Jeff Messer got the word from a pretty reliable source.

The Slippery Rock University baseball coach was watching one of his players, Matt Adams, in action for the Pittsfield (Maine) Dukes in a collegiate summer baseball league.

A left-handed hitter, Adams hit a 400-foot home run to the opposite field, sailing the ball into some trees beyond the left field fence.

“That guy is going to be in the major leagues someday,” the source said to Messer upon witnessing the blast.

The source? Pittsfield Dukes owner Dan Duquette, who is also general manager of the Baltimore Orioles.

“When Matt got called up by St. Louis, Dan called me right away to give me the news,” Messer said of his good friend. “I’ll never forget that day.”

Nor should he.

Adams became the first SRU baseball player to ever reach the major leagues. A number of others had been drafted by big league organizations, but never got there.

Now that Adams has established himself as an every-day first baseman with the Cardinals, SRU has two former athletes as regulars in the two biggest professional sports leagues in this country.

Seneca Valley and SRU graduate Brandon Fusco has been a starting guard for the Minnesota Vikings for three years and will be returning to action this season after suffering a torn pectoral muscle early in the 2014 campaign.

Adams and Fusco have followed similar paths, actually. Neither was highly recruited out of high school.

Adams was a catcher at Class AA Philipsburg-Osceola High School and gained interest from Pitt, which later backed off him. Fusco was a 240-pound lineman in high school who was considered too small for any major college consideration.

So, both came to The Rock.

Adams wound up hitting .495 as a junior, named NCAA Division II Player of the Year and gets drafted by the Cardinals in the 23rd round.

Fusco wound up hitting the weight room, grows into a 6-foot-4, 310-pound center who winds up winning the Gene Upshaw Award as the best lineman in all of Division II. He gets drafted in the sixth round by Minnesota. Moral of the story?

In terms of formulating a pro sports career, it doesn’t really matter where you go.

True, a starting football player at Ohio State or Penn State may get more opportunities in the NFL as opposed to someone from Slippery Rock or Clarion.

But it’s not about the opportunity. It’s what you do with it.

Talent is a necessity to make it in the pros in any sport. Still, it takes more than that.

Tireless work ethic and demands on oneself to improve come to mind.Adams said he never stops to wonder how a guy from SRU got to the majors.

“If I did, I would lose my edge in improving as a player,” he said.

Fusco is working on intensifying his conditioning to make his body stronger.

Hmm ... these guys may stick around for a while.

John Enrietto is sports editor of the Butler Eagle