Grayson Rodriguez has always been a special pitching prospect. His injury shows the pitfalls even the best can struggle to avoid.
The Orioles are well-aware of the risks associated with developing young pitchers, and a lat strain for baseball's most promising is a major hit to their plans.
Some time last summer, my family had Saturday afternoon plans with friends outside DC. The wheels started turning, producing a convoluted plan that only made sense to a person in a particular mind frame.
We could, the person in that frame of mind posited, take two cars to the park-and-ride at the 495 interchange. Then, that person would get in the family car for the rest of the journey, enjoy the plans he committed to on his weekend off, and get his car at the lot on the way back. That person’s wife would bring the baby home, and that person would go to Bowie.
I was that person, and the particular mind frame I was in came from the fact that it had been too long since I’d seen Grayson Rodriguez pitch.
Once that plan was abandoned on the advice that it was completely unreasonable, I was asked why it mattered so much. The answer then is the answer now.
Grayson Rodriguez is a special pitching prospect, the kind one makes a point to see whenever possible as a writer, fan, or neutral. And on the occasion of a lat strain that postpones his imminent major league debut for a while if not until next season, every bit of that phrase – special pitching prospect – is worth considering.
Why is he special? So many reasons, but for my money, all the reasons why he’s talented are more meaningful than the talent itself.
The stories of his rise to the first round weren’t apocryphal, but certainly were the kind that felt too tidy to actually be true. They were. He drove hours each way across Texas before his senior season to remake his body and his pitch mix into that of a top prep pitcher, then became one – and everyone that was a part of it marveled at how he’d accomplished that.
Once he signed with the Orioles and got into the new pitching program with Chris Holt and his longtime pitching coach Justin Ramsey, he absolutely took off, showing that aptitude for improvement wasn’t temporary and that he wasn’t settling for good enough.
And last summer, when the whole baseball world came together to anoint him the most promising pitcher in the minors, he remained driven not so much to prove them right as to prove wrong everyone who ever doubted that would be the case when he was in high school and drafted 11th overall by the Orioles.
He’s also, and now will remain for much longer than he should have, a pitching prospect. And boy, is that loaded. Pitching a baseball is not a natural movement, and some of the natural consequences on one’s body from doing that as often as pitchers do are better than others.
While I wouldn’t consider a lat strain to be on the mild side of that scale, however many years it takes to become qualified to speak on the severity of your average lat strain for a pitcher, that’s how many years short of said qualification I am.
Likewise, whatever context is required to know just how star-crossed the Orioles are when it comes to delivering promising pitching prospects to Camden Yards as front-end big league starters, I know it extends far beyond my decade in town.
All I’ve endeavored to do these last few years is learn as much about the Orioles’ process and plans here as I can, and I know how much Rodriguez meant to them. He and DL Hall gave them clearance, essentially, to not spend much draft capital on pitchers – so sure the Orioles were of them being in the big leagues anchoring their rotation for years to come.
They know they’re light on rotation pieces, but also know they have Rodriguez, so the rest could be figured out down the line. He was going to be the crown jewel of their pitching program, the ace atop their rotation. He very well still might be.
But by virtue of being a pitching prospect and not yet any of those things at the major league level, all the risks carried by pitching prospects still applied.
There’s a reason the phrase “There’s no such thing as a pitching prospect” exists. The best minor league pitchers can walk off the mound like Rodriguez did last night and never be the same way again, just like the most uninspiring minor league pitchers can make a few offseason improvements and become John Means, All-Star. Health, development curves, and any number of variables make it impossible to figure.
The Orioles know this, and not just in the sense that they knew the risk of wasting bullets with someone like Rodriguez a year ago. They know it because given the choice between drafting a pitcher with a high pick and a hitter, they almost always choose the more predictable range of outcomes that come with selecting a hitter. If they believed there was any guarantee that talented 21-year-old arms blossomed into top big league starters, they would have a lot more of them.
Instead, they basically have Rodriguez and Hall, the sparkling appliances that came with the house and that they kept while gutting and remodeling the kitchen. Pitching prospects rise and they fall, and in many cases rise again, even if it’s not to the same levels people expected. This isn’t a death sentence, even if it’s devastating in the short-term and concerning in the long run.
Nothing Mike Elias said Thursday indicates Rodriguez won’t be everything the Orioles dreamed he’d be once he’s healthy, or that he won’t be healthy again this season. They took great pains to ensure he was a top pitcher in their organization for a long time, both in how they managed his build-up this spring and the long-term ramifications of the timing at this stage in the summer.
It could have been as soon as next week that he debuted. If this issue hadn’t cropped up, it would have been shameful if it weren’t, because as we covered in this space quite recently, there was nothing left for the top pitching prospect in baseball to prove.
Hand up, I might have been wrong on that. He had an unprecedented amount of success in his minor league career, endured no hiccups as he climbed the levels, and satisfied all the developmental goals a pitching prospect could have in order to ensure a seamless transition to the big leagues. I still believe that part to be true.
But before he could finally achieve that transition, he had to prove that even the most special pitching prospects around are still pitching prospects. They’re to be enjoyed at every opportunity, because even those with a wide array of dazzling pitches need just one to expose how fragile the idea of a pitching prospect can be.