h716a5.icuEvery day, baseball’s most electrifying player stops moving long enough to answer his phone. Whether he has lined a ball into the gap and then stolen third or struck out three times, Marlins second baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. knows what awaits him.
"I’m gonna get a call," he says. "An hour, , after the game."
On the other end of the line is his first coach, the person who knows his swing better than anyone else. When Chisholm, 23, is playing well, the voice might say simply: "You did good tonight. Now go rest up and get ready for tomorrow." If he's struggling, the commentary is more specific: "You’ve gotta hit the ball! You’re striking out too much. Get on top of it, stay quick to the ball and use your legs."
"O.K.," Chisholm always replies. "Thank you, Grammy Pat."
He laughs now. He does not struggle often: He has a .926 OPS so far this season, and no one who smacks the ball squarer has stolen more bases. (He has barreled balls in 11% of his plate appearances and swiped seven bags without being caught.) But her coaching helps. "Every time she’s done it," he says, "I got two hits the next day!"
Baseball, it is often said, is a game for fathers and sons. Chisholm did not learn that cliché until he was a teenager at Life Preparatory Academy in Wichita, Kan. When he was growing up in Nassau, Bahamas, his baseball idol was his maternal grandmother, Patricia Coakley.
Coakley, 77, played shortstop for the Bahamian national softball team in the 1980s and starred on many amateur teams afterward. She finally retired only about a decade ago. Chisholm compares her to a rookie Francisco Lindor: "Tapping the ball around, running around the bases, making great defensive plays," he says. "She didn’t hit a lot of home runs. She was just out there making plays." One of Chisholm’s first memories involves watching her fly around the bases. "It was a moment," he says now of his toddler self. "I was like, ."
Young Jasrado was close with both of his parents, Martinique Coakley and Jasrado Chisholm Sr., but he lived weekdays with his paternal grandparents, Judy and Hermis Chisholm. Grandma Judy convinced him to stick it out when, as a homesick high school freshman, he tried to quit boarding school and come home. It was from her that he learned to work, he says. Grammy Pat, with whom he spent the weekends, taught him to play.