Mike Beer barely had one foot in the door before his five-year old son wanted to show him what he could do with the ol’ wiffle bat and ball. Seth spent much of that afternoon in the backyard with his mother, Robin, and he was ready to show his father how much he had improved.

So Mike went in the backyard and was standing about 10 feet away as he threw the wiffle balls at him. Seth was doing what he said he could. He was making contact and he was hitting them well. At that point Mike reached into the bag of balls and pulled out an orange one, which was used for floor hockey.

Mike figured what the heck, so he tossed the ball towards Seth to see if he could hit it.

“That thing came right back at me and smacked me square in the eye,” Mike said.

Mike fell straight to the ground holding his eye, confident he had just lost it.

“I thought my eyeball had exploded,” he said. “I was down on one knee and Seth was crying. He said, ‘Daddy, Are you okay!?’ Of course I didn’t want to show him the fact that my eyeball had exploded in my head. So I told him to hold on that I’m alright.”

Mike headed inside and went into the bathroom where he slowly tried to open his eye, hoping he at least could.

“I was happy to see that my eyeball was still there, but it was as swollen as a softball. At that time, that’s when I realized he had something special.”

That was the first of many injuries Mike Beer experienced over the years while playing toss or throwing the baseball to his son, who has become the most talked about Clemson ballplayer since Khalil Greene was tearing off the cover of baseballs in the early 2000s.

“Through the years he has broken several of my bones and bruised several other things from balls that have come right back at me,” Mike said laughing.

The only thing Seth is bruising these days is the egos of the college pitchers he has faced in his first 20 games as a Clemson Tiger. The freshman heads into this weekend’s series against No. 4 Miami leading the ACC in home runs (9), in total bases (63), while being tied for second in RBIs (26) and is fourth in batting average (.448).

“It is pretty humbling because this game is built on failure. To come out and swing the bat and help my team compete right now … we are playing really well and all of that kind of stuff. It’s a good feeling to be part of a program like this,” Seth said.

“It’s really cool because my teammates are the ones helping me succeed at the plate right now because they are just making it really easy for me. I’m having a lot of fun out there.”

Seth Beer heads into this weekend’s series against No. 4 Miami leading the ACC in home runs (9), in total bases (63), while being tied for second in RBIs (26) and is fourth in batting average (.448).

Keeping his eye on the ball

Things weren’t so much fun for Seth when he was younger. Mike and Robin discovered he had a reading problem when he was young boy. They found out after several test he had a problem with his eyesight.

For two years Seth went to a specialist, three days a week, to correct the problem as the doctors trained his eyes.

“Now of course he has incredible eyesight,” Mike said.

His eyesight is so well, doctors are now saying he has eyes that see as well or better than a fighter pilot’s.

“They focused almost exclusively on training his eyes to be able to take the image that is coming and translate it to his brain,” Mike said. “We took him there because he was really struggling with his reading and we wanted to fix that, but this turned out to be a real benefit for his baseball game.

“He can see a baseball coming and the spin turning on it. He has an advantage there because in most cases he knows what that ball is going to do.”

Seth’s trained eyesight explains a lot on why he is able to turn on a baseball as fast as he does and why there does not seem to be much of scouting report on him through the first 20 games.

“He can really, really hit,” Clemson head coach Monte Lee said. “He is a guy that hits the ball well to all fields. He hits for power to all fields. He is very, very disciplined.

“The thing that impresses me the most about him is how disciplined he is. He does not chase the ball out of the zone very much, but he is one of those guys that when you make a mistake, he hurts you, which is the sign of an elite hitter. He is the best freshman hitter I have seen in my time and he is off to probably the best start I have ever seen as a coach.”

An Olympic swimmer?

Mike Beer admits he really did not follow baseball growing up. He was a football player. He never got into baseball. He played college football as a middle linebacker at Winona State University, a NCAA Division II school in Winona, Minn. At 6-foot, 245 pounds, Mike started all four years for the Warriors.

“I was a football guy and I wanted Seth to play football. I wanted him to succeed in that area,” Mike said. “I knew what kind of personality he had. On the field he is a very competitive kid so I thought football would be something he knew what he was doing.”

Seth being a football player totally made since when he was constantly wrestling and tackling the other kids in the neighborhood and at school.

“My wife and I were continuously apologizing to people about him tackling their kids and wrestling with them and all of those kinds of things so we always thought football was going to be his avenue,” Mike said.

It turned out football wasn’t, though he did play the game through high school. Seth took to swimming, and actually became pretty good at it. The Beers, however, did not want him to get obsessive about swimming. To get his mind off it, they signed him up for baseball.

“We wanted to keep him active and moving when he was not in the pool,” Mike said. “He showed so well with his skills that we really started to see this was the direction he wanted to go.”

Seth Beer, who decided to forgo the rest of his senior year of high school to enroll at Clemson in January, was rated as the No. 2 overall player and No. 1 outfielder in the country by Perfect Game last summer.

The Natural

Seth was a natural at baseball, but Mike and Robin never really knew how much of a natural until Paul Byrd—a former Major Leaguer, who played in the Big Leagues for 14 seasons and was an All-Star in 1999—told them how special their son really was.

Byrd coached Seth, along with his son Grayson, on a travel team that was one of the best in the country. Twenty three of the 28 players on the squad went onto to get Division I scholarship offers. Grayson, who started off at LSU, transferred to Clemson this fall and will play for the Tigers next spring.

Wanting Seth to play with, and go up against the best competition he could in order to elevate his game, Mike scouted and helped build the roster with some of the best talent in the Atlanta area.

“My dad knew baseball was my thing, and he knew I loved it,” Seth said, who lettered three years in baseball, two in football and two swimming for Lambert High School in Suwanee, Ga. “He was one of those guys that did not know a lick about baseball, but he ended up putting together a team when I was 13-years old that actually had a guy go to Stanford, a guy go to USC and a couple of other big-time guys that are in college (baseball) right now.

“He put that together without knowing anything about baseball at all. I really want to thank him of that because he really played a big role in why I’m here today.”

Seth, who decided to forgo the rest of his senior year of high school to enroll at Clemson in January, was rated as the No. 2 overall player and No. 1 outfielder in the country by Perfect Game last summer.

“When he was a sophomore, going into the state playoffs, he was hitting .742, and finished the season at .614 or something like that,” Mike said. “So we have always known he has had that ability. It is something that just flows through him.”

Mike knew it when Seth nearly exploded his eyeball with that ol’ wiffle bat and floor-hockey ball when he was just five years old.