This story was excerpted from Jason Beck’s Tigers Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
Jackson Jobe couldn’t help but shake his head and wonder if hitters had an idea what was coming after giving up three home runs in his return to High-A West Michigan on Saturday, but he’s over it. After experiencing the buzz of a big crowd again and seeing hitters flail at his sliders for five otherwise solid innings, he can’t wait to see what’s next.
He missed that buzz while rehabbing in Lakeland for much of the summer. It took a case of lumbar spine inflammation for the former first-round pick to realize how much he loves baseball and competing in front of a packed house like the Whitecaps had Saturday at LMCU Ballpark.
“Watching everybody else play, watching these games, it was tough,” Jobe said on Sunday, his 21st birthday. “I feel like everything happened so fast. The last thing I expected was to come into Spring Training and break my back. It was tough. I was definitely frustrated, maybe mad at myself, trying to think what I could’ve done better to prevent something like that, but I knew something good was going to come out of it. It was hard, and I learned a lot from it. It’s going to make the good times even better.”
That says a lot. After working hard in the relative isolation of Lakeland to get back to this point, essentially where he’d left off at the end of last season, he has learned to take positives out of the toughest situations.
“Just my knowledge of pitching, my warmup routine, mechanics, what my focuses are, things like that, I definitely have a good base now of what I feel makes me a good pitcher,” he said. “I think that will be a big part of being consistent, keeping my command through the valleys and peaks throughout the season. I learned a ton.”
He has a stretching and core routine before he throws each day, activating key muscles. His first few warmup tosses each inning are more like power throws off the front of the mound, a routine he picked up from fellow Tigers prospect Ty Madden last year as a way to get his body energized.
He learned about pitch design and how that high-spin slider moves. What was a real bender of a pitch is now a little harder, a little tighter, and a little tougher for hitters to pick up. It accounted for most of his nine strikeouts Saturday.
“I’m throwing the slider mid-80s, where it was low 80s earlier when it was all loopy,” he said. “I’ve got a little cutter now, too, to help that out, low 90s. That’s a big part of my arsenal, a change from last year.”
The stuff was better than the results on Saturday. In addition to the harder slider, his fastball topped out at 97 mph and sat consistently in the mid-90s. One hitter Saturday ambushed a first-pitch heater for a home run. Another was ready for an 0-2 fastball right on the edge. The other drive to right came off a 1-0 changeup out of the strike zone.
He settled down from there and retired his final six batters, three by strikeout. He kept pounding the strike zone throughout. He left with a no-decision, but his strong finish to a five-inning performance helped keep West Michigan in position for a comeback victory.
“His powerful arsenal was there,” Whitecaps manager Brayan Pena said. “After they hit the second homer, he went back and made some adjustments. You can see he started using his offspeed better, which was great to see. He didn’t shy away, he was still attacking, but he made adjustments.”
Said Jobe: “It felt like I was pitching well, making good pitches and they were putting some good swings on them, so I didn’t want to get too in my head, overthinking things. Just wanted to keep attacking.”
By getting back to West Michigan now, arguably ahead of expectations, Jobe has more than a month in the season to pick up the learning process from where he ended last year. Just as big, he has a chance to get into more big-game atmospheres and enjoy it.
“It was a lot of fun,” Jobe said.