A big high school baseball announcement

I’ve got some exciting news for high school baseball players and fans.

The Deseret Morning News is going to team up with the Marshall Gates Foundation to stage what we hope will become a premier annual event. The inaugural Marshall Gates Foundation/Deseret Morning News All-Star baseball game will be played on May 27 at Gates Field.

Some of the plans for the event are still being finalized. Here are some details:

–We are going to invite who we believe are the state’s top 30 high school baseball players regardless of their age or classification. There will be no limit regarding the number of players that can participate from a given school.

–The players will be selected by Chad Shepherd, who serves on the board of directors at the Marshall Gates Foundation, my colleagues Jim Rayburn and Michael Black, and me.

–Teams will be split up as evenly as possible, and likely be named American and National.

–Players will be allowed to take batting practice before the game at Gates Field, the best high school baseball field in the state. That may not seem like a big deal, but it might be for players who don’t get the opportunity to regularly play there. We’ll also likely have a home run derby. The game will be a nine-inning contest.

Why are we doing this? Because it will be a fun event, and it will benefit a worthy cause.

Shepherd approached me with the idea last summer. He wants to simply try and get the best baseball players in the state together on one field and see how they compete against each other at the end of the season. There are other all-star baseball games in the state, and we respect what they do. Our game will be the only one that allows underclassmen to participate if they are worthy. It will also allow more than one or two players from one team to participate if they too are worthy.

We will charge a small fee to attend the contest, and all proceeds will go to the Marshall Gates Foundation. The Foundation is named after Marshall Gates, who died of a heart ailment at the age of 23. He was the son of Kevin Gates.

The purpose of the Foundation is “to promote amateur sports competition through development and training of young amateur athletes for national and/or international competition in baseball.”

We hope to build this into an annual can’t-miss event. I’ll provide updates and more details as game day draws closer.