Jul. 3—Did you win? Did you have fun?
Those were the first two questions that Jeff and Patty Frelick asked their three children on the rare occasions they couldn’t attend one of their baseball, softball, hockey or football games.
“We never asked how many hits they had or how many goals they scored,” said Jeff Frelick, a 1983 Greensburg Central Catholic graduate. “The emphasis was on the team and winning.”
Although individual success was secondary, it became hard to ignore in the case of Sal, the middle child in the Frelick clan.
Sal parlayed his baseball skills into a scholarship offer from Boston College before his sophomore year of high school, and he did so well in the ACC and summer leagues over the past three seasons that he is a consensus first-round pick in the Major League Baseball draft later this month.
Baseball America has Frelick, a top-of-the-order left-handed hitting center fielder, ranked No. 9 among its top 500 prospects, and he is the second college hitter listed. Some draft experts have Frelick linked to the Baltimore Orioles with the fifth overall pick.
His success is being celebrated from Lexington, Mass., where the Frelicks have resided for three decades, to Westmoreland County, where Jeff was a standout football and baseball player.
“It has become a sense of pride that one of our own made it big,” said David Zilli, the Greensburg Salem High School principal and former youth football teammate of Frelick’s. “If you know anything about Jeff, this is not a surprise. As much as he was a good athlete, he had that desire and grit, too. Those intangibles were things that Jeff was very good at, and he instilled it in his kids.”
Jeff Frelick grew up in the Hempfield hamlet of Brooklane, which is adjacent to South Greensburg. He played for the borough’s Bulldogs football program and its baseball teams. His father, Henry, was a quarterback at Greensburg Salem, and later coached youth sports in the borough.
A two-way football player at Greensburg Central Catholic, Frelick accepted a spot as a preferred walk-on at Pitt rather than try to play at a smaller school. Frelick was a backup fullback until a shoulder injury in his junior season ended his playing career.
Using his degree in biology — he later got an M.B.A. from Suffolk University in Boston — Frelick began a career in medical sales. His work led him to New England, and while spending 16 years on Wall Street analyzing medical device companies, he transitioned into management. Since 2019, he has served as the CEO of Bone Biologics, Inc.
He and Patty, a high school athlete and bowler at UConn, raised three children with an emphasis on sports. Since Nico, Sal and daughter Francesca were each born 14 months apart, a natural sibling rivalry developed.
“We said we wanted good, well-rounded kids,” Frelick said. “We expected good grades but didn’t demand straight A’s. They had to play hard in sports, but they didn’t have to be stars. We wanted them to be good kids.”
And versatile athletes. The Frelicks encouraged their kids to play multiple sports encompassing all four seasons.
All three played hockey in addition to baseball/softball. This year, Nico graduated from Northeastern where he was the team’s bullpen catcher — taking the walk-on approach at a D-1 school that his father did at Pitt. Francesca, the state’s Division III softball athlete of the year as a junior, just completed her freshman season playing at Duke. A defenseman in hockey at Austin Prep, she also was named New England’s girls high school player of the year.
Then there’s Sal.
He earned 12 letters at Lexington High School and was a two-time captain of the football, baseball and hockey teams. As a senior quarterback, he combined for 50 touchdowns passing and rushing and was named Gatorade’s football player of the year in Massachusetts.
Sal went undrafted out of high school, but his play against mostly college competition in the Futures summer league attracted pro scouts who inquired about signing Frelick as a free agent.
“That might have been the first sense,” Jeff Frelick said when asked when he thought a pro baseball career would be possible for his son. “He didn’t have that exposure of playing in showcase events. He’d rather play football or hockey, and we thought it was best for him to compete year-round.”
Sal emerged as a top prospect in the summer after a covid-shortened 2020 college season, and his stock increased as a junior when he batted .359 with 17 doubles, two triples, six homers and 27 RBIs in 48 games. He was named ACC defensive player of the year and became the first player in BC history to win a Gold Glove.
One of Sal’s home runs came May 8 at Pitt with his grandfather, father and a contingent of South Greensburg supporters, former coaches and teammates in attendance.
Jeff Frelick, though, will more likely tell you that Boston College lost two of the three games in the series, including the one in which Sal homered.
“Hit the ball hard, be a good teammate and help your team win,” he said. “Focus on those three things and you’ll do fine.”
That approach doesn’t surprise those who grew up with Frelick playing on the fields and basketball courts in South Greensburg.
“Everything we did was with the expectation that we were going to win,” said Zilli, who is the godfather to Nico. “It goes back to the Bulldogs. We were pushed beyond what we believed we could do and thought maybe there aren’t limits to what we could do. It was the understanding that if you work hard and take of the details, you can be successful. That has been Jeff all the way through.”
Joe Rutter is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Joe by email at jrutter@triblive.com or via Twitter .