In the Mississippi State baseball locker room, each Bulldog player is given 60 characters under his locker’s nameplate to say whatever he wants about himself.
At the locker of senior shortstop Seth Heck, a Kamiak High School alumnus and Edmonds native, it simply reads, “Keep proving them wrong.”
Heck has lived that mantra throughout his baseball career, succeeding at every stop despite not having the prototypical size or loud tools associated with a top-flight shortstop.
He has found a home in Starkville, Miss., however, batting leadoff for a Mississippi State team that has College World Series aspirations after falling in the regional round last season.
“It all fell into place for me down here,” said Heck, who is batting .384 as the leadoff hitter and shortstop for the No. 15-ranked Bulldogs, who have started the season 15-4. “When I flew down here for my official visit, I just fell in love with it. This is everything I wanted. Baseball is a big deal here, it’s supported well and we have an incredible fan base. If I played every game here or zero games here, this is where I wanted to be.”
One could easily imagine falling in love with a baseball program that routinely draws 10,000 fans to home games at Dudy Noble Field, plays in a conference that currently has six teams ranked in Baseball America’s Top 25 and is supported by a fan base that treats players from the Pacific Northwest as one of its own.
“My visit to Mississippi State was my first time in the Southeast, and it was 100 percent culture shock,” the 5-foot-11, 175-pound Heck said. “I didn’t know a single person, and it really is true that people talk different, dress different and act different down here. But my teammates and our fans took me in and understood that I was a long way from home. They’ve treated me like family.”
The story of how Heck got to Mississippi State is emblematic of how the recruiting process can help both the player and the institution.
Following the 2013 season — a year that saw the Bulldogs lose in the CWS championship series to UCLA — both incumbent shortstop Adam Frazier and the high school prospect the Bulldogs were bringing in to replace him turned pro after being selected in the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft.
With just a few short months before the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, Mississippi State coach John Cohen and his staff searched for a junior-college player who would be able to step in and contribute right away.
Enter Heck, who had just wrapped up a two-year career at Tacoma Community College, where he hit better than .330 both seasons and made fewer than 15 errors in more than 500 chances at shortstop.
“We never saw him play, but people we knew and trusted had seen him and thought he would be a tremendous fit,” said Cohen, who recruited 2006 SEC Player of the Year and former Mountlake Terrace star Ryan Strieby to Kentucky. “There’s an old saying in recruiting, ‘You don’t recruit what you want, but you’re going to get who you are.’ Seth Heck is who we are. He is the same kid every single day, and what he brings to the table is something very special. He’s a model of consistency for us, and a great teammate and leader.”
Cohen added that the fact that Heck swung the bat so well in the NWAC, which uses wood bats, only added to his interest.
Heck seized the starting shortstop job eight games into the 2014 season and never relinquished it, batting .299 in his first SEC season.
Even more impressive was his total of four errors in 251 chances at shortstop.
“When the ball touches his glove, there’s a very good chance that there’s going to be an out attached to it,” Cohen said. “You can have all the arm strength and athleticism in the world, but there are many defenders that struggle with finishing plays. Seth finishes plays and gets outs, and it makes our pitching staff more comfortable if balls are hit to the left side of the infield.”
Heck has always been able to field the ball — he won the SEC’s Gold Glove at shortstop in 2014 — and make good contact at the plate, but it took some time for him to adjust to the speed of the game in the SEC.
“I had to find a way to slow the game down,” he said. “The ball comes off the bat harder, SEC pitchers throw harder and have better breaking balls, the crowds on the road are wilder. You have to take all these things within the game and slow it down. It’s still the same game. It’s a struggle for guys when so much is happening. You have to look past all those distractions.”
Cohen said Heck’s intelligence, both on the field and off, have helped him make the transition to the SEC faster than most.
“His ability to simplify the process and to get something in one take is pretty amazing. Sometimes junior-college players who come to us are almost like freshmen because everything in the SEC is so new to them. For Seth to travel two time zones to do this, especially coming to Mississippi from the Northwest, is an even bigger adjustment,” said Cohen, who is from Alabama and played at Mississippi State.
Heck displayed the same skills that have translated so well to the SEC while at Kamiak, where he was a four-year varsity player who set 14 school records for coach Steve Merkley.
“He started his second game in his freshman year, and then started every (subsequent) game at shortstop until he graduated,” Merkley said. “We were selling him to everyone, but his size bothered people, especially since he was all of 145 pounds back then. He single-handedly beat Lake Stevens in the first round of the playoffs his senior year with three hits, four runs and five unbelievable plays at shortstop. He was one of those rare players that has talent but he’s so smart that he also out-thinks everyone.”
Heck’s intelligence extends to the classroom as well. He was the SEC Scholar-Athlete of the Year in 2014 and has a 4.0 grade-point average with a major in business administration in his first three semesters at Mississippi State.
He will graduate in May, and hopes to work on the business side of sports.
But not before he makes a go at a professional baseball career.
Heck will be undersized and teams will tell him he can’t stick at shortstop.
He’ll just have to prove them all wrong. Again.
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