Jamey is a lifelong Rangers fan who has been blogging for nearly 20 years at newbergreport.com and traces his fandom back to the days of Bump Wills, Bert Blyleven, and the powder blues.
They arrived in Hickory, North Carolina in early April 2013, some returning after having finished the previous season as Crawdads, others who’d last suited up in Spokane or Surprise. One was heading backward from Myrtle Beach, another two were making a precocious leap from Boca Chica, and then there was the one whose last officially recorded steps onto a baseball diamond came at the University of Texas.
Advertisement
Today, the players who made up that 2013 Hickory squad are Texas Rangers. And Philadelphia Phillies. There’s a Chicago Cub and a Miami Marlin. There are Round Rock Express and Frisco RoughRiders players in the bunch.
And a Houston . . . Texan.
There’s also a Minor League Field Coordinator, who at the time was about to embark on his second season as a professional manager. Corey Ragsdale was fired up.
“We knew all along that group was going to be special,” recalls Ragsdale, who had won an Arizona League championship with a handful of them in 2012. “They had a good ways to go at that point, but the talent was obvious. It was exciting to show up every day at the ballpark to see what they were going to do that day.”
Among those who would open the 2013 season with Hickory and had played for Ragsdale the year before in the AZL were Joey Gallo, Nomar Mazara, Alex Claudio, Keone Kela, Lewis Brinson, Nick Williams, and C.J. Edwards.
Joining them as Crawdads on Opening Day were Jose Leclerc, Ryan Rua, and Jorge Alfaro, as well as outfielder Jordan Akins, who like Alfaro was back for a second run at South Atlantic League pitching. As Akins, the Rangers’ third-round pick in 2010, suited up in red and black alongside Gallo and Mazara and Brinson and Kela, he probably imagined his name being announced in Arlington five years down the road — but as a Rangers outfielder, not as a draft pick by the Texans (again in the third round) as a tight end out of the University of Central Florida.
It was an extremely young team (the league’s youngest, in fact), with seven of the nine hitters in the Opening Day lineup in their teens and the entire roster averaging 20 years of age. One of the reasons for the extreme youth was a Rangers tendency to push some of their high-end talent. It was not so much to rush them towards Arlington as to challenge them along the way, to not shy away from introducing a little adversity for them to confront and grapple with. But another reason was the organization has historically found benefits in suiting some of its top young players up in the same uniform.
Advertisement
“There’s value in a group coming up together,” Rangers GM Jon Daniels says. “They compete. Challenge each other. Know each other’s game and can anticipate on the field. Support one another away from the park. And if it’s a talented group that wins together in the minors, that’s ideal, so they come through with the same expectation in the big leagues.”
The 2013 Crawdads won together, but not quite enough. They missed a first-half division title (and resulting post-season berth) by just half a game and followed that by finishing 7.5 games back in the second half. All told, Hickory’s 76-63 record was second-best in the 14-team league, but four other teams turned half-season division leads into playoff appearances, and the Crawdads went home.
It was a far better showing, however, than the 1987 Gastonia Rangers, whose record in that same South Atlantic League was a brutal 58-82, second worst in the entire circuit. Winning isn’t the most important job on the farm — even though, as Daniels points out, there’s upside in young players learning to win together — but history smiled nonetheless on that bad Gastonia club, which produced Juan Gonzalez, Sammy Sosa, Dean Palmer, Wilson Alvarez, Roger Pavlik, Bill Haselman, and Rey Sanchez, among others who are now drawing Major League pensions.
Aside from the 10 future big leaguers (Gallo, Mazara, Claudio, Kela, Brinson, Williams, Edwards, Leclerc, Rua, and Alfaro) and the new NFL’er (Akins) who lined that 2013 Crawdads club’s Opening Day roster, Hickory would gain Ronald Guzman, Andrew Faulkner, and Cody Ege later that season, plus righthander Sam Wolff, who has a real chance to be the 14th Major League Baseball player off that club, having been traded to San Francisco over the winter for Matt Moore (and recovering now from a hand injury).
You look at a young group of Rangers prospects like Leody Taveras, Chris Seise, Bubba Thompson, Pedro Gonzalez, Miguel Aparicio, Tyreque Reed, Anderson Tejeda, Brendon Davis, Matt Whatley, Sam Huff, Melvin Novoa, and Yohel Pozo — which is to say nothing of the young pitching at similar stages of development — and it’s not hard to envision groups of them lining up together, developing not only as hitters and defenders and baserunners but as teammates as well, just as Gallo and Mazara and Alfaro did, and Gonzalez and Sosa and Palmer before them.
Advertisement
Keeping groups of prospects together isn’t the priority (Daniels: “We wouldn’t promote the group together if someone hasn’t accomplished what they need to yet — each player has to justify moving up on his own”), but the reality is that players with that sort of upside end up pushing each other. You can bet that Gallo, who set a Hickory franchise record that summer with 38 home runs, was happy to have held his teammate Rua (29 homers) off, but he probably would have traded that for the two-level promotion to Frisco that Rua got in early August that year — at a time when Rua was out-homering Gallo, 29 to 26, and with a .914 OPS to Gallo’s .851.
Relievers Ege and Wolff — one of whom would eventually be traded for Sam Dyson and the other of whom later followed Dyson to San Francisco — were drafted in June of that season and joined Hickory together in late July, after debuting for several weeks with Short-Season-A Spokane. As Crawdads that summer, the two college products combined to allow one earned run over 35.1 innings (0.25 ERA) while scattering 20 hits and eight walks and setting 52 hitters down on strikes. If only they’d been part of that Hickory bullpen in the first half, when the club fell short of the Hagerstown Suns (which has produced a few big leaguers you haven’t heard of) by a half a game . . . that one-win-short finish doesn’t stick in Ragsdale’s gut at all, does it?
“Just because I had the most talented team in the history of minor league baseball and couldn’t make the playoffs, that’s not a big deal, right?” Ragsdale jokes. (Maybe.) “Look, I’m very competitive, but it’s not just winning. It’s about making sure my kids are in the fight every night.”
On some nights, Ragsdale decided to model for his young team just what “in the fight” was all about.
“Hopefully we helped them mature, develop their skills,” says Ragsdale, who finished his own nine-year playing career as an infielder (and then pitcher) in the Rangers system — his final season (2009) on the mound with Hickory — before moving into coaching. “If I know our guys went out and played the right way and were focused on the task at hand, then I am good. Everything else will take care of itself.”
Despite being the circuit’s youngest team, the 2013 Crawdads set a South Atlantic League record — in what was the league’s 111th season – with 178 home runs. Gallo’s 38 bombs were two short of an all-time league mark. Future big leaguers Gallo, Rua, Claudio, Alfaro, Brinson, and Edwards gave Hickory a league-leading six All-Star Game selections.
They fell just short of the postseason, though, which still hounds Ragsdale. He can take solace, perhaps, in that his squad’s 76-63 record looked nothing like the 58-82 that the Gonzalez-Sosa Gastonia bunch threw down, and that he led the charge to develop a roster full of young-for-the-league kids who would eventually become Major League Baseball players, at an extraordinarily high rate.
And it’s not like that Gastonia group sent anyone to the NFL.
(Photo credit for all photos in this story: Tracy Proffitt/Hickory Crawdads)
EXIT VELO
- Quietly, one of those 2013 Crawdads, right-handed reliever Jose Leclerc, is having a tremendous start to his 2018 season. In spite of finding himself on the Round Rock shuttle given the fact that he has minor league options unlike most of the Rangers’ relievers, in seven appearances the 24-year-old has dominated the American League, scattering one single and three walks (.045/.160/.045) while fanning nine in eight innings of work. Only Seattle closer Edwin Diaz has been a less hittable big-leaguer this year than Leclerc.
- Speculation sprouted up all over baseball when the Dodgers announced this week that shortstop Corey Seager would need season-ending Tommy John surgery, in terms of where Los Angeles would turn to address his absence. For now, the club is moving Chris Taylor from the outfield to shortstop, and club officials have publicly suggested they won’t look for outside help unless it’s for an impact addition — and the Dodgers are apparently reluctant to jump past the luxury tax threshold as well. So the idea of Elvis Andrus to Los Angeles once he’s healthy — while he would fit the impact profile and also presumably involve just a one-year commitment (should he opt out of his long-term contract at season’s end) — is probably a non-starter. And Jurickson Profar isn’t going to be what the Dodgers are looking for.
- Really interesting start to the season for Frisco outfielder Hunter Cole, who came over from San Francisco as the return for Sam Dyson. In what’s now a 104-plate appearance sample size, the 25-year-old is hitting .372/.481/.523, with nearly as many walks (18) as strikeouts (24).
- Cole’s RoughRiders teammate Jeffrey Springs is picking up where he left off in 2017 when he led the Rangers system in strikeouts. In eight Frisco relief appearances, the 25-year-old has set 21 Texas Leaguers down on strikes over 12 innings, walking three. On the strength of a dazzling changeup, the lefty is holding right-handed hitters to a .182/.229/.273 slash line.
