Small Wonder

LeBlanc is sitting in the third-base dugout at Taylor Stadium, slightly sunburned and red in the face. Every few minutes, he’ll take off his cap, run his hand through his brown hair and then place the cap loosely back on his head.

There is a glint in his eye as he talks about his size.

“You can look at me on the field, it’s just that easy…” he says. “The typical term in baseball is ‘he looks good in a uniform.’ You hear scouts come out and say ‘Well, he looks good in a uniform.’ I don’t necessarily make the uni-form look very good.”

A few days earlier, LeBlanc had rapped a single in the first inning off Texas A&M, starting a four-run rally.

The pitcher, Kyle Marlatt, is 6-foot-3, 10 inches taller than LeBlanc.

“I don’t feel the grating because on the field, I’ve never felt as short as I am,” says LeBlanc, now shaking his head and chuckling. “I don’t know if that’s a cocky statement, but when I’m on the field, I do not feel small. I think that helps out a little bit.”

The story begins about 15 years ago in southern Louisiana, where LeBlanc was growing up with a 5-foot-5 father and an even shorter mother. He wasn’t going to be tall; everyone around him knew that. But, like every little boy, he had his dreams, and sometimes those things have a funny way of making a difference.

LeBlanc’s dream was to play major college baseball, and he even knew for which team: Louisiana State University.

“Growing up in Louisiana, you want to play for one school, and one school only, especially southern Louisiana,” LeBlanc said. “You want to play for LSU. Without a doubt, that’s the school you want to go to.”

But LSU has a baseball-rich tradition rivaled by few schools. From 1984 through 2001, the Tigers advanced to the College World Series 11 times and won five national championships. The school pumps out first-round draft picks like Mardi Gras beads.

Programs like that don’t normally have room for a 5-foot-5, 150-pound kid, even if he can run and he is as strong as a bull.

But LeBlanc didn’t care; he wanted to play in Baton Rouge. His father, Bill, knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

“He knew that I was going to have to work very hard because he saw my brother against older and bigger guys and he knew that I wasn’t going to grow and I was probably going to be smaller,” LeBlanc said. “So he knew the chal-lenges that were ahead of me.

“Every weekend, it was Saturday and Sunday, we’d tell my mom we were going to hit, and that meant we were going for about two to three hours. Minimum.”

Okay, so he’s small. Think that means LeBlanc can’t play?

Then why did MU coach Tim Jamieson pick him as a ninth-inning pinch hitter in two games against Texas?

“His role is get on base and force the opposing pitcher to throw a lot of pitches,” Jamieson says. “I guarantee there’s not a guy who likes to throw to him because he’s such a small target.”

But don’t think he’s just up there to get a walk. Like he did against Texas A&M, LeBlanc can hurt you with his bat as well.

“He has had to face every day someone telling him what he can’t do, and that can be a great motivator,” Jamieson says.

Bill LeBlanc said when he started working with his son, he wasn’t even thinking about getting Bryson to LSU.

“My thoughts were to get him through high school,” Bill LeBlanc said. “He was so little, I didn’t really have college aspirations.”

But the older LeBlanc had instilled a work ethic in his son so strong that Bryson wouldn’t accept failing to reach his goals.

“When he puts something in his mind,” Bill LeBlanc said, “that’s what he’s going to do.”

Bryson said when he didn’t make his youth league’s all-star team at age nine, he thought it was because he threw left-handed.

Within the next year, he had taught himself to throw right-handed.

“I’m telling you, when I was nine or 10, I made up my mind that I wanted to play major college baseball,” LeBlanc said. “I didn’t want to play at a small college. I wanted to play major college baseball.”

His father, who once took third place in an Olympic weightlifting trial, was starting to change his mind too. Bry-son’s strength made Bill think baseball at LSU might really be a possibility for his son.

Throughout LeBlanc’s senior year in high school, LSU assistant coach Turtle Thomas followed him. Finally, at about 9 p.m. one night, the call came. LSU offered LeBlanc a scholarship to play baseball.

Bill LeBlanc said his son called all of his friends that night to let them know the news.

“He was excited as hell,” Bill LeBlanc said. “You never really know until you get the phone call. You always kind of hoped, but you never know.”

LeBlanc’s demeanor and his easy-going, slightly Cajun-tinted speech immediately put his audience at ease.

“In terms of personality, I don’t think he takes himself too seriously, which is good in sports,” Jamieson says.

It’s also good if you’re on the road in college baseball and, like LeBlanc, you happen to be the shortest player on the team.

“He gets a lot of crap about that,” first baseman Derek Chambers says. “When were at Winthrop, the fans started singing the Oompa Loompa song off of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

To LeBlanc, it was no reason to get upset, just another chance to chuckle.

“It’s just funny,” he said. “This isn’t going to be all the time for me. This game’s going to come to an end. Unfortu-nately, sooner rather than later, but hopefully the other way around.”

It almost ended much sooner than LeBlanc could have imagined.

Shortly into his freshman year at LSU, LeBlanc was ready to live his improbable dream. He went into the weight room at 6 a.m. for an individual workout on the first day of fall practice, excited because, like his dad, LeBlanc is very strong.

LeBlanc had a manageable weight on the squat bar, a weight he knew he could lift easily.

“I went down three times and on my fourth time up, I felt a burn in my back that I had never felt before,” LeBlanc said.

He had a herniated disc in his back. He participated in fall practice as best he could and then had surgery that Thanksgiving. He wasn’t even able to touch a baseball again for the better part of a year.

“And when I came back, it was horrendous,” LeBlanc said. “In 10 months, I didn’t touch a bat, I didn’t touch a ball, and so, obviously, it’s going to take a little bit to get physically back. But mentally back, it’s left a scar, big time.”

After his freshman year, LeBlanc was still ready to play the following fall. But after playing in a summer league, he knew it wasn’t a possibility.

“Even if they had kept me on, I wasn’t going to play,” he said. “It was that easy.”

LeBlanc had fallen off his mountain peak, and had to admit it. He called LSU coach Smoke Laval to tell him he couldn’t return to the team.

“I said, ‘Coach Laval, I’m gonna make this easy on you, and I’m gonna make it easy on me,’” LeBlanc said. “‘If I come back, you’ll cut me. Hands down, no questions asked, you’ll cut me.’”

LeBlanc enrolled at Delgado Community College in New Orleans. He wasn’t ready to give up the dream yet, but he had suffered a huge setback.

“I guess it was really kind of devastating,” Bill LeBlanc said. “He had worked for it for a long time.”

And things got worse before they got better. Instead of playing at the storied program of LSU, LeBlanc was painting bleachers with his team at a junior college. And even that didn’t go right. While painting, LeBlanc strained an ab-dominal muscle.

“I said, ‘Bryson, I don’t know, maybe you’re just injury-prone,’” Bill LeBlanc said. “‘What can I tell you?’”

On the field, Bryson was struggling to convince himself that he could still play.

“I mean, just zero, zero confidence,” he said. “I’d sit in the outfield and pray that a ball wouldn’t come to me. And in baseball, let me tell you something, a person asks for the ball not to come to them, the next play the ball’s coming to them.”

LeBlanc’s statistics for that season aren’t bad, but they’re far below what an LSU recruit was expected to do at Delgado. He batted .277 with an on-base percentage of .410. He scored 28 runs and had 14 RBIs in limited playing time.

“My mom left the stadium,” he said. “My biggest fan in the world left the stadium because she couldn’t watch. She sat me down and she said, ‘You need to either find a way to get your confidence back or you need to quit. It is kill-ing me to watch you play like you’re playing.’”

Two years after that nightmarish season, LeBlanc still sometimes struggles with the game at which even the best players only succeed three out of ten times.

Still inside the dugout at Taylor on a windy April afternoon, he glances momentarily down at the grass-stained rip in his pants as he tries to explain his drive and work ethic, which he calls “almost as much of a curse as it is a bless-ing.”

A blessing because it got him to LSU, and because he made it back to major college baseball after his injury.

“He’s the hardest worker on our team, I’ll tell you that right now,” Chambers said. “That guy’s out here after prac-tice, he’s always working hard.”

But there is another side.

“At times, he puts a lot of pressure on himself,” Jamieson said, “and when he struggles, he puts even more pressure on himself. That’s something he needs to learn to deal with.”

LeBlanc, who is a fountain of baseball truisms, releases another one as he sets his right leg on top of his left.

“Sometimes you definitely lose sight of the fun of the game,” he says. “It’s a hard game, and the game will beat you up and sometimes the game beats you more than you have fun with it.”

LeBlanc hit a low point after a game one night during that freshman season at Delgado. His dad got up at midnight, and sat down with Bryson.

“I asked him, ‘Is there something wrong with you?’” Bill LeBlanc said. “‘It looks like you weren’t going 100 per-cent. You have to give up thinking you’re hurt.’”

LeBlanc needed a way to get his confidence turned in the right direction. He found it in a summer league in Kear-ney, Mo., before his sophomore season.

He hit well, fielded well and, as he says, showed himself that he could still play the game well.

“God just blessed me,” LeBlanc says. “What a great summer.”

He followed the summer up with an impressive year at Delgado, one in which his statistics rocketed up from the year before. He started every game, hit .351, stole 19 bases and had a .542 on-base percentage. He also doubled his run production from a year before, scoring 60 runs and driving in 30.

The success was coming back. But LeBlanc still hadn’t played a game for a major college team.

After focusing his entire baseball life on earning a scholarship at LSU, LeBlanc was out of options after his two years at Delgado. Missouri assistant coach Tony Vitello came to the rescue, making a recruiting call to LeBlanc last spring.

“Coming out of JuCo, nobody really wanted me,” LeBlanc said. “I wrote letters to almost everybody. I was talking on the phone with a friend and I said, ‘You know what, Ryan? I don’t need 30 schools to recruit me. I just need one. I just need one.’

“And, I swear to God, true story, two minutes later, Vitello calls me, and he says we want to get you on a visit. It’s just amazing how God works, because I never even knew Missouri had a baseball team.”

On Feb. 10, LeBlanc led off the bottom of the first against Portland in Missouri’s first game of the season. He grounded out to first base for an easy out, but finally, after years of doubters and detours, the 5-foot-5 guy from Louisiana had played in a major college baseball game.

Fittingly, he has had ups and downs this year. He batted .300 in non-conference play and reached base nearly half of the time, phenomenal for a leadoff man. Since Big 12 play started, however, he has struggled, and watched more games from the bench.

“Bryson has struggled with batting average, but he’s still getting on base for the most part, which is really what we want him to do in that position,” Jamieson said.

And although LeBlanc isn’t on the Tigers he once imagined he would be, these Tigers aren’t half bad. They are 39-21 overall and came a game away from playing in the title game of the Big 12 Tournament.

“I mean, we’ve got players,” LeBlanc said. “I was blessed enough to be in a program like LSU, and believe me, not too much separates.”

LeBlanc has the rest of this season and one more to enjoy as a member of a Big 12 baseball team, but that might be all. Then again, it’s hard to doubt him as he stares out from the dugout, where the next night he will lace up his cleats and run out onto the field.

“Without a doubt, I’d love to play pro ball,” LeBlanc says. “It’s just, again, is somebody going to give me a chance?

“It’s always been not whether I wanted to do something or not, it’s will somebody give me a chance?”