SALISBURY — If Collin Woody didn’t know all about Nate George already, he might have guessed this was a hot-shot first-round pick patrolling the outfield for the Orioles’ Low-A affiliate, the Delmarva Shorebirds. In George’s first game for Delmarva last month, the outfielder recorded two hits, stole two bases and threw out two runners.

“It’s just like, ‘Holy cow, who is this guy?’” said Woody, the Shorebirds manager. “Everyone definitely turns their heads when they see him play.”

The “five-tool player” label is perhaps too often thrown around when discussing prospects, but here it is anyway: contact, power, speed, fielding and throwing, all in one. George has that package — what’s interesting is that this package came to Baltimore’s farm system as a 16th-round draft pick out of an Illinois high school.

“If you were to tell me he was drafted within the top 10 picks of the MLB draft last year, I would go, ‘Oh, yeah, that makes sense,’” Woody said. “And when you say he got drafted in the 16th round, it’s like, ‘Holy cow, good for that scout to find that guy and bring him in, because that’s some serious talent right there.’”

The story of Nate George is multifold.

It begins with a player who did things his own way, running track and competing in baseball during his senior year of high school in Minooka, a small town southwest of Chicago. It continues with an area scout who raised the flag on an overlooked player just in time. And it carries on through a front office that showed serious trust in their talent evaluators, handing out an over-slot signing bonus to ensure George joined the organization rather than attend a junior college in Florida.

Baltimore signed George for $455,000, the seventh-highest bonus in its 2024 draft class. So far, as the 19-year-old George rips his way through the Florida Complex League and Low-A Delmarva, he’s proving himself as a sound investment.

With this year’s MLB Draft arriving July 13-14, there will be plenty of headlines dedicated to the first-round picks — the most notable players in any class, the ones who receive big-time signing bonuses and are seen as franchise-changers. But there is always the unexpected star, the diamond in the rough.

After all, the Orioles found one in George.

“The 16th round, I look back on it and there are certain days I look at it and I’m like, ‘Why?’” George said. “But I look at it and I realize the Lord has a plan for everything and everything is going to happen for a reason. I don’t think I’d change a thing if I could. If I could redo the draft, the workouts, everything, I wouldn’t redo a thing.”

The discovery

Illinois doesn’t tend to be a baseball hotbed. That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of talent. Rather, the lingering cold into the spring season often inspires those who show the potential for a professional career to seek the refuge of the south, where the weather is warmer and the playing season is longer.

As it is, Ryan Carlson remembers the first day he saw George at Minooka Community High School. It was raining. It rained every time he saw George play. It was cold and rainy and yet George proved to be a bright light — even though he was hardly known.

During the fall of George’s senior year, he traveled to Jupiter, Florida, to compete in his first major high school showcase event. It was the 2023 WWBA World Championship, where hundreds of scouts descend each year. The wood-bat tournament offers high schoolers a chance to show their pro potential, and for George, it allowed him to play in the sun.

With 104 travel teams in attendance, and with games playing simultaneously on multiple fields, scouts tend to focus on players already generating buzz. Still, George made the All-Tournament team, drawing eyes for his performances. Those eyes soon followed him to Minooka.

“Having the success that I did in Jupiter I think helped me out a lot, kind of got me on the radar,” George said. “I was really an unknown guy. I didn’t have an agent at the time. My family, we didn’t really have any friends or anyone who had gone through the same process. We were kind of clueless to it all.”

Carlson, the Orioles’ Midwest area scout, made it a priority to see George during his spring season at Minooka. At the time, George ranked as the 14th-best player in Illinois, according to Perfect Game, in the class of 2024. But there was a growing sense within the industry that George had much greater potential, and Carlson wanted to see for himself.

So, on April 1, 2024 — just over three months from the MLB draft — Carlson watched George play in the wind and rain.

“Not having anything on him heading into the spring is very unusual,” Carlson said. “Normally I have a pretty good idea of who I need to prioritize and who I need to see. We kind of came in with next to nothing on him, but what we did have was really interesting.”

What they had: industry chatter about a little-known five-tool player.

“With Nate, his physical tools stood out, right?” Carlson said. “He’s strong, he’s fast, he’s got a really strong arm and he plays the outfield at a really high level. The first couple times I saw him play, he’s very raw, but he showed an ability to make a lot of quality contact. He found the barrel. He hit the ball hard and he hit it into the gaps in the air, so that sort of checks a lot of boxes for us.”

After two or three times watching George play, Carlson raised the flag for the rest of the scouting department. “We have something here,” he wrote in a message. The rest of the department agreed.

“There’s a little bit of a sense of urgency there, because you run out of days pretty quickly,” Carlson said. With time before the draft running short, other scouts completed their own reports on George, and they agreed with Carlson’s assessment.

“It painted this bigger picture of somebody who would really thrive in our player development system,” Carlson said.

By that point, George was already slated to attend Northwest Florida State Junior College. He had gone on a two-day trip to Florida junior colleges and he came away impressed by the facilities at the small college on the Panhandle of Florida. But more than anything, George wanted “to get out of the cold,” for a chance to play a longer baseball season, thus allowing him to develop more rapidly.

There were questions about whether George was a lock to attend the junior college rather than sign with a major league team. Perhaps that’s part of why he slid to the 16th round. Or perhaps too few teams really knew much about him at that point — apart from the Jupiter tournament, George participated in few showcase scouting events.

So even after the Orioles selected George in the 16th round, making him the 489th player chosen in 2024, George and his parents had much to mull over.

“It was real back and forth after I did get drafted,” George said. The main consideration, he said, was development.

“What would be better for me at this time?” said George, recalling the centerpiece of conversations with his dad. “I know I want to make baseball my career, and whether that meant me going to juco for a year, two years, three, who knows? Really, just the development side of it.”

As the signing deadline crept nearer, Carlson and members of Baltimore’s front office joined a Zoom call with George. They pitched him on just that — development — and along with the over-slot signing bonus, Baltimore landed a sleeper prospect.

“It took a little bit of a gamble from the people in the warehouse to commit that kind of money in him, knowing that he didn’t have that track record against elite competition,” Carlson said. “But those of us who saw him play, we were pretty convinced he could hold his own in pro ball.”

An early return

The first game George played under Woody was not an anomaly.

George earned a quick promotion to Low-A Delmarva after blitzing the Florida Complex League with a .383 average and 1.007 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in 23 games. In his first 20 games for Delmarva, George has continued that pace. He holds a .363 average with a .989 OPS, which includes six doubles, four triples and one homer, plus 13 steals.

The rise in competition is notable. George said the whole game is faster, and pitchers in professional ball exhibit better velocity, command and arsenals than the high schoolers of Illinois.

But George is more than holding his own. He is turning heads each time he plays — and a similar refrain follows him when onlookers realize this isn’t a high-draft prospect but a 16th-rounder.

Really?

George said he would be lying if there wasn’t a chip on his shoulder surrounding the fact he was the 489th player chosen. He believes in himself, his dedication and his work ethic. There will come a time, he believes, when his 16th-round selection will be a fun fact, not a defining quality.

Perhaps that time has come already.

“I’m not going to let that put me down. I’m not going to wake up and go, ‘Oh, I’m upset I was a 16th-rounder,’” George said. “I’m a strong believer everything happens for a reason.”