Travelin’ man

EVERETT — The Northwest League is a bus league. The Everett AquaSox chew up miles like a Little Leaguer goes through bubblegum, spending hours on the road as they travel to distant locations like Boise, Idaho, and Eugene, Ore.

But if there’s one player on this year’s roster who’s prepared fo

r those long rides, it’s Jordan Shipers.

Shipers knows all about life on the road, having attended a high school that didn’t have baseball. That meant Shipers was forced to travel approximately 100 miles just to play baseball during his youth. So life on the highway is second nature to the left-handed pitcher.

“It felt like that was just what I did,” Shipers said. “We’d leave at 4 o’clock after school, I’d practice and then I wouldn’t get home until 10 at night. It was hard to do homework and stuff like that.”

Shipers is one of the brightest prospects on Everett’s roster. Shipers, who didn’t turn 20 until June 27, was a modest 16th-round pick by the Seattle Mariners in the 2010 draft. However, conventional wisdom says he would have been taken higher, except it was believed he was strong in his commitment to play at Missouri State University. The Mariners showed how highly they regarded Shipers, giving him a reported $800,000 signing bonus, an amount more in line with a second rounder than a 16th rounder.

Shipers made his professional debut with Everett and has spent the entire season in the Sox’s rotation. Shipers features a fastball that touches the low 90s, despite standing just 5-foot-10. He also mixes in a curve and change-up that Everett pitching coach Andrew Lorraine described as already being major-league average.

All this despite the limited experience forced by not playing in high school.

“He’s young as far as his age, but he’s even younger experience wise,” Everett pitching coach Andrew Lorraine said. “He hasn’t had a full season of baseball in his life.

“Jordan’s been exceptional for this staff,” Lorraine added. “It hasn’t translated into wins yet, maybe not even in the numbers. But he’s improved each time out and really taken to task what we talk about, which is getting better every day.”

Shipers’ travel ordeals were a product of living in Bethany, a town of approximately 3,000 residents located in the northwest corner of Missouri. Baseball opportunities were few and far between. The local high school, South Harrison, had just 400 students and did not have a baseball program. There weren’t any summer team opportunities beyond Little League.

So when Shipers was 12 his mother, Debbie, decided to take the dramatic step of driving her son to Kansas City to play baseball, about 100 miles away.

This became Shipers’ routine through high school. The two would drive to Kansas City three times a week for practices, then again on the weekends for games. The round trip lasted three hours. Because Shipers is a pitchers, sometimes those three hours of travel ended up being for as little as 45 minutes worth of practice. When Shipers had multiple games on a Saturday with time in between, he’d head to a nearby skate park to pass the time — much to his coach’s chagrin.

“We tried it one year and he did so well,” Debbie Shipers said. “His work ethic was remarkable for as young as he was. He was the committed one.”

But the drives eventually took their toll.

“During my sophomore year I got kind of tired of traveling,” Jordan Shipers said. “I told my mom, ‘I don’t know how much longer I want to do this, this getting pretty old spending so much time in the car.’ She said, ‘OK, we’ll take a little bit of a break, but I’m not going to let you quit.'”

That year Jordan Shipers spent the spring focused on playing high school golf, where he reached the state tournament. Then the next year it was back to baseball and the long drives.

All the time in the car has paid off in multiple ways. Not only is Jordan Shipers now a professional, he and his mother developed a stronger bond.

“When you have a teenager it’s not like they want to be around their parents a lot,” Debbie Shipers said. “But he and I are pretty close because we spent so much time together in the car.”

And it’s made adjusting to life in the Northwest League that much easier.