Lakeland, Fla. — If you just look at the numbers, you might question why the Tigers bothered to take right-handed pitcher Nick Kuzia in the minor league Rule 5 draft last December.
Signed by the San Diego Padres as an undrafted free agent out of UMass-Lowell in 2017, he’s banged around as kind of an organizational floater, finally reaching Triple A last season. In four minor league seasons, he’s posted an ERA over 4.0 and a WHIP just under 1.4.
The Tigers, smartly, looked deeper. There was something decidedly different about him last season, coming back after the sitting out the 2020 pandemic year. His strikeout rate per nine innings jumped from 9.3 in 2019 (pitching against Low-A, High-A and Double-A hitters) to 12.1 last year (facing Double-A and Triple-A hitters).
He struck out 11 of the 27 batters he faced in his six-game audition in Triple A.
“I surprised myself with that,” Kuzia said Tuesday in a phone interview.
He ended up punching out 71 hitters in 52.2 innings. Eye-popping. The Tigers kept digging. His primary strikeout pitch was a slow, sweeping slider. In past seasons, Kuzia was pairing the slider with a low-90s four-seam fastball or sinker.
Last year, those fastballs were averaging close to 94 mph and he was hitting 97 in games. Hitters had to honor the heater, which made both the slider and his third pitch, a change-up, more effective.
“Each year since I’ve been in pro ball, my velocity has gone up almost exactly 1 mph each year,” he said. “When I went home for COVID in 2020, I was throwing in the backyard of a teammate, spent the entire off-season training there.”
Wait. You expected him to say he spent a month at Driveline Baseball or one of the other pitching development facilities around the country. But no. This is how it’s always been for Kuzia, taking performance and training tips from anywhere and everywhere.
Former No. 1 pick of the Cardinals (2010) and Kuzia’s teammate at High-A Lake Elsinore in 2019 Seth Blair had a mound built in the backyard of his home in Arizona. That’s where Kuzia spent most of the spring and summer of 2020.
When he wasn’t invited to the Padres alternate site, he went back home to Massachusetts and worked with coach John DeRouin at Hop’s Athletic Performance facility in Coventry, Rhode Island.
“Each year it’s something different,” he said. “My first offseason I kept my college throwing program. I did a Driveline remote training program one year. I worked out with Seth and some other guys, then at Hop’s. I try to learn from everybody and just apply it to myself.”
Kuzia was a skinny 190 pounds when he entered pro ball. Within a couple of years, he was over 200 and that’s when his velocity started to tick up. He’s developed a more structured off-season throwing program and then, with DeRouin, he tweaked his mechanics and improved the fluidity of his delivery.
“I really hope that translates into more velocity,” he said. “Just trying to put it all together and add to the trend that I have going.”
How intriguing is that? He’s 6-4, 210 pounds, just turned 26 last week and, including three seasons at UMass-Lowell, he’s only thrown 366 innings. This is still a relatively fresh lump of clay here, which, undoubtedly, the Tigers’ new player development staff, especially new director of pitching Gabe Ribas, can’t wait to start molding.
“Both Ryan Darko (vice president of player development) and Gabe Ribas have been great,” Kuzia said. “I thought I was progressing in the Padres organization a decent amount. I got up to Triple A at the end of the year after I had a decent season in Double-A.
“But when I got Rule 5’d, I was more than happy to be with an organization that, in talking to people in the organization, expressed an interest and wanted to get to work with me. Not that I wasn’t with the Padres, but I feel like it’s been voiced a little bit more here.”
Kuzia reported to minor-league minicamp here Tuesday and, along with other pitchers and catchers, will begin workouts Wednesday. Unlike the big-league Rule 5 draft, the Tigers don’t have to keep Kuzia on the big-league roster. But there will be a lot of eyes on him.
Of concern are his walk rate (4.6 per nine innings last season) and finding a more consistent weapon against left-handed hitters (.268/.366/.563 off him last season, including all five of the home runs he allowed).
The walks, at least partially, are a byproduct of the extreme movement on his pitches, especially the slider and change-up. In that sense, he’s a bit like a young version of Tigers’ injured starter Spencer Turnbull — the stuff is hard to harness, but it’s lethal when you do.
“Walks will always be something I work to minimize,” he said. “The walk rate is huge, but it’s also about getting ahead, not falling behind. I get in trouble when I try to be too fine. Everything for me now is just, throw it down the middle and let the movement do what it does.
“Just throw it down the middle and throw it as hard as I can.”
His issues with lefties were more mental. He didn’t trust himself to throw his best pitch, the slider.
“At one point, I made a bet with one of my teammates,” he said. “I said, ‘You give me $10 if I throw all sliders to this lefty and if I don’t throw all sliders I will give you $5 back.’ I forced myself to only throw sliders to left-handed batters just to get over that mental block.”
The Tigers, no doubt, will work to improve his change-up, which would probably be a better pitch against most lefties, or maybe help him develop a cutter. Bottom line, there is a lot to work with here. He made eight saves last season, the first time he was ever used as a closer. He also had 11 multiple-inning outings.
“I don’t know what my role is going to be,” he said. “It’s not like if I’m not pitching at the back end I’m going to go, ‘What am I don’t here?’ I didn’t start out as a closer. I was a guy who floated around, going here and then a week later going somewhere else. Kind of a fill-in guy. Whenever you hear your name called, you go pitch.
“Last year I found a role as more of a back-end guy and it was a good opportunity for me to get that experience. I enjoyed it. But I enjoy pitching in general. First inning, last inning, I don’t care. I just want to pitch.”
chris.mccosky@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @cmccosky