Orioles prospect Creed Willems gives off serious Kenny Powers vibes. But it's his glasses that have made the difference at Delmarva.
Creed Willems is one of the more popular players in the Orioles system on and off the field. He's working hard for production to match that.
Stout but strong with a brown, curly mullet and Oakleys, Creed Willems hasn’t been able to go far on a baseball field since joining Delmarva last month without hearing the Kenny Powers calls. He embraces it, of course — and wouldn’t lean into the look the way he does if that wasn’t the case.
His omnipresent sense of humor helps fuel the comparisons. So does the joy he brings to the game. One feature that’s not part of that Kenny Powers mystique, but has gone a long way toward getting the Orioles’ million-dollar catcher back on track after a tough start at Delmarva? Eye glasses.
Willems struggled badly upon joining the Shorebirds, collecting two singles and two walks with 14 strikeouts in his first 44 plate appearances. He’d never worn glasses on the field before — only in class in high school — but found them to be a perfect solution to jump-start his pro career.
“First two weeks, I didn’t wear them when I got up here and I was kind of struggling seeing a little bit,” Willems told me this week. “I said, ‘I’m going to try and wear them and see how it goes.’ The first night I wore them, I hit a couple balls hard and had some really good at-bats, and I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to keep wearing them.’ Ever since I started wearing them, I feel like it’s a little easier to see the ball, easier to pick up spin. … They’ve definitely helped the hitting come along a little bit — better swing decisions and all that stuff.”
After those first 12 games, around when Willems decided to go with the glasses during games, he has a .784 OPS with six extra-base hits and 13 strikeouts in 64 plate appearances.
To fully credit his glasses, however, discounts how Willems has tackled the steep jump from the complex league to the Carolina League in the face of the most significant on-field struggles of his life, the pressures that come with a $1 million signing bonus, catching a new staff — and being a magnet for fan attention everywhere he plays.
“He’s managing a lot of different things, and he’s doing a good job,” hitting coach Brink Ambler said.
Signed from a TCU commitment out of Aledo, Texas last summer as an eighth-round pick, Willems attracted the Orioles for his talent and leadership potential. He was a star back home, and was challenged in pro ball in a way high school baseball never provided, both last summer in the complex league and early on at Delmarva.
“It’s not like you’re going out there facing a D-1 arm every night in high school, much less a professional arm,” Willems said. “So, you have a bunch of success, and then I come out here and I had a rough year in the FCL, the couple weeks I was down there last year. Then … came up here, and hitting was a little bit of a rough start. There were times that I wasn’t even hitting the ball, times that I was just missing it, and then I hit one that was a really good ball but it went right to somebody. That’s when it got frustrating.”
To Ambler, it was just as much the quality of pitchers Willems was seeing on the jump from Florida — an increasingly large talent gap now after the elimination of short-season ball — as it was how he was being attacked. Willems has gone from being pitched around as an amateur to having his weaknesses attacked and at times exposed as a pro, requiring a refinement of his approach and plan at the plate on the fly.
“They’re challenging him with mixing sides of the plate, mixing pitch speeds, throwing a lot less fastballs, right?,” Ambler said. “And that’s something that he and I have talked about a good bit. It can be frustrated when guys don’t throw us fastballs, because he’s a really good fastball hitter. It’s a sign of respect, and from the very first week he’s been in this league, guys have realized this is a really good fastball hitter so they’re really starting to challenge him with off-speed. Big credit to him, he’s made some approach adjustments, and he’s been working on being able to have a plan that allows him to have success against non-fastball pitches too. It’s been a period of growth.”
Willems deadpanned that he learned in that growth period that he’s capable of hitting the ball the other way, something he attributed to his quick hands and fast bat, which allowed him to even pull middle-and-out pitches in high school. With pitchers capable of locating a hard fastball that moves plus a secondary weapon, Willems has adjusted to the mindset “that I’m going to try to hit the fastball to the left-center gap so that offspeed, I’m able to pull into the right-center gap,” he said.
“I think being able to do that and kind of adapt to that mindset has helped me excel and be more consistent at the plate, hit balls a little bit harder, and be able to hit more than just one pitch,” Willems said.
All that helps when, as Willems has found since joining Delmarva, the eyes of everyone at the park seem drawn to him all game long.
“Everywhere we go he’s a fan favorite — it doesn’t matter home or road, everyone gravitates towards Creed and fans are always talking to him,” Ambler said.
“Creed is a character—I mean, look at him,” teammate Carter Baumler said, gesturing to Willems as he did early defensive work. “He’s got that big hair. Lots of smiling, lots of giggling you do around Creed.”
Upon arriving at Aberdeen last month, top prospect Adley Rutschman lit up at the mention at playing alongside Willems at the complex while rehabbing.
“Unbelievable dude,” Rutschman said. “Just one of the most genuine guys you’ll meet, from the second you meet him. Always smiling, always kind of uplifts your spirits.”
Whether it’s his look or his personality, Willems certainly has a magnetism to him. Road fans heckle him, and he’ll give it right back. Home fans cheer his every move, and he’s liable to chat them up behind the on-deck circle before heading to the plate. He enjoys every interaction, and it seems hard to be disappointed with any encounter with Willems. (Unless, of course, you don’t like Chili’s — pitching coach Joe Haumacher said he and Willems had a meeting there over lunch at the player’s insistence “because it was the only place he’d talk to me.”)
Willems chalks up how those around him enjoy his company as “one of those things where, as much as it doesn’t sound good, I don’t take a bunch of things serious,” he said. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, either. He’s quick with a joke at his own expense or anyone else’s, a skill he believes is required in such a challenging game.
Where his work is concerned, though, he’s all business. He believes flipping that switch for early work allows muscle memory to take over during games, and wants to feel fully engaged during games not only to perform well but to enjoy the privilege of playing baseball at all. Ambler has been impressed with how deliberate Willems has been with focusing on his development goals, certainly not losing sight of who he is as a person or player in that pursuit.
“For Creed, it’s just understanding that the process is more important than the result, which he’s done a nice job of, and then being able to lock in every day and get a little bit more proficient in the areas we want to each day, and not expect big giant jumps or big giant changes in results. That’s sort of the path that he’s looking for and success as far as results are concerned is not linear — or exponential — it’s actually a lot messier than that.”
Creed has got to get into better shape, though. It's worrying that as his young age he hasn't started the process of losing the more than a few extra pounds he's carrying. I'm guessing by late August, he's gonna wish he'd started paying attention to his diet and nutrition. I'm hoping that's one area the Orioles insist he improve during the off-season.