According to the recruiting experts, Charlie Condon was never supposed to be here. Not even close.

He was never supposed to be the No. 3 pick in the draft or sign for a record-tying $9.25 million bonus. And he was surely never supposed to be the future face of the Rockies, much less the best hitter in college baseball.

But Condon became a star at Georgia and earned all those achievements and projections after walking on with the Bulldogs without a single Division I offer out of high school in Marietta, Ga.

“As a sophomore in high school, I was about 6-foot-3, 170 pounds, and I just wasn’t ready to be recruited,” Condon said. “… I like to use the analogy that you’ve got to get the house ready to sell before you put it on the market. And I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t a finished product.

“And I think that’s a good thing these days because I didn’t want to be the best version of myself when I was 16 years old. I wanted to continue to develop and I did, and I trusted that my time was coming.”

Indeed, Condon’s time has arrived with the Rockies.

In a few years, he’ll be expected to be a cornerstone of the lineup at Coors Field. A perennial major league All-Star isn’t out of the question, either. None of which would be possible without some lobbying for Georgia to give him a chance.

Slipping through the cracks

Paul Fletcher, one of the coaches in Condon’s youth club organization, 6-4-3 DP, picked up the phone in the summer of 2021 in an attempt to drum up D-I interest in Condon.

Most of the coaches the former scouttalked to didn’t have room on their roster. Tennessee was interested, but never formally offered a spot. Only Georgia, where the academically inclined Condon had already been accepted as a student, gave serious consideration.

“I told (then-Georgia coach) Scott Stricklin, ‘I really believe this kid can hit and he can help your team a lot,’” Fletcher recalled. “… I kept telling Strick, ‘If you put a little weight on this kid, this swing will really translate to the next level.’ He was as good of a hitter that summer as the summer I had (Cardinals outfielder) Jordan Walker on a travel team. I kept thinking, ‘It’s there.’”

Stricklin agreed to let Condon walk on that fall, and no further promises were made. Condon would have to carve out a role on a team that played in the top baseball conference in America.

“We had nothing to lose,” Stricklin said. “It was a low-risk, high-reward kind of deal, and no one ever saw this coming.”

To understand how a walk-on turned into the highest draft pick in Georgia baseball history, first one must comprehend all of the factors that led to Condon being a no-name recruit out of The Walker School.

The 6-foot-6, 216-pound Condon was a late bloomer physically. Even after his height started to shoot up in high school, he was a wiry 185 pounds when he first arrived on Georgia’s campus.

He played on the B team for his travel ball club and in one of the smallest high school classifications in Georgia. COVID-19 shut down recruiting during his junior year. And the combination of the college transfer portal and the extra year of eligibility granted to college athletes due to the pandemic created a logjam on rosters across the country that left Condon with limited options.

If he didn’t enroll at Georgia as a student, his other plan was to go to a Division III school (Rhodes College or University of the South) to play baseball and football (Condon was a quarterback for The Walker School).

But Condon bypassed that dual-sport possibility in favor of rolling the dice with Georgia.

“It was really about having faith to bet on myself because I knew that I wasn’t going to a place where I would be an immediate contributor,” Condon said. “But I wanted to go play against the best of the best, earn my keep, and know that if I have success it’s against the best talent there is.”

Exploding onto the radar

Condon got the Georgia coaching staff’s attention his first fall on campus.

“You could see the weight he was putting on, and he was passing the eyeball test because you could tell he was getting stronger,” Stricklin said. “The batting practices that he would take, the ball kept going farther.

“He would do live at-bats in practice, too … and one day he hit a ball to straightaway center field that put a dent in our batter’s eye. It had to come off the bat at about 120 miles per hour. It was like an ‘Oh my gosh’ moment for me.”

Condon earned a spot on the team as a redshirt in the spring of 2022. He had not played in a game in almost a full year at that point, so Stricklin pushed for him to get a spot in the prestigious Northwoods League that summer.

This time, it was Stricklin who was doing the convincing.

The St. Cloud Rox, one of the top teams in that summer collegiate league, liked the idea of getting a Georgia player on their roster. But one who hadn’t even played there yet? The Rox had little to go on besides Stricklin’s word.

“We had to basically say, ‘Look, trust us, this is a guy you want,’” Stricklin said.

So St. Cloud signed Condon to a two-week temporary contract. It didn’t take long for him to prove his worth.

“His first week in the Northwoods was eye-opening,” said St. Cloud manager Nick Studdard, who was the team’s hitting coach that summer. “We opened up in Waterloo, Iowa, and on opening day in Charlie’s first game he hit a home run dead center in a ballpark with a high fence, where it’s not the easiest to do that. It’s a poke out there.

“In those first four games on the road, he had two homers and a bunch of hits, and we were like, ‘OK, Charlie Condon’s good, like really good.’”

Condon went on to become a Northwoods League All-Star and put an exclamation point on his summer with two homers in the All-Star Game. He finished the season batting .294 with eight homers, 18 doubles, two triples and 71 RBIs.

By the time he got back to Georgia in the fall of 2022, he had a scholarship in hand and caught the attention of draft evaluators, including Rockies area scout Sean Gamble.

“When I saw that he put up those numbers in that league, with the wood bat, that immediately had him on my radar coming into the fall that year,” Gamble said. “Once he carried it over to the season and produced against the higher-end draft guys, it definitely made him stand out above the rest. There were a lot of first- and second-round guys they were facing and he was doing damage against them. So by the next summer (in 2023), he was already the guy for me.”

Condon’s Georgia debut made his Northwoods League showing seem like a prelude.

He batted .386 with 25 homers and 67 RBIs en route to earning National Freshman of the Year honors from multiple outlets. He was also an NCBWA first-team All-American and led the SEC in slugging at .800.

“At the end of his redshirt freshman year, we were standing together behind the batting cage during BP and I just looked at him and said, ‘Hey man, did you see this coming?’” Stricklin said. “And he just laughed, shook his head in a very humble way, like, ‘No way coach.’ It was like he was in a dream.”

Historic 2024 season

The dream only intensified this season, when Condon swept the Golden Spikes Award, Dick Howser Trophy and Bobby Bragan National Collegiate Slugger Award after turning in one of the best offensive performances in NCAA history.

Condon blasted a BBCOR-era record 37 homers while becoming just the third player ever to lead the nation in long balls and average (.433). His slugging (1.009) and OPS (1.565) also topped the NCAA.

The Division I and SEC Player of the Year had seven multi-homer games, including dingers in eight consecutive games from April 26 to May 9, one game short of the NCAA record. Add in a Georgia-high 57 walks that included 28 intentional free passes to amount to a .556 on-base percentage, and Condon was like a create-your-own video game player.

As Bulldogs freshman Tre Phelps explained, it’s “easier to remember the very few times he didn’t wow us.”

“We’d look at each other in amazement so many times, and it almost became easy to start calling his homers,” Phelps said. “There were guys in our dugout who would pull out an imaginary telescope, knowing he’s about to hit a home run, and he does.”

Not bad for a guy who, in an alternate universe, could have been just another student at Georgia.

“He’s now an example for everybody,” said his high school coach, Dan Garofano, who remembers Condon hitting upward of 10 batting practice homers in a row at The Walker School. “You don’t have to be the Perfect Game All-American; you don’t have to be the five-star recruit. If you believe in yourself, and you work and you have ability, you can make it and do great things.”

“30-plus home run guy”

Now, for the next ladder to climb.

This time, Condon won’t be taking anyone by surprise.

He will make his minor league debut this summer with either Low-A Fresno or High-A Spokane.

Condon saw time at both corner infield spots and all three outfield positions this year for Georgia, but he made the majority of his 2024 starts at third base. He said defensively, he wants to play “wherever I’m needed the most.”

“The plan for me here is to continue to be versatile and be a moving piece throughout lineups,” Condon said.

As for the expectations that come with being a first-round pick, Condon proclaimed, “I can promise you what I expect out of myself is much higher than what anyone expects out of me.”

It’s the same attitude he’s had since high school, when he didn’t shy away from the leadership or the sweat that eventually made him a college baseball sensation.

“We were underperforming at one point in his senior season, so one day Dan took them out to the warning track to run poles and asked them, ‘How many poles do you think you need to run to truly be great?’” recalled Josh Lammert, who coached Condon in baseball and football at The Walker School. “They ran and ran and ran, and Charlie led every single pole. I really believe he would’ve ran all night had we not stopped them. That’s symbolic of his journey, and the attitude he still carries himself with today.”

Condon’s intangibles, plus the raw power in his right-handed swing and a relentless work ethic, have those within his circle seeing superstardom coming in LoDo.

“Five years down the road, I see 20 more pounds on that frame and even more power,” Stricklin said. “He’s got great discipline at the plate. He checks all the boxes. So I see him being a 30-plus home run guy and a guy who’s going to be on a lot of billboards in the Denver area.”

Memorable No. 3 Overall Picks

Notable players drafted at No. 3 overall over the past three decades, including two Rockies.

(Can’t see chart in mobile? Click here.)

Originally Published: July 28, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.