What is it about baseball and country music? Is there a connection? Are they related but were separated at birth?

Kenny Chesney and Scotty McCreery pitched for their high school teams. Charley Pride played in the Negro Leagues and the minor leagues and has the distinction of being traded, along with a teammate, to the Burrough Barons for a team bus. Garth Brooks even made it to spring training with two major league teams in the late 1990s and returned in ’04 to spring training for the Mets, when he got his first and only hit in his final at-bat.

Now, 31-year-old former Menard pitcher Alex Smith of Alexandria is living in a Nashville suburb and singing country music songs on weekends at Blake Shelton’s restaurant, Ole Red. He’s also writing country songs with 45-year-old Barry Zito, who pitched 15 years in the big leagues with the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s.

The more timely news about Smith for Rapides Parish Journal readers is that he will be the grand marshal of the Mardi Gras parade in Alexandria on Sunday. If he throws you some beads or a trinket, don’t worry, you won’t need a glove. His “heat” was more of a simmer than a sizzle, which is why he didn’t pursue the sport beyond high school, where he went 10-1 and fashioned an earned run average of just under 2.00 as a 6-foot-3, 183-pound senior in 2011. He was the senior ace for an Eagles team that advanced to the Class 2A state quarterfinals.

For our FaceTime interview, he wore an Alexandria Aces T-shirt in homage to the baseball team that in his younger life won multiple independent minor league championships using Bringhurst Field as its home ballpark.

Musical genes run in his family. His paternal grandparents sang country and gospel music for a group several decades ago in the Jonesboro area, and his father, H.B., played for the “Dots” band when Alex was a youth, and he’s still releasing new music and can be heard on a few of Alex’s songs.

Curiously, though, Alex shied away from singing or playing the guitar as a kid, even though his dad had several guitars around the house. The turning point was playing a video game called “Guitar Hero” when he was a young teen. He had such fun with it, he wondered what it’d be like to play a real guitar. He started playing, honed his skills and started playing for school Masses as a junior at Menard, and by his senior year he was singing, too.

As a student at ULL, he noticed some friends who were making money playing music at bars in Lafayette, Meanwhile, he got a break when, while playing a gig at a pool party at his apartment complex, the manager of a local daiquiri shop spotted him and offered to let him play a one-hour show there. Smith packed the house and, by popular demand, extended his show to three hours.

Soon he was playing at all sorts of places around Lafayette. He got his degree in hospitality management in 2015, and moved to Music City, immersing himself in co-writing, recording and performing. He said he has been taking vocal lessons for a couple of years to improve his singing skills, and his coach told him he’d like for him to eventually get to where “it’s like pitching in the 90 mph range without thinking about it.” With a smile, he noted, “I’m not there yet.”

He said he has had some setbacks and rejections over the years but he shrugged them off as “knocks in the head” that he tries to learn from.

Nonetheless, Smith has hit a good enough stride to have been asked to perform in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade last November, and some popular songs of his being tracked on Spotify are “Good Guy,” “Fear of Missing Out,” “Bootshake,” “A Few Beers Ago,” and “Rhythm of the Rain.”

In fact, he and his fiancé, Kaylor, were shopping in Kroger on a recent visit to Alexandria and barely noticed some music playing faintly in the background, and then Kaylor said, “Listen! That’s your song.” It was “Bootshake.”

Alex Smith, who once answered to the nickname Big Al, will be back in “the Big A” Sunday to lead the parade, and you can shout at the former pitcher, “Throw me something, Mister.”

‘I’m so honored to be getting that position,” he said. “I’m very flattered to even fall into that line (of acclaimed previous grand marshals). I hope I can be an inspiration to others.”