For Rockies, realizing major-league dreams is long, arduous journey

Riley Pint was a baby-faced 18-year-old when he first met with Colorado media on June 15, 2016, at Coors Field.

The Rockies’ right-hander, the fourth overall pick in the draft out of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Overland Park, Kan., entered pro baseball with a 102 mph fastball, a $4.8 million signing bonus in his pocket and massive expectations on his shoulders.

“I feel like if I do the things I’m capable of doing, then I can make it to the big leagues pretty quick,” Pint said that day.

Nearly seven years, several injuries, one retirement and one comeback later, Pint is still waiting.

“It’s tougher than you think it’s going to be,” Pint said during spring training. “Coming in at a young age, I didn’t really know who I was as a person. I was still having my laundry done by my mom. Turning pro really was a wake-up call.”

Pint’s story is not a cautionary tale. Rather, it’s a reminder of what an arduous journey it is to travel from the minors to the majors.

Failure is not just an option, it’s an inevitability.

Unlike the NFL or the NBA, where top draft picks almost always enter the league right away and often make an immediate impact, it takes time and hardship to develop a major leaguer.

Since the major league draft began in June 1965, only 23 players have gone straight to the majors. Awaiting the rest? A years-long climb through the minors that many of them will never complete.

When the Rockies open their 2023 season Thursday against the Padres at Petco Park, every player on the 26-man roster — from four-time All-Star Charlie Blackmon to rookie third baseman Elehuris Montero — will carry baggage from their own journey. It’s part of what puts a lump in the throat and makes opening day so special.

“Embrace the suck”

Colorado second baseman Brendan Rodgers, likely to miss the entire season after undergoing shoulder surgery, was the third overall player selected in the 2015 amateur draft. Now 26, he recalls his minor-league days through a bitter-sweet lens.

“I think my longest bus ride was 12 or 13 hours from Grand Junction, where I played in rookie league, to Billings, Mont.,” said Rodgers, who was drafted at 18 out of Florida’s Lake Mary High School.

“Man, it was rough,” he said with a laugh. “You feel horrible and you’re stiff from the long ride. The only place you stop is at a gas station to get your food. So you load up on beef jerky and snacks. It’s hard to stay healthy and hard to stay in shape. It’s baseball from a different perspective, for sure.”

Rodgers and his Grand Junction teammates leaned on each other and adopted a slogan from the Navy Seals.

“We used to say, ‘Embrace the suck,’ ” Rogers said. “That’s kind of how you have to look at it. There are going to be good times and there are going to be times when you wonder, ‘Did I pick the right profession?’ ”

In 2016, playing for low-A Asheville, Rodgers befriended outfielder Yonathan Daza. They made for unlikely buddies:  Rodgers, who received a $5.5 million signing bonus, and Daza, who grew up on the violent streets of Caña de Azúcar, a section of Maracy, Venezuela. Daza’s older brother was shot and killed when Daza was just nine years old.

Despite the language barrier, they bonded quickly. Rodgers began donating baseball equipment to Daza, who shipped it back to family and friends in Venezuela. It’s a practice Rodgers continues to this day.

“I kind of took it upon myself to study the (Latin) culture, because I knew we were all teammates going through tough times in the minors,” Rodgers said. “I was young and I was a bonus baby — whatever you want to call me — and I knew I was going to be playing with a lot of these guys throughout my career. I just wanted to be friends with them.”

Rodgers and Daza commiserated through the inevitable slumps.

“As a young player, you feel like a failure if you go 0-for-4,” Daza said. “When you finally get here to America, it’s hard to (understand) that. You expect to be good every night because you want to get on the big-league team as fast as you can.”

But according to Major League Baseball, the average time a player spends in the minor leagues is about 2 1/2 years. But that’s only for the players who actually make The Show. Only 10% of minor leaguers ever play a game in the majors, according to More Than Baseball, a non-profit organization that supports minor league players.

Even for those players selected early in the draft, the failure rate in baseball is high when compared to the other major North American professional sports. From 2000-17, only 64.53% of first- and second-round draft picks ever played in the majors. In the NFL, that number is 99.39% (1,136 of 1,443), in the NBA it’s 85.87% (918 of 1,069) and in the NHL it’s 80.72% (900 of 1,115).

In baseball, even being the first player selected by a team is not a guaranteed ticket to The Show. From 1992-2017, 20 of the Rockies’ first 26 selections made the majors, just 76.9%.

Rockies general manager Bill Schmidt, who headed the club’s scouting department for more than 20 years, says that baseball is simply a different animal than the other major sports.

“Baseball is so hard to master,” he said. “Sure, a guy can throw hard but can he throw it where he needs to throw it? Guys can hit a baseball in high school or college, but it’s very different at this level.

“It’s all about developing the skills. Guys start out having the tools, but eventually, they have to develop skills. It takes time, and patience, to do that.”

The developmental road is full of potholes and hazards: injuries, immaturity, loss of confidence, the minor-league grind, and a player’s realization that he’s simply not good enough.

“There is a mental toughness that’s needed to make it,” Schmidt said. “You deal with failure so much that if you are not mentally tough, the game will spit you out. And you have to have a passion for it. You have to truly love the game.”

Sticking it out

Wynton Bernard surely did. He made his debut with the Rockies last August in what turned out to be the feel-good story of the season. After spending 11 years in the minors, and playing 863 games, Bernard finally made it.  At 31 years and 322 days old, Bernard became the oldest player to get a hit and steal a base in his major league debut since the Cardinals’ Joe Delahanty on Sept. 30, 1907 (31 years, 347 days).

“It was truly incredible,” Bernard said at the time. “It just felt like a dream.”

But for Mark Mangum, the flame burned out and the dream was never realized.

A hard-throwing right-hander out of Kingwood High School (Texas), Mangum was selected with the 18th overall pick by the Rockies in the 1997 draft. He signed for $875,000. After one year in Colorado’s farm system, Mangum was dealt to the Montreal Expos as part of a trade for reliever Dave Veres.

Mangum had fits and starts in the minors and struggled to command his curveball, but he made it as high as Double-A, pitching for the Harrisburg Senators of the Eastern League in 2001-02. He even pitched a complete game, five-hitter for Harrisburg in May of 2002. He still flashed promise but the passion was long gone. Later that season, at 23, he walked off the mound and never returned.

In his final game, he served up two home runs, including one to future major-leaguer Cody Ross. The funny thing was, Mangum thought he located both pitches well.

“I said it out loud on the mound: ‘I’m done,’ ” Mangum recalled during a phone interview from his home in Independence, Texas. “When there is no joy, and you are hitting the spots you want to and guys are hitting the ball out of the park, it was like, ‘What am I doing here?’

“During my last game, I was talking to the team trainer and I told him I wasn’t feeling anything. ‘I feel like a lobotomized pitcher out there.’ ”

More than 20 years later, Mangum knows he made the right decision.

“I was miserable,” he said. “Nobody did anything to me. Baseball didn’t do anything to me. I think I was so angry that I didn’t do my job.”

But, interestingly, Mangum still loves the game. He earned a business degree at Texas A&M and eventually returned to baseball as a coach. In 2013, he was named director of youth programs for Twelve Baseball in College Station.

“The joy I get out of coaching is much greater than the joy I got out of playing,” he said. “It’s so weird to say that, but I’m not embarrassed by it. I’m a teacher who just happens to know a lot about baseball.”

“Backed into a corner”

Right-handed reliever Justin Lawrence, whom the Rockies have high hopes for this season, had plenty of reasons to quit. A 12th-round pick out of Daytona State in 2015, he didn’t make his major league debut until April 2021 at age 26.

The sidearmer with a 97 mph fastball caught the attention of Rockies manager Bud Black and dominated in the low minors. But he posted an 8.76 ERA in 2019 pitching at Double-A and Triple-A, and then he was suspended for 80 games in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season following a positive test for Dehydrochlormethyltestosterone (DHCMT), a performance-enhancing substance.

Lawrence never suspected that his journey would have so many wicked twists and turns. He’s glad he didn’t have a crystal ball.

“At 18 or 19, if I knew what was coming and I asked myself, ‘Am I a guy who’s able to handle that? At that age?’ I doubt it,” Lawrence said. “If I looked at that path, I would say, ‘No way I’m making it through that.’ Of course, now I realize that I’m as mature as I am today, I’m as strong as I am today, I’m as healthy as I am today because I went through all of that.”

For Lawrence, who maintains that he never knowingly took PEDs, the 2021 season was do-or-die. He certainly wasn’t great — a 4.73 ERA at Triple-A and  8.64 ERA in 19 games with the Rockies — but he flashed enough promise to stick on the 40-man roster.

“I was really backed into a corner,” he said. “I wasn’t 20 years old anymore. I was 25. I knew that my dream of making it as a big-league baseball player was really on the fringe.”

So Lawrence overhauled his work habits, and with the support of his wife, Taylor, and his best friend, Evan Edwards, he re-committed to his dream.

“This game moves on, it forgets about people,” Lawrence said. “You might see a little ticker at the bottom of ESPN that says, ‘So and so got released.’ And you think, ‘Oh, man, I feel so bad for him.’

“Then you move on and the game moves on and there is somebody else in that spot.”

Still waiting for the call

The game nearly moved on from Pint when he briefly decided to retire in the summer of 2021.

Pint went 4-20 with a 5.56 ERA in 68 minor league games (40 starts) over his first five pro seasons. In 2017 at Ashville, he struggled through right forearm stiffness, a painful left oblique injury and frequent outbreaks of wildness. In the summer of 2021, Pint was 1-0 with a 6.75 ERA in 10 relief appearances at High-A Spokane through early June. That’s when he decided to quit.

“I just knew I had to get away from the game and clear my head,” he said. “I sat back and kind of reflected on it for a month or so, and I kind of knew (retirement) was not going to be permanent. But it taught me a lesson because I knew I was taking the game for granted.”

Pint rejoined the Rockies at spring training last year, began the season at Double-A Hartford and finished at Triple-A Albuquerque, putting up an encouraging 3.00 ERA in three appearances.

This spring, he arrived at camp with high hopes. But baseball, being the cruel game that it is, threw him yet another curve. He was sidelined by a left oblique injury before Cactus League games began. On March 11, he was optioned to Triple-A camp.

It remains to be seen if he will ever pitch in the majors.

“I would like to believe that’s going to happen,” Schmidt said.

Former Rockies reliever Scott Oberg, a 15th-round pick who made his major-league debut at 25 and pitched 159 games in the minors over parts of seven seasons, has some sage advice for those entering their journey.

“If you go into the minors imagining it’s going to be close to something like the big leagues, you are going to be disappointed and upset,” said Oberg, now a special assistant for the club. “But if you take it like, ‘Almost everybody who has ever played big-league baseball has been through this. This is just part of it,’ then you’ll be OK.

“So try to enjoy it as much as you can. Then, when you get through it, you can look back and appreciate all of the things you had to go through the get there. You’ll laugh about it — probably.”

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