Brewster manager Jamie Shevchik pondered if Nick Dumesnil was legit.

One spring evening, Shevchik was up at 1 a.m. EST, looking for any college games still on ESPN+. Sure enough, there was one: a Western Athletic Conference matchup featuring Cal Baptist. Earlier in the week, Shevchik had discussed with CBU head coach Gary Adcock the possibility of Dumesnil, the Lancers’ star outfielder, joining the Whitecaps this summer.

Dumesnil had exceptional stats, but Shevchik was unsure if he was just a product of his environment — an advanced offensive player in a high-scoring, lesser-known conference. For the first time, Shevchik saw the outfielder with his own two eyes in live-game action, and Dumesnil didn’t disappoint.

“I think he homered and doubled in that game,” Shevchik said. “Finally, I'm like, ‘If I don't take this kid, somebody else will and we're gonna watch (him) do damage against us.’”

The Whitecaps signed Dumesnil and, though he started slow in the Cape Cod Baseball League, he’s been on a tear, becoming a focal point of the Brewster offense that ranks third in the league in OPS with .734. He has a team-leading 21 hits while posting an impressive .296/.333/.826 slash line.

Similar to his two seasons with the Lancers, where he slashed .357/.434/1.095, Dumesnil is proving daily in the CCBL that he’s the real deal. He’s on pace to be the next great WAC product when he becomes eligible for the MLB Draft in 2025.

“Obviously, I come from a little bit of a smaller school, smaller conference than some of these guys,” Dumesnil said. “But I feel like that drives my game more to show that I’m a really good player and can keep up with everyone, if not exceed them.”

Dumesnil’s emergence into a top prospect began with early morning work at Huntington Beach High School in Southern California.

The neighboring housing complex complained to the school, saying players were hitting in the batting cage in the middle of the night, making loud noises with the crack of the bat while music blared. At first, Huntington Beach's head baseball coach Benji Medure didn’t believe the claim. But when he asked his team, Dumesnil fessed up.

Medure gave the players the code to the batting cage and clubhouse but expected them to use it in the evenings — not at 5 a.m. when Dumesnil and a few of his teammates had been entering the batting cage and hopping the 10-foot fence onto the track, perfecting their swings and quickening their sprints.

The work paid off when Dumesnil earned an offer to play Division I baseball at Cal Baptist. It was his first offer and one that made sense as the university is less than 50 miles from Huntington Beach. But Dumesnil went under the radar.

“We don't remember beating many people, if anybody, when we were recruiting him,” Adcock said. “I think we saw something in him before other people did.”

Adcock and his staff were out recruiting in Irvine, California, when they noticed Dumesnil’s athleticism. He was a strong, quick player but “stiff” as Adcock described him, not fully living up to the player the CBU head coach thought he could one day become. With more development and direction, he could blossom into a star.

At CBU, Dumesnil’s career started similarly to his time in Brewster: slow. As Dumesnil put it, his performance in the fall of his freshman season was “really, really bad.”

After a rough fall, Dumesnil rarely touched the field when the Lancers got into their spring season. He was mostly used as a defensive replacement and pinch runner and to not waste a year of eligibility, he contemplated redshirting midway through the season.

For the Whitecaps, Dumesnil began in comparable fashion: a 3-for-27 slump to start the season. Primarily in his approach, Dumesnil wasn’t himself.

“Instead of trying to be the player I was, I was just trying to hit singles and get a hot start going,” Dumesnil said. “Instead of just going up there and executing my original plan which is to smoke balls and hit homers.”

When Dumesnil was on the cusp of a redshirt decision a year earlier, he earned an opportunity to play more often as multiple CBU outfielders went down with injuries. Though he didn’t play much early on, Dumesnil continued to work daily throughout the year, not wasting the season if he happened to not redshirt. Once he had his shot, he wasn’t going to waste it.

In his first start against UC Riverside, Dumesnil reached three times, including a two-run double, and stole three bases. The next game, against UNLV, he hit another double. Though he started the season without an impactful role, he ended it as one of the Lancers’ most potent threats, hitting .333 and reaching base 40% of the time.

“It became very clear that he had caught up with the speed of the game,” CBU assistant coach Andrew Brasington said of Dumesnil. “He understood what was going on, and really the rest is history. He took off with his opportunity.”

Following a strong end to his freshman year and a successful summer playing for the Victoria HarbourCats of the West Coast League, Dumesnil’s game leveled up in his sophomore season.

Zero home runs in 2023 turned into 19 a year later. His slugging percentage led the league at .702 and his batting average moved up .029 points from the previous season, reaching .362.

No series proved Dumesnil’s ability more than a mid-April weekend series against Abilene Christian. In the three-game set, he totaled seven hits and six RBI, leading Cal Baptist to a series win.

“I think it was about halfway through, he kind of realized that he was one of, if not the best, player on the field at all times,” Adcock said. “Once he figured that out from a mental standpoint, he was the best player on the field the rest of the season.”

In the end, Dumesnil’s ascension resulted in First Team All-WAC recognition, one of four underclassmen to make the list. And following a similar pattern to his collegiate career, Dumesnil made adjustments in the Cape League and quickly broke out in a big way.

With the Whitecaps on a three-game losing streak and knotted at 3-3 with the Bourne Braves on June 25, Dumesnil delivered with an eighth-inning solo blast, spearheading an eventual 6-3 win.

The late-game heroics have continued since. A first-pitch-swinging two-RBI double in the bottom of the seventh on Sunday tied the game at 3 with Orleans. A few pitches later he used his speed to score the eventual game-winner on a single by Kaeden Kent.

From June 25 to July 7, he took off, totaling a .424 batting average and 252 OPS+ while having an average exit velocity of 82.5 mph, as calculated by Whitecaps Baseball Operations intern Anthony Marotta.

Through game-winners or an aggressive free-swinging approach, Dumesnil’s impact on the Whitecaps hasn’t gone unnoticed and he’s become the latest example of a CBU player making his mark in Brewster.

In 2015, Tyson Miller joined the Whitecaps after his sophomore season with the Lancers. In five outings, he posted a 1.44 ERA, propelling him into a fourth-round pick in 2016. Now, Miller is helping to fortify the Chicago Cubs bullpen.

Chad Castillo, also from CBU, posted a .333 average in 16 games for Brewster in the summer of 2021, helping the Whitecaps to a CCBL championship. The following year, Castillo went in the ninth round of the draft to the Philadelphia Phillies, where he currently plays in Triple-A.

The relationship between CBU and Brewster has strong precedent, and Adcock believes Dumesnil could be the best yet.

“One of the goals for him that I've tried to relay to him is to be the highest-drafted player in the history of CBU baseball,” Adcock said. “Currently, that's the fourth round with Miller. I think a good goal is to surpass that and I think he's capable of it.”

Outside of Cal Baptist, there have been other successful players from the Western Athletic Conference. Most recently, Nick Gonzales and Jacob Wilson combined stellar collegiate totals with an impressive performance on the Cape into first-round status.

However, with success in a smaller conference comes the opportunity to leapfrog it into financial gain. Many players in today’s landscape of college baseball would look to the transfer portal to get a nice payday. Not Dumesnil. The portal opened on June 3 and closed on July 2, but Dumesnil never entered.

“I love it at CBU, and I'm loyal to them. They made me the player that I am today,” Dumesnil said.

Despite his unheralded status out of high school, Dumesnil’s performance on the Cape is making waves in the baseball world. During a July 3 Whitecaps’ team meeting, with the squad amid a rough stretch, Shevchik says he asked the team if anyone had heard of Dumesnil before this summer. Nobody had.

Everyone knows now, and most of the league does too. He’s proving daily that he’s the real deal and the next great WAC product rather than a mere product of his environment.

“The kid wants to be successful. He understands where he's at and the opportunity is in front of him. And I feel like he doesn't want to lose, he's gonna do everything in his power not to,” Shevchik said.

Photo credit: Avery Raimondo