A pitcher from the Tigers past appeared this week, not in person, but in a memory vault where good and bad moments are stored.
The pitcher was Kenny Baugh, who the Tigers snagged with their first-round pick, 11th overall, in the 2001 MLB Draft.
Baugh was a right-handed ace from Rice University finishing a 2001 senior year in which he worked 141.1 innings in 22 games. In a June game against Nebraska, he threw 171 pitches.
The Tigers signed him and weren’t about to shelve him, even after a spring so strenuous. He tossed another 64.1 innings, combined, at Single-A West Michigan and Double-A Erie. Add it all up. Baugh, who was 22, racked-up 205.2 innings in a single 2001 season.
You might know the rest of this story, which in a baseball context is tragic. Baugh had surgery the following spring for a torn labrum. He never regained his old fire. He never pitched in the big leagues.
Baseball Prospectus wrote in the spring of 2002: “Kenny Baugh could almost serve as a poster child for pitcher abuse these days.”
This sad slice of history surfaced last week as the Tigers continued to groom their 2021 draft picks at Lakeland, Florida, where the TigerTown minor-league complex is situated.
Not one of the 12 pitchers the Tigers last month drafted has yet pitched in a single minor-league game.
I had attributed this, largely, to how science began 20 or so years ago to teach MLB front offices a brutal lesson about pitching and the human body: that innings and pitch-counts absolutely had to be capped. Play with fire, as the Tigers did with Baugh in 2001, and you can lose an irreplaceable resource, as well as kill a man’s career and dream.
But it’s not that simple, this care the Tigers — and all clubs — are showing their 2021 draft picks.
It has more to do with July’s draft date — a month later than the annual June drafts that were always a staple.
Rob Manfred, the MLB commissioner, decided this year’s draft would be a neat little headliner to begin All-Star week. He probably had enough going as it was, with the Futures Game (where baseball’s hotshot prospects are showcased) already set for its All-Star Sunday tradition, followed by the Home Run Derby on Tuesday.
Manfred, though, wanted more glamor. So, the draft was moved, and things promptly got tougher for the people who drive big-league baseball’s talent. Scouts who typically are busy signing drafted guys in June before the sleuths hit the Cape Cod League and showcase tournaments in July were set back a big, big month bird-dogging 2022’s top talent.
Worse, perhaps — and this is where the Tigers got nailed — was how July’s draft led to so many prep and college kids losing at least a half-season of development.
A prep prize like Jackson Jobe, the Tigers’ first pick, last pitched in a game in mid-May. That’s a two-month layoff between his last start and the date he showed u p at Lakeland. You can’t plug him into a game, not yet, even after a few weeks of conditioning.
What amounts to a second spring training — concentrated on re-building bodies, arms, strength, stamina — has been the reality for all of the dozen pitchers the Tigers drafted in June.
Another factor, a big one: Last year’s COVID invasion canceled farm seasons that chopped deeply into endurance for pitchers and position players. It threatened, most critically, how arms are being treated in 2021, which is doubly gently.
Some of this tender treatment will be changing soon.
The Tigers aren’t saying anything — just yet — but Jobe, who threw only 51 innings this spring, probably will be pitching in a game on the rookie-league lots as early as this month.
Others, a few others, might also get a taste of rookie ball or a stint with the Lakeland Flying Tigers, the low-A team that works a few hundred yards away at Marchant Stadium.
But note that 11 of the 12 pitchers grabbed last month were college pitchers. And unless their workloads were on the trim side, it’s doubtful they’ll be throwing many, if any, game innings in the farm calendar’s final six weeks.
The pandemic’s punch, presumably, has begun to ease. By next year, 2021’s drafted players should roll into spring camp and have something approximating a regular spring rehearsal for what should be a stable minor-league schedule.
But what won’t go away, unless Manfred’s office listens hard to his front offices and scouting/developmental chiefs, is the setback MLB teams can regularly expect if the draft sticks in July.
Manfred needs to have a conversation with himself, and preferably with others.
Dismiss, first, thoughts that 30 teams are getting some indispensable elixir from a Sunday-through-Tuesday draft during an already congested All-Star week. That’s over-assessing a draft that probably benefits from June’s lighter agenda and an audience that isn’t dealing with July’s travel and vacation disruptions.
The bigger issue is that a July date, for sure, is compromising the very kids and personnel charged with making the draft the first-year foundation for a team’s roster.
Manfred doesn’t need it. Baseball doesn’t need it. Not in July. The kids being handled this month with excessive care, on those back lots at TigerTown, aren’t being helped by a July draft any more than they were somehow boosted by last year’s COVID-canceled year.
It’s taken a toll, both factors, and Manfred doesn’t need to own one of them.
It’s suspected that he’ll hear these very points, loudly, at this autumn’s General Manager Meetings, and if nothing happens there, he’ll get an earful afterward at the owners confab.
Unless he’s overly stubborn, or too deeply obsessed with pride of ownership, he might heed what the guys in charge will tell him: Get rid of that July draft. Return to that June date, which June worked as well as anything in baseball is allowed to work for scouts and coaches and players involved in an impossible game.
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and former Detroit News sports reporter.