LAKELAND, Fla. — Colt Keith was in Ohio, visiting a friend who was building a cabin in the woods of the Buckeye State, when the phone call came.

On the other end of the phone, Matt Paul, his agent, delivered the news with excitement and urgency. We got a call. You need to get down here.

Emotion shocked through Keith’s body. “Just overwhelming joy,” he said.

Soon the Detroit Tigers prospect called his parents and told them the latest. Even though Keith had never taken a major-league at-bat, even though there were persistent questions about his defense, even though he’s only 22, the idea of a lucrative offer was not, in this case, something that caught Keith off guard. He and his agent had considered the possibility before. “We actually talked about it,” his mother, Mary Keith, said. When other players such as Milwaukee’s Jackson Chourio signed big-money deals early in their careers, Keith and Paul pondered the question: If the Tigers ever offered something like that, what would it take?

The fact itself reveals something about Keith, a serious baseball prospect with a mono-focal mindset, a player who has fulfilled every aspect of an ambitious vision so far in his young career — including a pre-debut extension that guarantees him at least $28.6 million over the next six years.

“You get this idea that the guys signing these big contracts are like this far-off person and unapproachable,” Mary said. “They’re not. They’re just the next-door kid.”

Over the next six months, Keith will embark on a new sort of journey: The chance at 162 games in the big leagues, and all the pressures and perils that can come with it.

The mentality that turned Colt Keith into one of baseball’s best prospects took root on a mat.

His father, Troy, wrestled in college at University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. His mother played college basketball, so the athletic genes were always there. And long before Keith was ranked as The Athletic’s No. 36 prospect in baseball, he was grinding away on wrestling mats in Ohio.

“Wrestling,” Keith’s father said, “made him who he is.”

The world’s oldest sport comes attached with a reverence for mental fortitude. It is one man versus another, an art form more than a show of brute strength. Wrestling demands focus. Perhaps the sport taught Keith these lessons early. Perhaps Keith was simply born with a rare wisdom.

“He has always worked at stuff,” Mary said. “He puts in the effort, and once he puts his mind to doing something, whatever it takes to get there, he’ll do it.”

Keith was a great wrestler, but as he grew older, his parents saw signs he might become an even better baseball player. From his first days in T-ball, Mary watched as Keith stepped up and hit the ball from the left side of the plate. “He’s standing on the wrong side of the plate,” Mary would say. Try as they might, he wouldn’t stop doing it.

Eventually Troy suggested they simply let Keith hit left-handed. And the swing he started developing then is not all that different from the one we see today: tight and compact, a calm and controlled attack, less flair and more precision.

Despite this swing, Keith throws with his right hand, writes with his right hand, eats with his right hand and uses right-handed golf clubs. Add the lefty touch to his 6-foot-4 frame, and it’s another insight into the natural gifts that made Keith an athletic wunderkind. So much of his story to this point feels too good to be true. But that’s not to say any of it has been simple.

The journey really started when the family decided to move from Ohio. The main reason for boxing up their belongings and saying goodbyes: They wanted to be somewhere Keith could play baseball year-round. They chose St. George, Utah, a city in the northeastern-most crevice of the Mojave Desert. There in the warm climate, Keith played on a pre-teen club team, and within two weeks, he became the team’s starting shortstop. Two years in, the team’s coach told Mary point blank: If he’s serious about playing baseball, you need to get him to Arizona or California. Again the family moved.

And when they arrived in the baseball hotbed of Arizona (where Keith gave up wrestling) Troy and Mary laid out a stern disclaimer: “If baseball is really what you want to do, you have to be all in,” Mary said. “There can’t be any partying. There can’t be any running around. You can’t be chasing girls. You got to be totally focused on school and baseball.

“As a 14-year-old, to make that decision, he said, “Yeah, I will be.’ So we went, and he was,” she recalled.

In 2019, Keith appeared in the High School All-Star Game at Progressive Field in Cleveland. (Alex Trautwig / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

By his sophomore season, Keith was a finalist for the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year. Before his junior year, he had a scholarship offer to Arizona State. James McDonald, a former Pirates pitcher, contacted a friend named Matt Paul. Paul was an agent, and in another fortuitous event, McDonald told him he needed to come learn about Keith.

As a matter of principle, the Keith family always had open and honest conversations. They made decisions as a unit, including those long moves. Trust became paramount, and the Keiths sensed trustworthiness when they met Paul and made him an adviser.

Soon after, Mary’s career as an attorney in the oil-and-gas world led the family to another move. This one came to Biloxi, Miss. Younger brother Cael, forced to move again, was actually excited to live by the beach. The family chose Biloxi over a couple of other possible locations also in part because it happened to be where Paul, by then already a trusted confidant, lived.

“We had other options,” Mary said of Keith’s representation. “But we had a relationship with Matt, and Troy would tell him, ‘We trust you with Colt. We trust you with his future. We trust you with his life.’”

To picture Keith at age 17 or 18 is to see a young man locked in on the future. He had friends and a social life. Mary swears he has a laid back, even goofy, side. But Keith’s goals took precedence. He actively avoided being in the presence of alcohol, not wanting to be seen even in the same photo frame as a beer can. Neither of his parents drink, and Troy had given him warnings. What if you try one drink, and you like it?

“He told us at one point, maybe toward the end of high school, ‘I don’t know how it happened, but maybe when we moved at different times, I missed all that,’” Mary said.

When he would hang out with friends, he’d often make an early exit if the gathering was about to take a turn.

“It got to the point,” Mary said, “where they respected him for not doing it.”

Four years later, when Keith and the Double-A Erie SeaWolves clinched a first-half Eastern League playoff spot, the team celebrated with champagne in the locker room.

Keith shotgunned a root beer.

The day Colt Keith was drafted felt like an eternity.

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic that altered Keith’s senior season and cut the draft to only five rounds, Keith had met with nearly every major league team. Some even considered Keith as a pitcher or two-way player — he could supposedly hit 95 mph on the mound. “He’s a toolshed,” former Arizona State assistant Michael Earley said in 2020. “He can really do it all.”

Leading up to the draft, the family heard rumblings he could go as high as the first or second round. On draft day, there were calls from teams early. But the pick never happened. In the middle rounds of the draft, everything went silent.

“It felt like it wasn’t gonna happen, and I was gonna have to go to Arizona State,” Keith said. “It sucked.”

Teams may have had concerns about Keith’s signability. With the way in-person scouting was limited in 2020, perhaps they just weren’t as certain about a high-school hitter who had moved around the country. Finally, with the first pick in the fifth round, then-Tigers general manager Al Avila called. He informed Keith the Tigers wanted to draft him. They were going to offer him a $500,000 signing bonus, the floor Keith had set for what it would take to keep him from college.

In truth, Keith never had much intention of going to Arizona State. His mind was set on turning pro.

“I hate school,” Keith said. “Hate school, love baseball.”

Some important context here: Keith was a perfectly fine student. One semester, Mary challenged him to get all A’s. His brother happened to be an academic whiz who graduated high school a year early, graduated from Ohio State in three years and is now making top grades in vet school. “Your brother gets all A’s all the time,” Mary said. Keith took his mother’s challenge seriously. He got all A’s. And then he told her: “Mom, I can get B’s and C’s and I have an extra hour every day to play baseball, or I can get A’s and play one less hour of baseball. I’d rather get B’s and C’s and play an extra hour of baseball.”

Before the Tigers made the pick official, Avila asked to talk to Mary. He wanted her word that Keith would sign.

Three-and-a-half years after that call, Paul sat in front of a dais, announcing a contract extension that could make Keith a Tiger for up to nine major-league seasons.

Keith is now one of only seven major-league players to have signed a contract extension before his major-league debut.

So much of this has been linear. High-school success. Getting drafted. Crushing in the minors. He is engaged to his fiancee, Kait. He takes grounders and batting practice and does yoga and workouts with his trusted agent. He has secured a lifetime’s worth of money and has a chance to become a staple in the Tigers’ lineup for years to come. A shoulder injury that cost him four months in 2022 was the only real obstacle.

Sometimes, though, these stories can become cautionary tales. It’s not that every too-good-to-be true young athlete turns into a tragedy. Sometimes the fairy tale just doesn’t last forever. Take, for example, the case of Kris Bryant, the No. 2 overall pick who won the Rookie of the Year in 2015 and then the MVP in 2016. Before he debuted, they had a billboard near Wrigley Field that read: Worth the Wait. Within a year, he was on Express ads at Chicago bus stops. Bryant was also this non-drinking, non-smoking, non-cursing golden child. Eight years later, injuries have derailed his career. He is toiling in obscurity with the Colorado Rockies. Once people marveled at how naturally he handled the pressures of being the face of a franchise. Now he has openly admitted maybe all that pressure wasn’t so good for him.

Keith has already endured the scrutiny of the outside world analyzing his contract. And if he meets all this promise, he indeed could be foregoing the chance at a much larger payday in six years. But listening to Keith and Paul talk about it all at their January press conference, the picture became clearer. “We approached the conversations with a different attitude, a different approach, than some people would,” Paul said.

Keith has won the Tigers’ second base job this spring. (Nathan Ray Seebeck / USA TODAY)

Keith spoke with players who had been in similar situations, some who had taken the guaranteed money and at least one who hadn’t. He valued their perspective and made the decision.

“He always said, ‘I’m worth way more than that, but just in case, I can’t pass this up. They’re gonna pay me to play baseball,’” Mary said.

Look at the other players who have signed these pre-debut extensions, and it almost serves as validation for Keith’s decision to take the money while it’s on the table. Luis Robert Jr. may be a budding star, and Eloy Jiménez is a solid hitter. But Jon Singleton, Scott Kingery and Evan White are not exactly household names.

“I read some of the stuff that came out after that that kind of bashed (Paul),” Mary said. “I said, ‘Nope, Matt knows Colt, and this is Colt.’”

This spring, Keith arrived to spring training fresh off all this news. He was yet another rookie in the spotlight, and for a few days, the Tigers asked reporters to give Keith space to “settle in.” Yet Keith blended in seamlessly throughout spring. He looked comfortable in spring training games, racking up 12 hits and a home run. And slowly, subtle signs of his personality came to the surface.

“We’ve tried to tell him, ‘Hey, you got to be more fun when you’re out there,’” Mary said. “But he’s focused on what he’s doing.”

At the start of spring, Keith largely kept to himself during periods in which reporters were allowed in the clubhouse. By the end, he was wheeling a chair in a semicircle near Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene.

“He’s pretty serious,” Torkelson said. “It’s also his first legit big-league season. I’m sure it’s a little nerve-wracking and he doesn’t want to totally open up.”

Torkelson, a former No. 1 overall pick who struggled during his rookie season, knows better than almost anyone what the next six months of Keith’s life will be like.

“I think he just needs to be himself,” Torkelson said. “Whatever he’s done here, that works. He’s really locked in. As long as he sticks to himself and can lean on us, don’t be afraid to reach out with questions, he knows that we all have his back.”

Alan Trammell, the Hall of Fame shortstop who is now a special assistant and works closely with young Tigers infielders, has also watched Keith’s evolution since draft day.

“Getting to know him over the first couple of years, I’d say he was a little bit on the quiet side,” Trammell said. “Now that I look back on it, he was taking it all in.”

Keith worked with Trammell and others all spring, and though he remains quite large for a second baseman, he handled the position better than some evaluators expected.

“And I can give you a little more,” Trammell said. “He wants to be good. He doesn’t just want to be OK.”

In case there was any doubt, Keith is now officially set to be the Tigers’ Opening Day second baseman. Manager A.J. Hinch gave him the news in the midst of one of the final spring training games. The Tigers were playing the Mets, and Hinch asked Keith if he wanted another at-bat late in the game. Keith nodded. Mets right-hander Austin Adams (since traded to the Oakland Athletics) was on the mound and had gotten the better of Keith earlier in the spring.

“Do you know why I asked you?” Hinch told Keith. “I only ask the guys that are on the team.”

Keith gave Hinch a sideways glance

“So next week in New York,” Hinch said, “You’re gonna see this uniform, and I need you to have the same intent to go out and face him again.”

Every step of Keith’s young life has led him to this moment. And now the real story begins.

(Top photo: Brace Hemmelgarn / Minnesota Twins / Getty Images)