Trayce Thompson Is on a Journey Toward Becoming His Own Man

Tucked beneath some stray gear in Trayce Thompson's locker in the Dodgers spring training clubhouse is a copy of Sports Illustrated with the Golden State Warriors on the cover. Out of sheer coincidence, the magazine protrudes just enough that the only player visible, jutting out on the right, is Thompson's older brother Klay.

As usual, it looks like the center fielder can't avoid the shadows cast by his family. First it was his father, Mychal, a former No. 1 overall pick and Showtime Lakers big man. Then it was Klay. Now, thanks to an offseason trade from the White Sox, Trayce will attempt to forge his own identity in the city that made his father famous.

It's clear that Trayce, who stands a muscular 6 feet 3 inches tall, has the tools to do just that. The 25-year-old has been so impressive in his brief Dodger tenure that earlier this spring, manager Dave Roberts felt compelled to issue a public vote of confidence in incumbent center fielder Joc Pederson, despite Pederson having started at the position all last season and Thompson having accrued just 135 major league plate appearances to date.

Pederson, a good friend of Thompson's dating back to instructional league, calls his competition "a freakin' thoroughbred." ESPN's Keith Law recently forecast Thompson as "a low-OBP, 20-HR regular with plus-plus defense in center," an appraisal that recalls Adam Jones.

But Trayce Thompson also understands that, barring multiple All-Star seasons, he will probably always be compared to his basketball-playing family. During a three-game road swing against the Indians last September, rather than heckle Trayce about his own performance, Cleveland fans instead aimed their diatribes at Klay's work against the Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. Trayce brushed it off, as he is wont to do.

"I don't really care—and I say that with respect—I don't really care what people say," he says. "It was never, 'I want to grow out of my dad's shadow or my brother's shadow.' Nothing I do will make me more proud of what my brothers have done." (Trayce's other brother, Mychel, currently plays for the Santa Cruz Warriors in the NBA D-League.)

Still, he admits, "I just want to be my own guy." He says this casually but firmly, and if that seems contradictory, well, so is the idea that the best way to honor the family he loves so fiercely is to differentiate himself from his dad and brothers.

He texts with his brothers every day and often crashes with Klay in the offseason, working out A's shortstop Marcus Semien, his former minor league teammate, to stay sharp. But according to Dodgers second baseman Micah Johnson, who came over with Thompson in their offseason trade and ranks as Trayce's closest friend on the team, "he definitely doesn't like talking about Klay at the field, because people aren't going to Klay and talking about Trayce."

"Every time you listen to the broadcasts, it's always like, 'Klay Thompson's brother,'" Johnson says. "That's not the case. It's Trayce Thompson. I understand his frustration, because it's not like he doesn't like Klay. He supports Klay and Klay supports him. But Trayce is a baseball player. He wants to talk about baseball. He could care less about what the Warriors are doing."

This season, more than any in his life, Trayce Thompson will have a chance to change that. There is opportunity in the Dodgers outfield. Starting leftfielder Andre Ethier is out until at least July, and Pederson is on shaky ground in center after a rough second half. Meanwhile, Thompson finally appears to be harnessing his boundless physical gifts after a seven-year journey through the minor leagues. If he does, maybe then people will stop and ask: Who is Trayce Thompson?

Mychal Thompson may have made a name for himself in Los Angeles, but the Thompson boys grew up in Oregon. There, Trayce says, "sports weren't so individualized and not one sport was really prominent over the others." That helped foster the brothers' aptitude across multiple disciplines. There was baseball and basketball, naturally, but golf and football, too.

For years, Trayce was convinced that Klay would pursue playing quarterback professionally instead of shooting guard. Mychal swears to this day that Trayce, the thickest of the brothers, would have made an outstanding football player in his own right, as a tight end or perhaps even a linebacker. At first, he thought even bigger. According to Mychal, when Trayce ballooned up to 22 pounds at a month old, he wondered if there was a future offensive tackle in the family. "I always thought he'd be 6-7, 310, like Tyron Smith of the Dallas Cowboys," he says.

"He was like forty-something in a year," says Julie Thompson, Mychal's wife and the boys' mother. "The doctor told me he was frankly obese."

The Seattle Mariners were the closest baseball team to the Thompsons, and so Trayce grew up watching Alex Rodriguez, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, and Bret Boone. Most of all, however, he worshipped Ken Griffey Jr., and soon aspired to emulate him as a center fielder. Years later, awe still creeps into his voice at the mere mention of his idol's name: "I know everyone talks about Bryce Harper and Trout and this kid from Houston and everything, but there won't be a Ken Griffey Jr. ever again."

Yet since the age of six, Thompson has devoted all his energy toward trying to be just that. Julie remembers him racing to finish his homework on the car ride home from school so he could spend that many extra minutes out on the field. "The other boys work hard, too, but Trayce, to me, is so focused on his goals," Mychal says. "This guy doesn't let anybody or anything derail him."

At home, Mychal would serve as his sons' designated pitcher and umpire, setting a narrow strike zone to coax the boys into becoming less passive hitters. "I told them, 'Hey, if the ball is close, I'm going to call it a strike,'" Mychal says. "So you better come up here and swing it."

In Trayce's case, it stuck. Aggression became his calling card at the plate, his blend of rangy athleticism and precocious strength inviting comparisons to Giancarlo Stanton. Like the rest of the Thompson men, Trayce excelled on the hardwood, too, combining with Klay to lead Santa Margarita High School to a state championship as a sophomore. ("I was kind of the Carmelo," Trayce says of his game. "I was bigger. I'd go to the rim and stuff like that.") But despite his bloodline and his ability, no college bothered to recruit him. "Everyone knew I was a baseball player," he says. Trayce dropped hoops entirely before his senior year—as much as he loved basketball, it had become another distraction that needed to be curtailed.

Upon graduation, Thompson bypassed his UCLA commitment in favor of the 2009 MLB Draft, and the White Sox selected him in the second round. He breezed through rookie ball in just 32 games, making the game seem natural like he always had. A promotion to Single-A figured to be a ho-hum stepping stone, a prerequisite to tick off on his inexorable climb to the majors. Instead, it changed his life.

***

Kannapolis, North Carolina, is every small suburb you've never bothered to visit, 25 miles northeast of Charlotte. (It also happens to be the hometown of Trayce's new teammate Corey Seager.) Many of its residents have lived in the town their entire lives, including 61-year-old Rocky Wagner.

Wagner was a baseball player before he settled down with his wife, Shelly, to raise five sons. One of them, Daniel, became a second baseman in the White Sox organization. As fate would have it, the organization's Single-A affiliate, the Kannapolis Intimidators, played their games a mere three miles from the Wagner house, and Daniel lived at home to save money. When new teammates arrived in need of a host family, the Wagners eagerly opened their doors.

"We just loved on those boys and tried to treat them like they were ours, because we knew that's what their parents would expect," he says. "Because I knew how I would have felt if my son went off some place [not knowing anyone]."

In 2010, Trayce Thompson became one of those players. The Wagner house was completely different from Trayce's childhood home on the West Coast: the rural property, rife with wildlife, has a pool as well as a lake for fishing; walk a short stretch into the nearby woods and you'll find another lake. On Trayce's first night there, the Wagners had little trouble pranking him into believing they were serving possum for dinner.

But Trayce quickly grew to adore the town, as well as his host family. He learned to fish and befriended a 75-pound potbellied pig named Lucy, who once faceplanted into Daniel's birthday cake after Trayce let her loose at a family gathering. At night, he would have long talks with Rocky, about baseball and everything else. When Daniel's little brother Zach celebrated his birthday, Trayce hopped into the car and took him shopping at a mall some 40 miles out of town. Rocky's grandson, Landon, was three years old when Trayce came to Kannapolis; Trayce became a surrogate uncle. Ditto for Rocky's nephews, twins Jacob and Jackson. "Lord, Trayce took up with them boys," Rocky recalls.

As much as Trayce gave, he got back in return. He shattered his thumb 58 games into the season and Rocky took him to the hospital that night. Months later, Rocky stood alongside him for support as a nurse pulled the long setting pins out of his skin. Soon after Trayce got hurt, the Wagners were scheduled to visit Shelly's cousin for a weeklong family vacation at Ocean Isle Beach. Rather than leave Trayce alone without any baseball to occupy him, they brought him along.

Klay heard so much about the Wagners that he asked to visit, too. When he came to Charlotte for a pre-draft interview with the Bobcats, Rocky drove into the city to pick Klay up and ferry him back to the house. To this day, Mychal will arrange for tickets to be left for the Wagners when the Lakers face the Hornets.

Trayce repeated A-ball the next year and the families grew tighter than ever. Some nights, if Trayce struggled at the plate, Rocky would field calls from a fretting Julie Thompson. He'd gently calm her down, one parent soothing another. "I'd say, 'Julie, he's fine. He's growing up.'"

Whenever Landon would come to games, he'd holler for his uncle Daniel as well as for Trayce. His grandparents would take him down near the batter's box and, without fail, Trayce would halt his warm-up to greet them. Then he'd scoop Landon up and whisk him over the guardrail, parading him around the field. They remain some of the best days of Trayce's life. "It was like a dream come true living at that house," he says. "That's a special place to me."

When Trayce got promoted to High-A in 2012, he wrote the Wagners a long letter before moving out, thanking them for everything. "We were literally crying when he left," Rocky says. "Trayce, he's just like one of my boys. I've got five boys and he's number six."

Trayce Thompson never imagined he'd need to repeat A-ball, nor that he'd graduate from the experience with a second family. But something even more unforeseen happened after he left the Wagner house that year: he was bad.

High-A went smoothly enough, but Double-A was a disaster. In 2013, Trayce's batting average sunk to .229. The player whose agent once compared him to Giancarlo Stanton slugged all of .383.

Always introspective, Trayce began to contemplate all the holes in his game. His multi-sport background meant that he accrued significantly less baseball experience than most players his age and, while he didn't notice the effects immediately, he came to realize that "I was a high pick but I wasn't necessarily a very polished player at the time." The thumb injury in Kannapolis had prevented him from gripping a bat for four months. When he finally returned, he did so with a longer swing, a flaw that Double-A pitchers pounced on.

Thompson's trademark focus began to work against him. He obsessed over solutions, but his urgency made him too impatient to commit to any one adjustment. "My approach varied from day to day, because I was young and stupid," he says. So he sought out advice and was told to concentrate on using the whole field. "But I got in the trap of doing it the wrong way, trying to guide the ball over to right field instead of really drive it over there."

Trayce's confidence plummeted, and with it went the very quality that defined him as a player. "I lost my aggressiveness," he says. "I just got kind of defensive as a hitter…. I was taking these passive swings that are maybe OK for a guy that hits in the two-hole or is trying to get on base and a run a little bit. I can run but I'm supposed to go up there and do damage. That's been my job since they drafted me."

He repeated Double-A the next year with only marginal gains, but it was enough to punch his ticket to Triple-A. There, he began to rebuild what had been broken. Worried he was too easily influenced by outside opinions, he selected a small circle of people to guide his hitting. One was Rocky Wagner, who always harped on him to trust in his ability and hold back until the last possible second before swinging at the pitch. Two more were Jim Thome and Vance Law, former All-Stars turned hitting gurus in the White Sox organization. They implored him to reclaim his aggression and return to what made him successful in the lower levels.

"I attacked the fastball a lot last year," Trayce says. "I remember thinking a lot, 'When I was young, I never missed fastballs.' Guys who were throwing me fastballs, I was going to do some damage on them. That's something I tried to really get back to."

Gradually, he became Trayce Thompson again, the supercharged athlete who allows his talent steer him through skids. He isn't Griffey—no one is—and he understands he's not Giancarlo Stanton, either. So he sets his sights on emulating another idol: Torii Hunter, who, like Trayce, was an early draft pick based on physical ability, and who took until his age-26 season to cement himself in the majors. "He didn't establish himself in the big leagues until a little later and really made an impact with his career," Trayce says. "It's definitely a journey—everyone's path to the big leagues is different."

Thompson may be more judicious in tinkering with his approach these days, but that doesn't stop him from soaking up every observation he can wring out of veterans like Chase Utley, Scott Van Slyke, and Carl Crawford. "That's what you want to see in a young guy," Crawford says. "It's really refreshing, given the fact that he's the brother of an NBA superstar. You'd think that guy would the guy talking the most and all that type of stuff. But he's actually the opposite."

Rocky Wagner expects Trayce to become as significant for the Dodgers organization off the field as he will be on it. "He's going to be the best role model that they could ever have," he says.

To hammer that point home, he sends over a picture from the Kannapolis days. In it, Trayce and Landon are huddled together on a couch in the Wagner home, peering into tablet. Landon's clutching a lollipop in his right hand and jabbing the screen with his left. Trayce holds the screen steady for the little boy, a big grin plastered on his face. I ask if I can use it for the story. No problem, Rocky Wagner tells me.

"That's Trayce Thompson," he says. "That's who he is."