NEW YORK -- During his sophomore and junior years of high school, Steven Matz barely pitched. As a lanky first baseman at Ward Melville High School on Long Island, Matz wasn’t on any college or draft radars. Scouts never came out to see him play. At that point, Matz hoped simply to garner enough notice to play at a Division II college somewhere.
Ron Matz, Steven’s father, had other ideas. Always a proponent of his son’s baseball career, the elder Matz, on a tip from a friend, decided to sign Steven up for a Perfect Game showcase in Connecticut. It wasn’t cheap, but Ron thought it would be a worthwhile risk. So the two took a road trip together across state lines, where Steven impressed both college coaches and pro scouts alike. The next spring, Matz’s senior season, scouts came out in droves.
“It just snowballed from there,” Steven Matz said. “It’s just a good picture of my dad being committed to me.”
Although Matz no longer spends his winters on Long Island, he goes home to spend time with his parents on as many off days during the season as he can. Ron, who worked as a car mechanic and manager when Matz was a child, instilled a love of baseball in him.
“I always looked up to my dad because he’s the type of guy that when anything goes wrong … he can fix anything,” Matz said. “I was always following him around because he could take care of everything. He worked really hard.”
During Father’s Day games, for the fourth consecutive year, players wore specially-designed New Era caps to raise awareness and funds for the fight against prostate cancer. Players also had the option to wear Stance multi-pattern blue-dyed socks. MLB will again donate 100% of its royalties from the sales of specialty caps and apparel emblazoned with the symbolic blue ribbon – a minimum $300,000 collective donation – to the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Stand Up To Cancer.
This effort also includes the annual Prostate Cancer Foundation “Home Run Challenge,” which has given fans the chance to make a one-time monetary donation or pledge for every home run hit by their favorite MLB Clubs during the time period of Saturday, June 1st through Father’s Day, Sunday, June 16th, all the while tracking where their team stacks up in a “Team vs. Team” competition. Every dollar donated through the Home Run Challenge goes to PCF to fund critical research to defeat prostate cancer. As of June 13th, more than $1.26 million has been pledged via the Home Run Challenge in 2019. Since inception, the Home Run Challenge has raised more than $51 million for PCF, the world’s leading philanthropic organization funding and accelerating prostate cancer research.
Founded in 1993, Prostate Cancer Foundation has funded nearly $800 million of cutting-edge research by 2,200 scientists at 220 leading cancer centers in 22 countries around the world. Because of PCF’s commitment to ending death and suffering from prostate cancer, the death rate is down more than 52% and 1.5 million men are alive today as a result. PCF research now impacts 67 forms of human cancer by focusing on immunotherapy, the microbiome, and food as medicine. Learn more at pcf.org.