Here's how Venable chose baseball over basketball

This story was excerpted from Scott Merkin's White Sox Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

CHICAGO -- If Will Venable saw himself as a potential professional athlete as a freshman at Princeton University, that image would have manifested itself on the NBA hardwoods instead of the Major League Baseball diamonds where he currently resides.

Venable didn’t even play baseball during his senior year in high school nor his freshman year with the Tigers.

“I was still at that point all basketball,” Venable told MLB.com during a recent interview. “I had the intention of playing baseball my freshman year, but basketball season just overwhelmed me. I needed to not play and just get my grades together and get through school.”

“Basketball was kind of his thing coming up as a young kid,” Max Venable, Will’s father, told MLB.com. “His mom [Molly] kind of always told him, ‘Don’t give up baseball.’ Sure enough, he didn’t give it up. Mom kept on saying don’t give it up, and there he is still at it.”

Venable became the 44th manager in White Sox history two days after celebrating his 42nd birthday. He played nine seasons for three teams, with eight of those years spent with the Padres, and coached with the Cubs and the Red Sox before moving to associate manager for Bruce Bochy with the Rangers over the last two seasons. It’s a great story made even better when thinking about his collegiate baseball career resurfacing as a sophomore.

Scott Bradley, Venable’s baseball coach at Princeton and one-time White Sox player, remembers Venable coming for his official visit and going off with the basketball crew while he talked with Max, who he knew from their Major League days. It might have been Venable’s mother who convinced him not to give up baseball, but it was Max who had a sense Will wasn’t done with baseball and even shared that thought with Bradley in the moment.

Sure enough, at the end of that freshman season of basketball, Will came to Bradley’s office and expressed a desire to play baseball as a sophomore. Bradley immediately offered Will a chance to go hit in the cage.

“He swung and missed the first five, he fouled the next five off and then he proceeded to hit line drives all over the cage,” Bradley said with a laugh. “So, it took him 10 swings to catch up to everyone else.”

“That’s the story he tells, and I can assure you it took a lot longer,” Venable said. “I was really lucky that I went there primarily for basketball, and with the opportunity that I would be able to play some baseball. I couldn’t imagine a better situation for me as far as baseball goes -- to have a coach like Coach Bradley who had played for a long time in the big leagues.”

After slashing .244/.352/.372 as a sophomore, Venable rose to a stat line of .385/.437/.636 with nine home runs, 33 RBIs, 10 stolen bases and 35 runs scored as a senior. He averaged 10.6, 10.3 and 10.5 points per game in his final three seasons playing basketball, but Venable realized he was going against players with first-round potential and not quite stacking up.

There was no full understanding at that point of his baseball ceiling, but Venable knew something special was possible.

“You hear people talking about being on the court and just being in a different place. I just loved going to that place in basketball. That’s not just something I found with baseball early on in my life,” Venable said. “It wasn’t until college really where I started to fall in love with the game again and kind of that mentality shifted.”

Baseball has been and is Venable’s profession, his passion and his future. But he’ll always hold on to those basketball memories, including the game at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Jan. 5, 2005, when Duke won but Venable (21 points, four rebounds, three assists) played every bit as good as All-American JJ Redick (21 points, two rebounds, two assists). The Princeton website recounted the moment shortly after Venable was hired.

“That was obviously like a career game for me,” Venable said. “He’s gone on to have an amazing career and post playing career as well. But when you are just a little fish in that pond, you remember those types of games and certainly that one stuck out for me.”