Marlins’ Williams Credits CV Roots for His Baseball Success
Alex Williams, meet Shohei Ohtani.
Sorry, that’s not likely to happen this spring, with Williams working out with the Miami Marlins in Florida and the Los Angeles Dodgers having moved their training site to Arizona. But that’s not Williams’ only link to being a two-way player.
A star pitcher and shortstop at Redwood Christian High, the right-hander actually got a start in baseball playing in both the Castro Valley Little League and CV Independent.
“I don’t think I was supposed to do that,” he now admits. “But I did.”
Williams went on to be an All-State pitcher at Redwood Christian and All-American at Stanford before getting drafted by the Marlins in the 2022.
The 24-year-old is still moving up the Marlins’ organizational ladder, and soon will do so as a member of the Castro Valley Sports Hall of Fame, into which he’ll be inducted in April.
Even light years away in a place called Jupiter—a town in Florida, not the planet—Williams is appreciative of his Castro Valley roots.
“The people surrounding me really pushed me,” he said on the eve of greeting other Marlins prospects last week. “My teammates encouraged me to love the game and work hard. When I’d come back from winter break at Stanford, I knew the guys I could contact to go get in a workout. Everybody in the baseball community in Castro Valley has been truly supportive.”
Pretty much everything Williams has touched in baseball has turned to gold. And then there’s the one thing he couldn’t touch, which turned to silver. Many of Williams’ baseball buddies were members of the Castro Valley High team that made it all the way to the North Coast Section finals in 2016.
The Trojans lost that game 7-3, perhaps coming up – ahem – one pitcher short after dramatic wins over Granada, Monte Vista and Heritage to earn an opportunity Williams, already a standout pitcher at Redwood Christian, could only watch.
“My friends were kinda trying to recruit me,” Williams recalls with a chuckle. “They’d say, ‘If you had been there, you would have pitched, and we would have won.’”
Having graduated from youth basketball, soccer and even karate to focus on baseball, Williams went on to do something few could have ever imagined: He successfully followed in the huge footsteps of a pitcher he labels as his idol – A.J. Vanegas, who paved the way from Redwood Christian to Stanford for a star who had many options.
“He was eight years older than me,” Williams notes. “My older sister Nia would tell me about him because she knew I was really into baseball. So, I started following him. He was THE baseball guy who went to my school. Everybody knew who he was.”
Soon, the same was true for Williams, the National Christian Schools Athletic Association National Player of the Year in 2018 under coaches Jim Cleveland and Mark Saake at Redwood Christian and Pacific-12 Conference Pitcher of the Year in 2022 at Stanford, where he had a 23-8 record.
Williams is now in his third season with the Marlins, hoping to make the jump from the High-A minor-league level to Double-A this year. A lot will depend upon how his right elbow holds up after becoming so painful last year, he opted for a PRP injection in the off-season.
“I’ve been throwing the last two months,” he reports. “I feel good.”
Regardless of whether he’s in Beloit, Wisconsin, Pensacola, Florida, or some small town in between this season, he knows where he’ll be next fall – at some local baseball field, instructing at a youth camp.
“I have always loved coaching kids,” he assures. “I love giving back.”
This is the sixth in a series of 16 articles profiling the 2024 inductees into the Castro Valley Sports Hall of Fame. The Hall of Fame ceremonies and banquet will be held Sunday, April 21, at Redwood Canyon Golf Course. For tickets, go to castrovalleysportsfoundation.org and click on “Events, Hall of Fame Banquet.”