By BAKER ELLIS / Sports Editor

Oak Mountain High School alum David Dahl continues to climb through the minor league baseball ranks, and recently got a piece of the national spotlight. Dahl, who graduated from Oak Mountain in 2012 and was drafted by the Colorado Rockies with the 10^th overall pick in the 2012 draft, participated in the 2016 Futures Game as part of MLB All-Star weekend.

Dahl has had an impressive minor league season to date, and was recently promoted from the AA Hartford Yard Goats to the AAA Albuquerque Isotopes. With the move, Dahl is now one level away from breaking into the MLB. In his first six games since making the transition to the AAA ranks, Dahl has notched 13 hits on 26 at-bats, including three doubles and two home runs, and has five RBI as well.

This has all happened in the wake of a scary incident in late May of 2015, when Dahl suffered a lacerated spleen while playing center field for the New Britain Rock Cats. A lacerated spleen can cause potentially life-threatening internal bleeding, and Dahl missed the remainder of the 2015 season recovering from the injury.

In this, his fifth season in professional baseball, Dahl has broken into the AAA ranks for the first time. In his first 76 games of the year with Hartford, Dahl posted a .278 batting average, had 13 home runs and drove in 45 runs before getting called up.

The Futures Game, which has taken place every year since 1999, matches a team of minor league baseball prospects from the United States and a team of minor league prospects from around the rest of the world, and is played as a part of the Major League Baseball All-Star Game festivities. It is a chance for the top minor league talent in the world to perform for an international audience.

Dahl went 0-for-2 in the Futures Game and was credited with an outfield assist, as his team, the US Futures, lost to the World Futures 11-3 after taking a 3-2 lead heading into the eighth inning.