The mystery of Brandon Belt’s high school nickname

“McDeep Dive” is our new series that spotlights one Giants player every day for a week. We’ll move backwards and forwards through time, look at on the field stuff, off the field stuff, and see if we can learn something new about them. Here’s part 4 of our look at Brandon Belt.

Brandon Belt’s college days were formative years. He said in his player profile, “I’m so happy I went to college. I matured so much as a baseball player and as a person and I made so many friends.” And it was good for the Giants that he opted not to go to the Red Sox when they drafted him, but what about all the time before that?

He was a pitcher for Hudson High School in Lufkin, Texas, and was as big a goofball then as he is now. To that point, here’s an interview he did during his senior year after committing to the Texas Longhorns:

Why Bob for a nickname? Sadly, we’ll never know. What we do know is that even though he went to school in what he went to bed in the night before and that he ultimately did not go to the Texas Longhorns straight out of high school.

He went to junior college to stretch out his eligibility — there’s a story about how the Cubs promised him they’d draft him in an early round and that’s what prompted this move — and eventually joined the Longhorns. Shoulder pain caused Texas to convert him to a first baseman full-time and we are all, of course, better for that.

Yeah, I was trying to find footage of him pitching but instead wound up here. As much as he enjoyed college, he never forgot his high school. After the 2012 World Series, he went back there for an assembly where students got to meet him and hear him speak. He’s kind of a big deal in Lufkin.