Spring training 2025, Day 4.
Wrapping things up in Arizona with maybe my best Last Day ever.
I’ve pretty much got things down as a spring training and Fall Instructs regular. I reliably do the same dumb things every six months (wait too long to book the flight and the hotel I know I’ll stay at, pack not enough zero sunscreen, etc.), but by now there’s also a whole bunch of decisions and places and times I know I’ll get right. I’ve got a routine.
But on this visit, there was one new mistake . . .
. . . but also one new thing that I got absolutely right: I booked a later flight out on my final day than usual, to give me a chance to see more than just a quick series of backfields BP groups and pitcher sides before having to leave for the airport.
As it turns out, having had so little baseball on a rainy Friday, getting in a reasonably busy pre-flight Saturday was a helluva good way to round out an invigorating half-week.
For one, Friday’s rainout in Scottsdale — a game I was never going to go to (baseball-wise, I’ll travel during Instructs but always stick to Surprise in the spring) — meant Jacob deGrom’s and Wyatt Langford’s debuts would be pushed to Saturday afternoon in the home park. On top of that, a camp game was scheduled in the morning to get Jon Gray, Kumar Rocker, Jacob Webb, Shawn Armstrong, and Luke Jackson some extra innings and Joc Pederson, Josh Smith, Ezequiel Duran, and Jonah Heim a few added at-bats, not to mention to give prospects like Winston Santos, Yolfran Castillo, Paulino Santana, Yeremi Cabrera, and others a valuable opportunity to show out in front of the big league coaching staff. (An opportunity that was badly botched by a young third baseman whose name I will keep out of this.)
Even better, the camp game was played early enough to get most of it in on Field 1 before the 1:00 big-league game got underway a couple hundred yards away in the stadium. I believe it might have been arranged that way for Bruce Bochy and his staff and Chris Young’s and his, not for me. But I was grateful all the same.
Rocker’s three innings had far more good than not. Though he threw a little under 60 percent of his 39 pitches for strikes, his separator curve flashed plus again, leading to some bad swings from a series of mostly big-league hitters and zero hits. Rocker beat Pederson on a curve for strike three, got four groundouts (for five outs), picked off a runner, and coaxed two infield pop-ups, while also issuing a walk and hitting a batter.
The key is Rocker got three innings in, and they were largely efficient and productive. That’s big progress and something to build off of, after his first two spring outings went poorly.
There was a Pederson moment that drove home something that I’ve been wanting to write about, and this seems like a good time. I linked Ken Rosenthal’s exceptional story on Austin Hedges last week (you should read it), and the difference-making impact the veteran backup catcher has brought to several teams, including the Rangers late in 2023.
I’ve had more than one member of the organization suggest that without Hedgey’s arrival at the trade deadline that summer, it’s not difficult to imagine that season ending short of a parade. Texas is known to have an uncommonly business-like clubhouse, which is not a knock. It’s just a reality given the personality of the team’s best players and leaders. Would the Rangers have won the World Series without Austin Hedges? On the stat sheet, there’s very little he did to suggest he moved the needle at all; if anything, the negative-WAR production probably hurt the team in scattered moments, at least offensively.
But the energy he brought to the clubhouse and the plane and the dugout, the loosened environment that just happens when he’s in the middle of things, those things are absolute pluses (and certainly as big a reason as any that he’s still landing major-league contracts at age 32).
Bochy has said this spring that one of the big things that Pederson brings is some of the swagger the manager says the team was missing in 2024. Obviously, it’s not just swagger — he’s an exceedingly impactful offensive player. But the other part is big and, it sounds like the Rangers believe, has already started filling a void. There’s plenty of the ball-busting energy that Hedges is known for.
When Jackson took the mound in the camp game, Cabrera (age 19) and Castillo (age 18) squared up a couple balls and hit them hard and deep. From the third base dugout, the chirping started up: “Get a new pitch!”
It was Pederson, teammates with Jackson in Atlanta and in San Francisco and now in Texas.
A couple batters later, Jackson shot back, issuing Pederson a challenge to get in the box himself.
Lots of Rangers fans lining the chain-link laughed. I could hear that, but that’s not what I was looking at in the moment.
The coaches were smiling.
When the Rangers talk about culture, it’s clear that this is, or at least can be, a big part of that. The team ethos is what it is, but Bochy more than anyone else understands what a winning clubhouse looks like, and Pederson is the type of player — potentially even more so than Hedges, given that he’s here to be a core producer on the field as well — who can shake that up a little bit, in a good way.
It was the seventh inning when I realized it was time to walk over to the stadium for the start of Royals-Rangers.
From there, the mental process went this way: First pitch was scheduled for just after 1:00. I needed to be on the road to the airport at 1:30. It’s a six-minute walk to the hotel I was at, and I figured I’d need about five minutes in my room before getting out to the monster truck, so I decided I could probably afford to hang at the game until 1:20. Could I get deGrom’s top-of-the-first inning — possibly all he would get himself, as Bochy said in the morning the plan was for 30-35 pitches but that if deGrom got close to that range in the first, he wouldn’t send him out for the second just to face another batter — and also Langford’s first at-bat, certain to happen in the bottom of the first since he was hitting third?
That was the hope: deGrom’s first inning of the spring, and Langford’s first plate appearance. A good send-off, if it worked out.
It worked out.
Langford, not only hitting but playing left field as well, got as much exercise in the top of the first as I did. deGrom worked at 96-97 mph, striking out Kyle Isbel (looking) and Bobby Witt Jr. (swinging) and getting Vinnie Pasquantino to pop out to second, all three at-bats ending on a wicked slider. It’s what the big righty does, even if it was just his first appearance of the spring.
deGrom looks so happy every time I see him these days.
Same.
After Marcus Semien and Corey Seager went down swinging in the bottom of the first, Langford stepped in. Fouled off a curve, watched a fastball miss, and then did this to the next pitch, another heater.
I started walking toward the exit just as Langford broke for second on a 3-1 hit-and-run that Josh Jung fouled off. I listened to the rest of the game, which included a second spotless frame from deGrom, who needed no more than his prescribed allotment to get the team back to the dugout (31 pitches, 21 for strikes).
I had Eric and Matt on the radio all the way back to Phoenix, listening to a crisp two-hour, 5-3 Rangers win. Once at the airport, I started reworking the Top 72 Prospects list, which I’m happy to say will take on a much different look from what it was a week ago. Time to dig in on the 72, which I will roll out soon — but first, I’ve opened up the Mailbag for your questions. Jump in if you’d like; I’ll keep it open for another day or so before writing it up.
It’s not often that I spend much time on the big league side in camp. But between the camp game and the pivoted deGrom and Langford starts on Saturday, it’s how I finished this one.
Well, at least until I gladly returned the stepladder monstrosity at the rental car center. Never again on that one. Some people who are not me are built for that sort of Joc Pederson energy.
In all fairness, that white car is over the line into your spot.
Love climbing in and out of mine.