Odom has only hard work to thank

The dream has been realized, yet there is still so much to accomplish.

Joseph Odom, a former Vestavia Hills High School catcher who graduated in 2010, has been invited to spring training with the Atlanta Braves.

“It’s a dream, for sure,” he said. “It’s definitely one of the goals I had coming into this year.”

Odom was one of seven players from the Atlanta organization who received an invite to the Arizona Fall League in 2015, an offseason league that brings together the top minor league prospects from each team’s farm system.

His performance there was satisfactory enough for him to get the call to come spend parts of February and March in Orlando, Florida, with the Braves, as they prepare for the regular season. 

“They said that I earned the spot, and they were excited for me to get down there and to get a good start to the season this year,” Odom said.

The spring training invite moves Odom one step closer to potentially holding the job he has desired for so long. Javy Lopez was Odom’s favorite player on the Braves — the Major League Baseball franchise he grew up rooting for. He was the longtime starting catcher in the 1990s and early 2000s.

He recalled, “I used to tell my mom all the time, ‘I want his job so bad.’ It’s 

crazy that I have an opportunity to maybe someday have it.”

The plan in Spring Training is to be a sponge, and absorb as much information as possible.

“I want to go in and keep my mouth shut and just listen and learn as much as possible from all those coaches and players who’ve been around forever,” Odom said. 

That doesn’t mean that Odom plans to do anything other than put his best effort on the field in his opportunities.

“I want to turn some heads and hope they get to throw my name around after they see what I can do,” he said.

This opportunity would have seemed unlikely, to say the least, a few years ago. Odom was not the athletic phenomenon that burst onto the high school level as a freshman. Far from it, actually.

“I played with Coach (Kris) Thomas my freshman year, and I played very little,” Odom said. “I wasn’t that good. I was about as wide as I was tall.”

Thomas remembers one of the moments during that season that played a role in Odom turning the corner.

“One time we had to run poles (from foul pole to foul pole in the outfield),” Thomas said. “He was way behind everybody and I remember stopping him and talking to him.

“I said to him, ‘You got to make a choice of what you want to do. If this is what you want, it’s time get serious and time to put in some work to change your life, change your lifestyle, your weight, all that stuff,’” Thomas said.

The light bulb went off. The hard work began to pay off.

Odom did not start a game at Vestavia Hills until midway through his junior season. He was primarily used as a defensive replacement at catcher during the late innings of games. 

A former teammate of his in high school, Dylan Wheeler, didn’t know if Odom had what it took to be a successful player, but knew nothing would stop him.

“He wanted nothing but to prove the naysayers wrong,” Wheeler said. “I told all of the older guys on the team that didn’t think he would ever start a single game to watch out, because this kid has something special and will prove all of you wrong.

“By the end of Joseph’s junior year, he was starting in the playoffs in our most important games,” Wheeler said.

He made enough progress to start his entire senior season at Vestavia and get the opportunity to go play at Huntingdon College in Montgomery. The Braves drafted him in the 13th round in 2013 after a junior campaign in which Odom batted for an average of .369 and led Division III with 14 home runs.

After being drafted in the summer, he played the rest of the 2013 season at the rookie level. In 2014, he moved up to the Class A-Advanced Lynchburg team. He spent 2015 with another Class A-Advanced team in the organization, the Carolina Mudcats.

The Braves are going through a dramatic rebuilding process, as they have traded away many household names over the past two years. The likes of Craig Kimbrel, Freddie Freeman, Justin Upton and Evan Gattis have been replaced with an abundance of young talent.

The transition process gives Odom the chance to make some headway, as Atlanta has a strong eye on how the minor league prospects are developing.

“They’ve made some moves lately, but the biggest thing is to control what I can control,” Odom said.

Odom hopes to begin the season in Double-A Mississippi of the Southern League, which includes the Montgomery Biscuits and Birmingham Barons. Road trips would be similar to homecoming trips in both spots. 

But he certainly doesn’t want to stay there.

He said, “My ultimate goal is just to be another piece to the puzzle and try to help the Braves get back to the World Series and stir some noise with the fans and get them back interested in baseball in Atlanta.”