Baseball Player of the Year: Half Moon Bay’s Jared Mettam

Mettam joined GamePrep in the early days of the private local baseball academy in 2015. He was an undersized infielder who was a bit light with the bat — much like George Brett in his amateur playing days — but Granato took a quick liking to the youngster’s elite shortstop defense and set to work on fostering the other elements of his game.

“Since I was in sixth grade he helped me with footwork, throwing hard and taking one pitch at a time … and trying to make every play you can,” Mettam said, “and really, really make every play you make look routine.”

Mettam made the difficult seem routine with such regularity this season, it oftentimes seemed he wasn’t anything too special. But in his fourth year with the Half Moon Bay varsity squad, he routinely flashed leather and range that wasn’t far off par from his professional hero Andrelton Simmons of the Chicago Cubs.

In 2022, the bat finally caught up with the glove, as Mettam raked to the tune of a .431 batting average, ranking second in the Peninsula Athletic League Ocean Division, just two points behind league batting champion Giancarlo Selvitella. But Mettam powered six doubles, six triples and four home runs to lead the league with a .847 slugging percentage, while his 35 steals led all of the PAL and ranked second throughout the Central Coast Section.

In leading the Cougars to their first league championship in 11 years, Mettam garnered PAL Ocean Division Player of the Year honors. And now, he has been named the Daily Journal Baseball Player of the Year.

“He rose to the occasion and had an unbelievable season,” Cougars manager Brian Anderson said. “And I don’t even want to think about where we’d be without him.”

It was Mettam’s heroics that delivered Half Moon Bay to the PAL Ocean Division championship. The Cougars found themselves in a tough spot during the final week of the regular season. Leading the division by one game entering a two-game series with second-place Sacred Heart Prep, Half Moon Bay dropped the opener of the series 4-2 to set up a winner-take-all showdown on the regular season’s final day.

The Gators jumped out to a 3-1 lead in the fifth inning, leaving Half Moon Bay six outs away from disappointment. But after the Cougars rallied to tie it in the top of the sixth, Mettam took over the game in the seventh, showing off all five tools in his five-tool repertoire. He thumped a leadoff double, stole third and — despite SHP’s best efforts by playing the infield in — raced home on a routine grounder to second base to score the go-ahead run with a head-first slide.

Then he opened the bottom of the inning with a web gem, ranging over the middle of the diamond to glove a high chopper and sizzling an off-balance throw to first.

Four batters later, the Cougars were celebrating their Ocean Division championship in the middle of the infield.

“His imprint was just on everything because he sets the tone every practice,” Anderson said. “Because he’s going to be locked in, because he wants to be good every day.”

Mettam’s work ethic stems from struggles at the plate early in his career. As a freshman, he played every day as HMB’s second baseman — pairing over the middle with his older brother Jack, who in 2019 anchored the Cougars at shortstop — but underperformed at the plate, hitting just .244.

“He had the talent to play at the varsity level his freshman year,” Anderson said. “But he didn’t have, probably, the greatest season hitting wise that he would have wanted. But he was still able to compete.”

Still, the defensive brilliance was readily apparent.

“The thing that was crazy, he made every defensive play,” Anderson said. “Jared was the best second baseman I have ever had that season.”

Then the year-round work at GamePrep began to pay dividends. After the COVID season of 2020, Mettam’s sophomore year, he was weighing in at 170 pounds. That’s when Granato started exemplifying the hitting guru ways that once made Charley Lau have such an impact on the formative years of the great George Brett.

Granato insisted on breaking down Mettam’s swing piece by piece and building it back up. And when the talk came about Mettam adding muscle weight to his wiry frame, the commitment rang through.

“He literally said to me: ‘I’m going to do that,’” Granato said. “And he did. … It was just like a switch went off for him. And the player he is now, he’s 110% better than he was a year and a half ago.”

After batting .294 as a junior in 2021, Mettam emerged as a legitimate 6-foot, 195-pound amateur prospect this season.

The Saint Mary’s College commit has already participated in several pre-draft workouts with Major League Baseball organizations. And he is one of just a handful of 2022 high school graduates currently playing in the prestigious Northwoods League, a wood-bat summer league in the Great Lakes region that generally features established collegiate players.

With great success has come a profound swagger. Mettam played in all but one game as a senior, his absence the result of a one-game suspension for getting ejected while vehemently arguing balls and strikes. And all that was missing from Mettam’s antics during his immortal seventh inning in the regular-season finale against Sacred Heart Prep was a cry of: “Are you not entertained?”

“I think it just comes out on the field,” Anderson said. “In the classroom and stuff like that … he’s more reserved and quiet. But I think it just comes out, the passion just shows out on the field, which is just really fun to see.

“That swagger he plays with, everybody just feeds off that,” Anderson said. “And I think it just gives the younger guys a ton confidence too.”

But Mettam’s swagger comes from years of hard knocks. As the younger brother of a baseball standout, tagging along with Jack provided Mettam with a chance to consistently play with older kids. This is what set the stage for him at Half Moon Bay, led the way to GamePrep, and for the past several years even saw him working out at Skyline College, where Jack recently finished his freshman season.

“At my age, I guess I was a little better than him,” Mettam said. “So, I got to play with older kids … and I think that helped me in the long run.”

And if Mettam keeps improving at the rate he did in his four years at Half Moon Bay, the long run is going to be a lot of fun to watch.

“It’s crazy that in shifting over to shortstop, he was able to make every play there,” Anderson said. “And he just keeps getting better and better and better.”