The Leiter build.
It hasn't been linear, and it hasn't always been pretty. But the unconventional path that Jack Leiter and the Rangers have taken to now have them in the best place they've been together yet.
A week after Jack Leiter made his debut on a major-league mound, sooner than many expected from one perspective but unusually behind schedule from yet another, we had an hour-long Zoom session with Kenny Holmberg, who, as the Rangers’ Minor League Field Coordinator, is responsible for overseeing the organization’s minor-league managers and development coaches and running the spring training and Fall Instructs programs. He’s held the position since 2022. That is, since the day Leiter threw his first professional pitch.
Holmberg, who has 20 years in pro ball between his playing and coaching days, the last 16 with the Rangers, was asked about the unconventional steps the organization has taken with Leiter’s development — essentially shutting him down in-season three different times in 2022 and 2023 despite no injury issues — to put the former high school and college All-American through an intensive, Jack Leiter-specific program to work on things without a player from another team anywhere in sight.
Holmberg’s answer was succinct.
Jordan Tiegs, a former college pitcher and college and pro pitching coach who has served as the Rangers’ Minor League Pitching Coordinator since that same 2022 season, was instrumental in orchestrating and executing the Rangers’ plan with Leiter. A plan that had no paint-by-numbers template to fall back on. A plan that called for pivots and restarts. A plan that has Leiter poised to make his second major-league start later today, and not out of desperation.
“Sometimes you’re trying to help a player return to a previous form,” says Tiegs. “And sometimes you’re trying to get him to do things he’s never done before. No two players are the same and no two players’ situations are the same.”
As Leiter’s case has shown, sometimes one player’s situation doesn’t remain the same.
The first of three shutdowns the Rangers instituted as part of Leiter’s development, in the middle of the 2022 season, lasted 12 days. The next one, almost exactly a year later, spanned nine. The third, engaged a mere two weeks after the second one ended, went on for a month and a half.
While the righthander’s foundation was being rebuilt throughout the three-step process, it appears the third time may well have been the charm.