DUNEDIN, Fla. — With nameplates around the Toronto Blue Jays oval Dunedin clubhouse reading “Bichette,” “Guerrero,” “Varsho” and “Wagner,” the club’s affinity for athletic bloodlines is evident. Never mind the recently removed “Biggio” and “Gurriel” placards. And this spring, the fraternity welcomed a newcomer.
Charles McAdoo, the 22-year-old third baseman Toronto acquired from the Pittsburgh Pirates at last year’s trade deadline for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, is the son of Michael, who played college basketball at Howard University, and Wanda, who ran track at the University of California. His older brother, Michael, was an outfielder for four years at UC Santa Barbara.
His cousin, James Michael, was a two-time second-team All-ACC forward at the University of North Carolina before entering the NBA and winning two championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2015 and 2017.
His more distant cousin, Bob, is the Bob McAdoo of the Showtime Lakers — a two-time NBA champion himself who was named the league’s 1975 MVP and inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
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“One way or another, I was going to be an athlete,” says the baseball-playing McAdoo, who will start at first base for the Blue Jays in Saturday’s Spring Breakout game against the Minnesota Twins. “Maybe a chess athlete or something. But an athlete.”
There will be plenty of time for English Openings and Queen’s Gambits someday in the future, but for now McAdoo plans to pursue baseball as far as his athleticism will take him. After he was drafted in the 13th round by the Pirates in 2023, he’s breezed through the lower levels of the minors and arrived last June at double-A, where he got out to a blistering, 135-wRC+ start prior to the trade.
But a significant slump set in after it, as McAdoo struggled to process the unexpected transaction and went hitless in his first 26 plate appearances with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats. His mindset clouded, McAdoo put excess pressure on himself to impress in new environs and tried to do too much, which led to him batting .167/.268/.267 over his final 36 games of the season. He added over five points to his strikeout rate and lost a point off his walk rate in the process.
Yet Blue Jays evaluators were nonetheless pleased with the bat speed and exit velocity data he was continuing to produce. And while McAdoo is still developing defensively after playing mostly second base in college, the Blue Jays came away from the season encouraged that he could stick at third base long term or potentially move to an outfield corner.
The Blue Jays brought McAdoo to Toronto this winter as part of a development camp at Rogers Centre — “It was pretty cold, but it wasn’t, like, unbearably cold,” the Californian says — before inviting him to his first major-league spring training. While he’ll likely begin 2025 back at double-A, a mid-season promotion to the triple-A Buffalo Bisons isn’t out of the question if he hits the ground running. Plenty within the organization are intrigued to see how McAdoo can progress following an off-season to clear his head. He is, too.
“Getting to decompress, that was super important,” he says. “You’ve got to separate sometimes. Playing baseball all the time is good. But it takes a toll on you. And that break is super, super necessary for ballplayers, I think.”
Watching McAdoo play this spring, Blue Jays manager John Schneider was reminded of what he saw from Addison Barger when he was first invited to big-league camp two years ago. Every game is like a prospect showcase. Quick bat speed and high exit velocities at the plate; speed up the first base line; a strong arm across the diamond. The raw tools are unmistakable.
What’s missing is refinement — the kind that comes with experience. Game clock; swing decisions; situational awareness. Understanding how you’re being pitched and what you can do to get to pitches you can drive.
“You can see he’s going to be an exciting player,” Schneider says. “There’s a lot to like. And then you put it on top of basically an 80 makeup. He’s an unbelievable kid, unbelievable teammate, every single day. He was awesome.”
McAdoo went to De La Salle High School in Concord, Calif., which is known as more of a football powerhouse than a baseball one. From 1992 through 2004, the school won 151 consecutive games — a national record. It went undefeated (316-0-2) in regional play over a three-decade span ending in 2021. NFLers Austin Hooper, TJ Ward, Maurice Jones-Drew, Amani Toomer and D.J. Williams all went there. You have to be pretty good to take the field for that team.
McAdoo? He never left the field. He was a receiver on offence and played all over defensively: Cornerback, free safety, middle and outside linebacker. Strong safety was his position of choice — “I liked delivering contact,” he says — and he reckons that if he’d focused fully on football, he could have played professionally. Two of his defensive teammates, Henry To’oTo’o and Isaiah Foskey, are currently in the NFL.
But the most aggressive college interest — specifically from San Jose State — was in what McAdoo could do on the baseball diamond, so he hung up his pads. He played only part-time as a true freshman at San Jose but went nuts when he became a sophomore regular, OPSing 1.035 while pacing the team in extra-base hits and setting a school record with a 44-game on-base streak. A year later, after hitting .325/.409/.543 as a junior, he was drafted and off to the pros.
McAdoo says it hasn’t been challenging to adjust as he’s faced rapidly escalating levels of competition in a sport he began solely focusing on fewer than five years ago. If anything, he believes playing football enhanced his baseball skills.
“A lot of the running transfers over. Playing safety is just like getting under a ball in the outfield. You have to be patient and get good reads,” he says. “And when you’re playing closer to the line, like when I was playing corner, you learn how to be reactionary and take quick first steps. Flipping the hips, keeping my eyes as focused as possible on what’s in front of me, not having my head on a swivel — that’s all super important at third base, too.”
Evidently, those athletic bloodlines help. McAdoo has speed from his mother, whom he frequently tells he could’ve beaten in her prime, running backward. He has work ethic from his father, who supported his pursuit of whatever sport he was interested in while working multiple jobs, including one with troubled youth at a group home. He has grit from his brother, who never once let him win on the family’s backyard basketball hoop and is currently serving as a marine. He has a couple cousins with a couple NBA rings.
It’s a family with nearly the entire athletic collection save for a big-leaguer. And that could change before long.
