Scholar Stories: 'Baseball Kid' Paige Gains Perspective, Motivation After Injury
3/10/2021 10:00:00 AM | Baseball, Features
Continuing the series that began in 2016-17, each Wednesday MGoBlue.com will highlight a Michigan student-athlete and their academic pursuits. These are our Scholar-Athlete Stories, presented by Absopure.
By Jack Pennington
It was the second game of the College World Series, and University of Michigan redshirt freshman pitcher Isaiah Paige was starting. Michigan was up, 1-0, against Vanderbilt in the series, and Paige's mound counterpart was the projected top pick in the 2021 Major League Draft, Kumar Rocker.
A young player with a few starts under his belt might not have the mental fortitude to pitch in the biggest game of the college baseball season, but Paige was not worried. He had prepared his whole life for moments like this.
Paige grew up in Diamond Bar, Calif., and was a standout baseball player at Damien High School. When Michigan came knocking, Paige was excited to answer.
"I always wanted to go to Michigan because I knew that it stood for something more than just athletics or academics," Paige said. "[Wearing] the block M has a sense of pride."
Michigan baseball coach Erik Bakich was a big reason Paige donned the maize and blue as well. Paige knew that something great was being built at Michigan.
"I fell in love with it from the second I stepped on campus," he recalled. "It's hard to listen to Coach Bakich's pitch and not want to put on a jersey."
Paige enrolled at Michigan and was ready to begin his academic and athletic career in a big way, but an ACL injury would postpone his freshman season.
"It was the first time I had the baseball label ripped away from me," he said. "That's when I learned to diversify my interests."
Throughout his life, Paige had viewed himself as "the baseball kid." While he threw himself into his recovery, being forced from the game also became an opportunity to see himself in new ways.
"When I hurt my knee, I was just Isaiah with nothing behind it," he said. "That was scary, but at the same time incredibly motivating."
Paige found a new love for reading, and started thinking about his life after baseball. Paige decided he wanted to stay close to the game, which led to him enrolling in Michigan's School of Kinesiology as a sport management major.
Paige has enjoyed delving into the industry of sports from a different perspective.
"It's a business degree in the context of sports," he explained. "You're doing something you love but learning about it from a different lens."
Paige will graduate at the end of the year, and move forward with a much broader outlook on the sports world, including viewpoints as a player and a student.
While Paige expanded his interests outside of baseball, it did not stop him from working hard mentally and physically to be ready for his Michigan debut. Paige even credits his ACL injury with preparing him for the rest of his baseball career because he learned to push himself to new limits, and to overcome hardship.
He returned in 2019 and still remembers his first bullpen session back.
"The entire team was there. Thirty-four guys were around me, cheering me on, wanting to see me succeed," he said.
Paige remembers that moment as the beginning of what he calls, "the best year of my life so far."
Michigan went on an incredible run and made history. Paige turned in an astounding debut season, and during the Division I Baseball Tournament, he would display the resilience he learned while recovering from his injury. Called in from the bullpen during the Corvallis Regional Final, Paige faced Creighton, which needed to defeat Michigan twice in order to advance. Paige entered the game with a lead and runners on base.
"All I needed was a ground-ball double play and the game was over," he said. "Thirty pitches later, I gave up six runs on four hits and a couple of walks. That was my first ever really brutal downfall on the field."
He had no time to be down on himself, as the very next day he was brought into an elimination game with the bases loaded and no outs.
"I went pop-up, pop-up, strikeout. No runs scored. All that hard work came to fruition," he said.
Michigan not only went on to win the game, it advanced to the Super Regional where it defeated the No. 1-ranked team in the nation, UCLA, to advance to the College World Series. For Paige, the dogpile following their victory against UCLA was especially poignant, as it would be the last game his grandmother watched him play in person before she passed away.
"For her to be able to see all my dreams come true, because I always wanted to play in a College World Series, that meant a lot to me," he said.
Starting a game in the College World Series added significance to Paige because it was more than a showdown of two elite pitchers in Paige and Rocker. It was also the first time in College World Series history that both starting pitchers were African-American.
"Being part of a little bit of history meant a lot to me because I'm very passionate about diversifying baseball, especially at the college ranks," Paige said. "I know how many kids aren't getting that opportunity."
The prevalence of African-Americans in baseball has been a prominent issue in recent years, and is a subject that Paige speaks about passionately.
"I was always drawn to players like David Ortiz, Curtis Granderson, Torii Hunter," he said. "At first, I wasn't conscious of the fact that I liked those players because they looked like me."
Paige said African-Americans once made up roughly 19 percent of Major League Baseball rosters. He says now it's as low as six or seven percent.
"That's why it's a topic I feel really strongly about," he said.
Paige not only made history, but turned in an excellent pitching performance, allowing only one run on three hits in four innings of work. While Michigan did not win the series, Paige still looks back on the experience fondly.
"It was an insane ride that we can all look back on and be proud of," he said. "It was bittersweet at the time, but looking back, it was all worth it."
Unfortunately, Paige was not able to carry his success into the following year, though it was no fault of his own. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Paige and millions of athletes across the globe saw their seasons canceled.
"I can still picture being on the field being told our season was over," Paige said. "It hurts because it feels like a blank page, and we will never really know what could've happened."
While we will never know what Paige's 2020 season would look like, he is more than ready to have a successful 2021 season.
"I want a Big Ten Championship," he said. "The College World Series ring is nice, but I want one that says 'champion' on it. We are gonna get it, no questions asked."
