Cam Cannarella: The man with the slow heartbeat, who can roll out of bed and hit a 2B

Cannarella put together a strong freshman campaign.

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Tue Jan 23 15:15:02 GMT-04:00 2024

The man with the slow heartbeat is back to roam center field for the Tigers this season, and his head coach thinks there’s room for even more growth.

Sophomore Cam Cannarella fashioned a superlative freshman season for the Tigers in 2023, hitting .388 in 59 games with 16 doubles, three triples, seven homers, 47 RBI and 24 stolen bases in 29 attempts.

Cannarella showed his hitting prowess early in the season and never slowed down, and head coach Erik Bakich sees even more growth ahead for the South Carolina native this spring.

“He’s continued to keep the target on growth and improvement, and he's added strength and added size, and he's a guy who could get out of bed at 6 AM and probably hit a double,” Bakich said recently to D1Baseball. “He just has a slow heartbeat. Cam is very steady, and I think that's why he's so good. He's very consistent. He's got one of the highest levels of compete of any athlete I’ve seen. He genuinely gets ticked off when he does not do well, and it's a fire that burns inside him that's just different.

“He just is very competitive, which you don't know that until you see him actually in the competition arena because he's very quiet and unassuming. Which, going into the season last year or even into the fall, it's a slightly built, at the time, kid that played infield. Didn't say much. But he had this really unique ability to put the barrel on the ball. Like just the consistent hard contact and the ball jumped. It was something that was just like kind of an eye opener, wow thing from the fall last year. So, we knew we had to get him in the lineup somewhere just because of the consistency of firing his barrel accurately.”

The Tigers were set at shortstop with veteran Benjamin Blackwell, and with Will Taylor still rehabbing his torn ACL, Cannarella was given a shot to play center.

“Will Taylor was kind of the projected center fielder. But he came in and was still taking care of the knee that he had banged up,” Bakich said. “He wasn't able to jump right into the outfield at the beginning of last year. And Cam is such a natural athlete, we just threw him out there. And he's one of three guys that have an ability to, when the ball is hit off the bat, to put his head down, run to a spot, turn around and catch the ball. There's only been two other guys, at least that I've coached in 22 years, that have been able to do that, but he's one of them. He's one of those three, and he's a game changer defensively as well as a game changer offensively.”

Bakich said Cannarella simply needs to fuel his competitive desire.

“So I think the key for him is keeping that target on his strength. His strength is his level of compete,” he said. “And his level of compete makes him very consistent because while one fire burns really high here in the compete zone, the ability to have a slow heartbeat and keep his mind still, so to speak, while he's competing. It's just this odd, unique combination that he's really good at. And while he's hyper-competitive, he's also moving slow, in a good way, mentally.”