Mickey Moniak is channeling his inner via his grandfather and his father. The ties that bind in baseball are long, strong, and lasting.
Moniak entered the weekend on a tear that even the “Splendid Splinter” would admire. The Rockies outfielder/designated hitter entered a three-game series vs. the Mets riding an eight-game hitting streak in which he slashed .419/.455/.871 (1.326 OPS), with three home runs, five doubles, six RBIs, and a stolen base.
“I’m bursting with pride and joy,” said Bill Moniak, Mickey’s grandfather, whom Williams tutored back in Bill’s minor league days.
Bill, 86, lives in an assisted-living complex near San Diego. The TVs there don’t carry the Rockies games, but that doesn’t mean Bill hasn’t watched nearly every inning.
“Until they get this figured out for me, I’ll keep watching on my phone,” he said. “It’s a pain in the neck, but I keep watching on that little screen.”
On Thursday, he watched his grandson hit two home runs during a 4-for-5 performance in Colorado’s crushing, ninth-inning loss to the Padres at Coors Field.
“Mickey was a heck of an athlete, and he could have been a big-time quarterback, but he always loved baseball, just like I did,” Bill said. “I remember from the time he was about 3 years old, he would carry around a little Wiffle ball and bat, and he’d say, ‘Papa, Papa, throw it to me.’ ”
That 3-year-old kid blossomed into a baseball phenom that the Philadelphia Phillies selected No. 1 overall in the 2016 draft out of La Costa Canyon High School near San Diego. He received a $6.1 million signing bonus from the Phillies.
Mickey credits his grandfather and his father, Matt, who played briefly at San Diego State, for his love of the game.
“My granddad was at almost every tournament,” Mickey said. “He used to go with my dad and I to Arizona on baseball trips. I remember he was with us when we went to a tournament in Steamboat Springs when I was 10. He’d take me to batting cages wherever we could find them.”
Bill grew up in the tiny borough of Youngsville in Warren County, Penn. The winters were too cold and snowy for the local high school to field a baseball team, but Bill, who stood 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, was a gifted outfielder and honed his skills in sandlot games during the summer.
So gifted, in fact, that in the summer of 1958, he signed with the Boston Red Sox for the princely sum of $25,000. Coming straight out of high school, he was one of the first “bonus babies” the Red Sox ever signed. The left-handed hitter never made it to the majors, but played six minor league seasons. Bill finished with a .271 average and 26 career home runs.
During spring training in 1961-63, Bill was instructed by Williams, who worked for the club as a special batting instructor after finishing his Hall of Fame career in 1960. Williams took a special interest in Carl Yastrzemski, who replaced him in left field and would one day join Williams in Cooperstown.
“Ted was a good guy, but you had to do it Ted’s way, ” Bill recalled. “There was no other way. And Ted was, shall we say, colorful, with his language.”
One morning during spring training, Williams brought out his fungo bat to hit fly balls to the Red Sox’s young outfielders. They started razzing Williams, even though they were quite aware of his greatness. Williams had a career batting average of .344 and hit 521 home runs. He hit .406 in 1941, the last player to hit .400 in a season.
“Hey, why don’t you hit the ball? You call that hitting the ball?” We thought you were the great Ted Williams!”
It turns out that “Teddy Ballgame” didn’t take too kindly to that.
“So Ted sticks his arm up in the air, like he always did, and waves everybody in,” Bill recalled. “He says, ‘OK, you smart-asses, we’re going to handle this.’ So he hit to us for probably an hour straight. I’d never seen so many 400-foot fungo shots before. He was just hitting BBs. He’d run us from one line to the other — left to right, right to left — over and over. We laughed so hard that day, I’ll tell you.”
But Bill’s most memorable Williams story took place in a spring training batting cage. It’s a story Mickey has heard, “about 100 times.”
“I was having a great spring, hitting over .400,” Bill recalled. “But Williams wanted me to hit his way. I told him, ‘Ted, I don’t feel good about this.’ He says, ‘Damn it, kid, try it my way.’
“I mean, I’m 21 years old, so what am I going to do, tell Ted Williams he doesn’t know what he’s talking about?”
Bill ended up striking out four times trying out Williams’ swing and stance. The next game, three more strikeouts.
“So I went back to my old way of hitting, and I hit a home run in my first at-bat and went 4 for 4,” Bill recalled with a laugh. “The next thing I know, I see Ted, his arm up in the air, and he waves me over. He puts his arm around me, and says, ‘If anybody ever tells you again how to hit a (blanking) baseball, you tell them to take it and shove it where the sun don’t shine.’ ”
Still, Bill hung on to the basic tenets of hitting that Williams imparted, and he passed those along to his grandson.
“The main thing that sticks out is what Ted Williams taught my grandfather about approach,” Mickey said. “The basic idea is to know strikes, and know that you own the pitcher. Hit your pitch; the pitch you want. If he throws you a strike on the corner, tip your cap. One strike, you still own him. Two strikes, you choke up a little bit and put the ball in play. I don’t choke up on the bat, but I get the idea.”
Mickey’s dad has been a huge influence, too, but in a different way than Bill.
“From a young age, he was the parent who never pushed me,” Mickey said. “He was a surfer and dirt biker — all of that Southern California stuff. But he was incredible. Any tournament I wanted to go to, he’d get me there on the weekends. I was always dragging him with me to go hit, and he did it.
“I’m not sitting here without him. I always tell people that when I got drafted first overall, and I told him I didn’t want to play baseball anymore, he’d have been good with it. He was going to support me no matter what. But I always wanted to play big-league baseball.”
Moniak needed support from both his dad and his grandpa during his up-and-down career with the Phillies. He spent parts of three seasons with the organization before being released. It was a similar story with the Angels, where a breakout 2023 campaign was followed by a subpar 2024 season. The Angels released him at the end of last year’s spring training, and the Rockies swooped in and signed him just before Opening Day to a one-year, $1.25 million contract. His .270/.306/.518 slash line with 24 home runs during his first season with Colorado earned him a one-year, $4 million contract to avoid arbitration.
Moniak has been essential to the Rockies’ rebuild, not just on the field but in the clubhouse.
“Behind closed doors … he’s part of what keeps everything around here loose and keeps everybody ready to play,” manager Warren Schaeffer said. “What he provides off the field is just as big as what he’s providing on the field, but he’s in a really good place offensively, too.”
And that’s not easy. As Williams famously said, “The hardest thing to do in baseball is to hit a round baseball with a round bat, squarely.”
As for Mickey’s baseball bond with his grandfather, it’s still going strong.
“He texts me after almost every game,” Mickey said. “He always tells me, ‘Grip it n’ Rip it,’ and he’s been telling me that since I was a little kid.”
And 10 years after the Phillies picked him No. 1 overall, Mickey is gripping and ripping as well as he ever has.
“Mickey’s turned out to be a pretty good ballplayer, don’t you think?” his grandfather said.
