Late-Bloomer: Alabama LHP Hunter Furtado Brings the Heat

When trying to define Alabama baseball pitcher Hunter Furtado, there's nobody better to do it than the young man himself.

“A fiery left-handed pitcher who’s going to give the batter everything he’s got to get the batter out,” Furtado said in an exclusive interview with BamaCentral. “And a guy that really wants to win and is determined to win and will do what he can to help the team to get it there. I’m a guy that is very competitive and I love to win, but more than that I hate to lose.”

Speaking on the phone, Furtado had just exited a crowded Chipotle restaurant in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and was headed back to his car. He had actually missed the first time that I had tried to call him due to the noise, but that didn't stop him from calling back. Nor did the distractions around him cause him to falter in quickly stating his goals.

“I don’t understand how people play at this level and don’t want to be a professional baseball player,” Furtado said. “Like, that’s the end goal. Not just to be a professional baseball player, but to be really good at it. For me, I want to be the next Clayton Kershaw if I could."

Just a few years ago, those dreams of being an MLB player were likely just a pipe dream. Today, though, they are quite a real possibility.

Furtado started out playing baseball at the young age of three years old in Lake Worth, Fla.. For his birthday, his father gave him a baseball glove and some baseball pants and took him to the local Boynton Beach YMCA for tryouts. He had played soccer before, but this was going to be his first time playing baseball.

And at the age of three, Furtado fell in love with the game.

His father being an avid baseball card collector, Furtado soon followed suit. His dad was also an Atlanta Braves fan, which gave Furtado first-hand experience watching great pitchers like John Smoltz and Greg Maddox. While Nolan Ryan's playing days were long over before Furtado was even born, he was also an inspiration to him at a young age.

"I always had Nolan Ryan," Furtado recalled. "Like, I had a picture of Nolan Ryan that he signed with the bloody lip after he got hit with a baseball, I think. But I always had that in my room and I didn’t really know who that was until I got older and my dad got me the Nolan Ryan Pitcher’s Bible.

“Before my junior year when I was pitching in the games, I would watch highlights of him in study hall before I would pitch just because — you know when you see something and it’s kind of like it’s fresh in your mind and you think you can do that, too? Well, I would watch Nolan Ryan clips. Just the way the ball sizzled out of his hand.”

Throw in some more recent players like Clayton Kershaw, Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander, and Furtado has had a lot of MLB pitchers to look up to. However, his size heading into high school had always hindered him from expanding his game. That would all soon change.

At the start of his freshman season, Furtado measured up at 5'4" — quite short for a high school pitcher. His stature prevented him from getting solid velocity behind his pitches, and after the conclusion of his sophomore year, he hadn't caught the eye of any college coaches, let along pro scouts.

All of his struggles with height came to a sudden end between his sophomore and junior years, though.

"I had a year where I grew a foot in a year-and-a-half," Furtado said. "So from my sophomore to my junior year I grew a lot and I gained a lot of velocity, but I was still skinny and I was like a baby giraffe — I didn’t really have a lot of control. I was new to my longer body so I didn’t really know how to use it. Once I started working out a little bit in the fall of my junior year, I made this huge velo jump during my spring season and I just started looking at how to throw harder and stuff.

"At the beginning of the season, I was topping out at 82, and then at the end of the season I topped out at 90 in the same spring season.”

While the sudden growth spurt was nothing short of a miracle, it came at a time that was a little too late for Furtado.

“At that time, all of the big colleges already had their recruits,” Furtado said. “And so when I was in the spring looking at places that I wanted to play, I would always look at the Perfect Game college commitments and the first team that always came up was Alabama because of alphabetically. And I was like ‘Man, it must be nice to be those guys going to such a nice college and I’m having to pick these small Division 1 colleges that maybe I can go to.’"

During the summer prior to his senior season, the pitching coach at Wake Forest came to a game and saw Furtado warming up. After being impressed with the potential that Furtado had with his newfound velocity, he later gave him an offer to play baseball with the Demon Deacons. It would be the only offer from a Power 5 school that Furtado had in high school.

"I was a very late bloomer and then once my senior year happened, that’s when I started to get really good — I mean, I’m not really that good, but I got a lot better,” Furtado laughed. “My velocity jumped, too, and that’s when I started to get pro scouts at my games during the spring. I just made a huge jump. Pro scouts were asking me ‘Where were you these past three years?’ I said ‘You wouldn’t have recognized me a year ago just because I was so much smaller.’”

Furtado attended his freshman season in 2021 at Wake Forest, where he appeared in 22 games and combined for 27 strikeouts across 25.2 innings. Still, the rushed decision to attend the only Power 5 school that had offered him left Furtado wanting to find a place that he fit in better. While he enjoyed his time at Wake Forest and the opportunities that it gave him, he knew it was time to move on.

Spending his summer playing for the Hyannis Harbor Hawks in the Cape Cod Baseball League, Furtado had his first interaction with Alabama. For his living situation for the Hawks, Furtado was neighbors with Alabama outfielder Caden Rose. The two quickly became friends, and as soon as Rose caught wind that Furtado was considering transferring, he quickly gave him his pitch for why he should come to Alabama.

"He kept saying ‘Hey man, if you go in the transfer portal’ — because I was talking to him about how I might go in the transfer portal — he was like ‘Hey man if you do, come to ‘Bama and we’ll be teammates,'" Furtado said. "I would just keep laughing. I didn’t think that Alabama was going to offer me or anything.

"Once I went into the transfer portal, that morning I threw our first live scrimmage for the Hawks and I faced Caden and he came out and was like ‘Hey man, I’m texting [Alabama coach Brad Bohannon] right now since you’re in the transfer portal.’ He texted coach Bo, coach Bo ended up calling me a couple of days later and that’s how that process got started."

Furtado made his decision and transferred to Alabama. After seeing the Crimson Tide listed at the top of Perfect Game several years earlier, life had come full circle and he was now a member of Alabama baseball.

When asking Bohannon to describe what Furtado brings to the table for Alabama, it's easy to see why he was so quick to pull the trigger after Rose referred him to Furtado in the transfer portal.

“Hunter’s got a ton of upside and he’s got a lot of arm talent,” Bohannon said. “And he does have some Power 5 experience; he was pitching on the weekends at Wake Forest. Hunter’s a guy — I think he’s just a late-bloomer — kinda came on late in high school and I think last year, they kinda used his velocity out of the bullpen and his breaking ball was a little light and his changeup was ok and his secondary stuff has continued to evolve here.

"He and [pitching coach Jason Jackson] have a great connection, but he’s left-handed, he’s gone up to 95-96 with a very good changeup and a good slider/cutter so he’s going to be a big piece of what we do on the weekends and he’s going to leave as a really good draft pick next year.”

Despite being a late-bloomer, things have fallen into place for Furtado. With his increased velocity due to his sudden increase in height, the odds that a Wake Forest pitching coach would drop by one of his team's summer games and the oddly perfect scenario that placed Rose as his neighbor in the Cape Cod League, the stars certainly aligned for him and his then-undiscovered talent.

And Furtado is the first to admit that there's been more at play over the past several years of his life than just pure circumstance.

"I never thought that I’d be able to go to a school like Alabama," Furtado said. "Like, the institution, how great the school is and how great they are at sports — I really lucked out and I really believe that God had a plan for me to end up here just how everything kinda came into play with Caden being my neighbor and just everything.”

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— Alabama Baseball (@AlabamaBSB) January 23, 2022

This story is the third in a four-part series highlighting Alabama baseball transfers for the 2022 season. You can find links to the first two stories in the series below:

Keeping it Crimson: Alabama OF Tommy Seidl Brings Experience to Tuscaloosa

Alabama Catcher Dominic Tamez is Turning Question Marks into Exclamation Points