University of North Carolina Athletics
Baseball's Chris Maples: Marching To His Own Beat
August 9, 2001 | Baseball
Aug. 9, 2001
By: Travis R. Everette, Carolina Baseball
We've all heard the old adage about someone marching to a different beat or marching to the beat of a different drummer. Let this article serve as notice to you all that Carolina Baseball's Chris Maples has an entire percussion section banging around somewhere inside his head. As anyone who knows him will tell you, that's the only explanation that fits. If you don't, just imagine a kid who would use the spray paint normally employed by the grounds crew for painting bases to whitewash his spikes. For an encore, he carefully repainted them and had the entire team autograph them. He's the guy we all know who never gets tired and can almost always find a way to drive you crazy, but he somehow translates that energy into a fierce competitive nature that drives him to excellence on the diamond.
Maples, the lone rising senior for UNC, has spent the latter half of his summer playing in Durham, N.C., for the Durham Braves of the Coastal Plain Collegiate Summer League. Maples is not a new face at the Historic Durham Athletic Park -- he played there in the summers of 1999 and 2000 as well. But this summer was going to be different.
Maples planned to work UNC's Baseball camps while also taking summer school classes to ensure he would graduate next spring. He did just that, until Braves coach Tony Trumm phoned following the first summer school session with a proposition. Trumm wanted Maples to play the remainder of the summer schedule, but he wanted the lifetime infielder to do so in right field. Somewhat reluctantly, Maples agreed to take on the new position for the league-leading team.
His success at his new home in right has been nothing short of amazing. It's easy to rattle off numbers like a .301 batting average, good for second on the team, or the fact that he is only one off the team home run lead despite playing nearly 20 fewer games than the team leader, or that he is 7-for-8 in stolen bases -- those numbers jump right off the stats page at you. But the number that's the most amazing is his 10 assists -- from right field that is -- in 29 games. To put this number in perspective, Raul Mondesi of the Toronto Blue Jays and Pat Burrell of the Philadelphia Phillies share the major league lead this season with 15 each -- through 110 games -- and there are only three players total with double figure assists from the outfield.
I can only vouch for what I saw myself last Wednesday evening as the Braves took on the Florence Red Wolves. It was pretty comical in the first inning when Maples was openly distraught at his first baseman when he thought he had a chance to throw out the runner on a base hit to right field but the bag wasn't covered. At least it was funny until he actually did it in the fifth inning. He didn't throw behind a runner who made a wide turn around the first base bag. No, he simply came up with what appeared to be a rifled single to right and gunned the kid out at first base with a step to spare.
Should anyone be interested in seeing this phenomenon in the white shoes, you can do so at the Durham Athletic Park at 7 p.m. on Thursday night as the Coastal Plain League playoffs get underway. The Braves will be taking on the Fayetteville Swamp Dogs for the right to advance to face Wilson in the Petit Cup Championship Series beginning on Friday.
