Change in fortunes: How the careers of two 24-year-old Rangers righthanders took off

On July 30, Jose Leclerc jogged toward the mound from the visitor’s bullpen as the eighth inning moved from the top of the frame to the bottom, asked to hold an 8-5 Rangers lead in a game in which the Diamondbacks, half a game out of first in their division, had already twice erased deficits.

Ketel Marte, leading off the inning, laced a 1-1 fastball into the right field corner and stood at third with a triple. Chase Field was rocking.

John Ryan Murphy, batting next, couldn’t check his swing on an 0-2 cut change. There was one out.

On a 1-2 count, veteran pinch-hitter Daniel Descalso foul-tipped 97 mph at the letters into Robinson Chirinos’s mitt. Two down.

Jon Jay, who’d already tripled, singled, and walked in the game, proceeded to watch, swing through, and foul off three straight changeups and, on 0-2, was frozen by 97 at the knees. The leadoff triple was stranded.

Jake Diekman closed things out in the ninth.

The next day, Diekman and Keone Kela were traded. The 24-year-old Leclerc was suddenly a closer.

Since then, Leclerc has been utterly dominant, based both on the metrics (FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan is especially impressed) and on the eye test. Leclerc has faced 41 batters since replacing Kela. One has managed a base hit — and that was an Andrelton Simmons pop fly to shallow left on August 16 that shortstop Elvis Andrus got a glove on before it fell for a double.

Three of the other 40 batters drew walks (two on full counts). One was hit by a pitch. Everyone else got out. Including 22 on strikes in that 12-inning stretch.

The league is hitting .027/.122/.054 off Closer Jose Leclerc, striking out nearly twice an inning. Those would be mind-blowing numbers even for the most established lockdown closer in the game. For a pitcher thrust into the role for the first time, the results are even more staggering. For Leclerc himself, it’s another thing altogether.

Even Rangers officials would concede that they didn’t expect this out of Leclerc, especially this quickly. “But Jose’s a young man with big-time makeup,” says Assistant GM Mike Daly, who was the club’s Director of International Scouting when Texas signed Leclerc and his older brother, Anyelo, midway through the 2010-11 J2 period. “He’s an exceptional competitor. It’s probably fair to say nobody could have anticipated that first month-plus going the way it has — but with Jose, it doesn’t surprise us.”

Especially not with that cut change.

Leclerc had saved Major League games before. Two, to be exact, and both came in 2017. The first was on April 12th of that year, and for many, it remains the highlight moment of the young righthander’s career.

Texas, having gone 2-5 to start the season, was nursing a 6-3 lead over the Angels, heading into the bottom of the eighth inning. Los Angeles had the top of the order coming up. Jeremy Jeffress, who had pitched a clean seventh, got Yunel Escobar to roll out to second base to start the inning. Alex Claudio was summoned to get Kole Calhoun and didn’t. Calhoun doubled to left. Mike Trout (who had homered earlier in the game) and Albert Pujols loomed, with Pujols the potential tying run.

On came Leclerc.

He’d been up briefly the year before, making a dozen late-season appearances. All 12 were Rangers losses, with Leclerc usually entering as the team was well behind. He made the Opening Day roster in 2017, in part because Kela was optioned late in camp for disciplinary reasons.  Sam Dyson then got off to a miserable start closing games, and the bullpen was a mess.

Leclerc had pitched in the second game of the season (striking out three Indians in two perfect frames of a game that Texas trailed, 4-2), again in the fourth game (handling the ninth inning of a blowout Texas win over the A’s), and then in the sixth game of the year, getting two sixth-inning outs to protect a 3-0 lead in Oakland.

His next appearance was three days later. He made his warm-up pitches, on the mound in Anaheim for the first time, with Trout and Pujols watching together from the on-deck circle.

Trout stepped in.  Leclerc fired the first pitch over the heart of the plate. Trout, who had never faced Leclerc, swung through the 97-mph four-seamer.

Next, Leclerc unleashed the equalizer changeup, the pitch that has baffling glove-side run, cutting like a slider would, which makes it different from almost every effective change big league hitters see. Most changeups fade to the arm side. Not Leclerc’s.

Trout tried to check his swing. He couldn’t.

Jonathan Lucroy called for the exact same pitch on 0-2, and got it in the exact same spot, a perfectly executed chase pitch that Trout didn’t recognize out of the hand or anytime after that. The world’s best baseball player didn’t attempt to check his swing this time, and swung through it, as Lucroy dropped to block a second straight pitch.  This one was strike three.

It was as bad as some people who watch a whole lot of baseball have ever seen a pitcher make Mike Trout look. And after muttering something under his breath (along the lines of “What was that?”), he walked back to the dugout, turning back to watch the footage of the crime on the video board — as if to make sure he didn’t see what he thought he didn’t see — as Pujols traded places with him.

Leclerc looked poised as a veteran.  (I, like many Rangers fans, might have been a little Twitter-excited.)

Pujols, probably expecting the kid to start him off with that low-80s cutting thing, saw Leclerc’s first pitch planed toward the letters. Even if it were to dive, this one wasn’t going to kill any worms. Pujols cut loose.

But the ball didn’t plunge into the ground. It didn’t plunge at all.

The pitch came in at 97, and stayed up in the zone. The only downward action was the skied baseball floating down harmlessly into Carlos Gomez’s patiently waiting glove, in medium-deep center field.

Well, that and Pujols’ bat, which he grabbed by the barrel and fired into the ground as he started his insincere steps toward first base.

After Texas added two runs in the top of the ninth, Rangers manager Jeff Banister sent Leclerc back out to finish the game. He needed another 12 pitches to dispose of the Angels. The 12th was another wipeout cut change that Danny Espinosa swung through and that Lucroy blocked.

It was the Rangers’ first save of the season. And the first of Leclerc’s big league career.

Jose Jaimes didn’t arrive in the Rangers system with much fanfare. Texas signed the 17-year-old righthander from Venezuela in 2001 for $30,000, far less than Dominican righty Pedro Fernando was paid, for instance, and while Jaimes had some success, others from the Rangers’ international class like Edinson Volquez (first known as Julio Reyes, then as “Edison” Volquez), Mauro Gomez, and Williams Sarmiento made quicker and bigger impacts.

Jaimes spent his first two summers in the Dominican Summer League, another two in the Rookie-level Arizona League, and finally, two with Short-Season A Spokane before Rangers Director of Player Development Scott Servais approached him in 2008 about the idea of transitioning into coaching. He spent that summer on a player/coach contract with the AZL club. The Rangers liked Jaimes’s potential as a pitcher; they loved his upside as a coach.

“We’re always looking for great people with a passion to learn, men who want to impact players and drive our culture,” says Daly, who was instrumental in putting Jaimes on a full-time coaching track. “Jose had those ingredients. He just needed an opportunity.”

Jaimes joined the Dominican Summer League coaching staff in 2009, at age 24. The club was managed by current Assistant GM Jayce Tingler. “Jose was special from day one,” Tingler recalls. “As soon as we got rolling, he was studying the game and developing game plans for each individual pitcher. He related well with the players and built strong relationships, which ultimately sped up the process of players trusting him.”

Tingler and Jaimes moved up together to coach in the AZL in 2010, after which Tingler was named Coordinator of Arizona and Dominican Republic Instruction. Jaimes headed back to the DSL, where he served as the pitching coaching in 2011 and 2012.

Over those first four years in the Dominican and Arizona complex leagues, Jaimes coached a number of pitchers who would eventually get to the big leagues. Among them were Derek Holland, Alexi Ogando, and Alex Claudio. There was also a relatively unheralded righthander from the Dominican — less hyped than fellow J2’s from the 2010-11 class like Rougned Odor, Luis Marte, and Alberto Triunfel — named Jose Leclerc.

Jaimes had both Leclerc brothers in 2011, and Jose again when the younger of the two (by two years) was asked to repeat the level in 2012. “When they arrived, Anyelo was a better pitcher overall,” Jaimes recalls. “He understood the game better than Jose did at the time. But Jose always had the higher upside.”

The younger Leclerc’s memories of his early time with Jaimes are not so warm. “I thought he was a bad guy,” says Leclerc. “[It seemed like] anything I did, he said it was bad.” But Leclerc knows, in hindsight, where the real root of the problem was.

“My first year was really bad,” he admits, “because I had a bad attitude. I was a young guy. Tried to do whatever I wanted. Every time I would do something bad, Jaimes would tell me, ‘Hey, you’ve got to do this, no matter what.’ He told me those things because he knew I had the talent to be in the big leagues. It makes me a little sad now, because I know he was just trying to help me.”

The esteem in which Leclerc now holds Jaimes, in retrospect, is unmistakable.  “He always dealt with me.  He helped me a lot. He’s one of the [reasons] I’m in the big leagues. If not [for him], I’d probably be in the Dominican doing nothing.”

Leclerc, who had signed for a relatively modest $90,000, wasn’t getting premium pitching assignments those two years in the DSL. His 39 appearances included one start and three ninth innings. He was sitting 89-91 with a little bit of deception and the makings of an effective breaking ball, but he was raw. Jaimes believed there was much more there. A foundation was being built.

“Jose didn’t know much about pitching,” says Jaimes. “But the effort he put in to learn the little things was big. Almost every day he was out on the field doing early work and extra work, looking to improve his mechanics, his fielding, every part of his game.”

Including the cut change. Jaimes didn’t teach Leclerc the pitch. He actually had to tone it down.

“When we first had him, he used to cut everything,” Jaimes recalls. “He was always on the side of the ball and pretty much everything was cutting.”

It wasn’t by design.  The unique behavior of Leclerc’s changeup wasn’t masterminded by a maverick pitching coach or a cagey veteran who’d taken the young man under his wing. That’s just how the baseball came out of Leclerc’s hand when he picked up the game as a kid in Esperanza. He’d throw a changeup, and it would cut to the left, rather than fade to the right.  “I thought that was normal,” Leclerc says. “So I stayed with it.”

Jaimes wasn’t about to try and overhaul Leclerc’s unconventional grip and release on the pitch. Even at a young age, the action on the pitch was undeniable.

“His fingers were always on the side of the ball, and with the changeup that was working for him,” says Jaimes, who had first thought Leclerc’s curve would be his go-to secondary offering. “So instead of us trying to achieve ‘normal’ changeup action, we just worked on learning to control the cut, to keep the pitch in the zone long enough so hitters would swing at it. With time, Jose figured out he could either cut the change or go the other way [fading it] whenever he wanted to. Jose learned to do those things. The rest is history.”

Jaimes knew there was something potentially very special about Leclerc’s changeup, and so did Leclerc. “He always loved that pitch,” says Leclerc’s first pro pitching coach. “Especially when he cut it. He loved the bad swings he always got on that.”

Like a couple of particularly memorable ones on April 12, 2017, and a pile of them virtually every time he’s taken the mound in 2018.

By the time Leclerc had graduated from the DSL under Jaimes’s tutelage, the low-90s velocity was touching 96. Texas made the eye-opening decision to have the 19-year-old bypass the two short-season levels in 2013 and pitch in the Low-A South Atlantic League for his first stateside assignment. In 59 Hickory innings, he fanned 77 hitters, walking only 21, despite being nearly three years younger than league average. He missed even more bats in 2014 at a higher level, striking out 79 Carolina Leaguers in 57.1 frames for High-A Myrtle Beach as he worked as a closer for the first time as a pro. He was unhittable (.193 opponents’ batting average) but his walk totals bumped up to nearly six per nine innings.

In 2015, Texas assigned Leclerc to AA Frisco and decided to try his fastball/changeup/curve repertoire in a starting role. The thought, says Daly, was not only to see if the three plus pitches would work several times through a lineup, but “also to challenge him to throw his fastball more for strikes. Jose was used to punching A-ball hitters out by getting them to chase his fastball out of the zone. Against better hitters, he needed to advance his approach.”

Leclerc’s first four RoughRiders starts went relatively well (2.86 ERA, .200/.353/.295 opponents’ slash line) but they included 20 walks in 28.1 innings. The rotation experiment went in a fully wrong direction from there (6.31 ERA, .261/.370/.409 opponents’ slash, 44 walks in 67 innings), and Leclerc led the Texas League in walks and wild pitches.  But the Rangers — not willing to risk seeing him harness his high-end stuff in another uniform — put him on the 40-man roster after the season.

They weren’t quite ready to give up on Leclerc as a starter as the 2016 season got underway, but after two poor Frisco outings, they moved him back to his familiar relief role. And he took off. After a month, he was in AAA. Another six weeks later, Leclerc was a Major Leaguer. He made three July appearances for the Rangers, returned to Round Rock for a month and a half, and finished the year strong with Texas (.212/.308/.333, 10 strikeouts and three unintentional walks in 9.1 innings) in what was basically a mop-up role.

That Trout-Pujols sequence highlighted the start of Leclerc’s 2017 season, his first on the Opening Day roster, but while he was virtually unhittable all year (.146 opponents’ average) and struck out a staggering 11.8 batters per nine innings, the 40 walks in 45.2 frames were unfathomable (“one of the very highest walk rates in all of baseball history,” as FanGraphs points out).

A young pitcher who issues eight walks for every nine innings typically wouldn’t be entrusted with much more than those nine innings before being reassigned to a minor league club, where he could work to find ways out of his ineffectiveness without affecting big league wins and losses. The Rangers didn’t do that with Leclerc in 2017, though, and it wasn’t just because he was missing a lot of bats even while too often missing the strike zone.

It also wasn’t only because the team was out of the race by May and more able to focus on development in a big league setting, though surely that factored in.

Coaches and club officials uniformly put elite grades on Leclerc’s makeup and his drive. He took his lumps in 2017 on the biggest stage, where he was not only trying to work out issues that could have threatened his ability to forge a big league career but also accountable to teammates, coaches, and an organization singularly focused on winning ballgames.

Leclerc’s 2017 actually got worse as it wore on, at least as far as the striking weakness of his game was concerned. In June, he walked eight batters in 11.1 innings, or one of every 6.1 batters he faced. That’s a very bad rate. In July, he issued unintentional walks to one of every 5.1 batters. In August, an incredible one of every 3.6 batters to step in against Leclerc drew a walk, and in September, with the club using him less (and only in games the club would ultimately lose), the rate was a similar 1:3.5.

Leclerc, proud and unafraid of the work, sought out a familiar teacher and a familiar classroom.

The Rangers have been systematically advancing Jose Jaimes’s coaching career since the two years he worked with Leclerc in the Dominican Republic. He was on the AZL coaching staff in 2013, served as Spokane’s pitching coach in 2014-15, and has been in the same role with Hickory since 2016. In that time, he’s been entrusted with the development of pitchers like Kela, C.D. Pelham, Yohander Mendez, Ricky Rodriguez, Joe Palumbo, Hans Crouse, Jonathan Hernandez, Tyler Phillips, A.J. Alexy, Demarcus Evans, and others whose names Rangers fans will soon learn, pitchers who have taken large steps forward in their development path toward Arlington.

Jose Leclerc was one of his first students.

And he still is.

When the 2017 season ended, Leclerc pitched in the Dominican Winter League for Gigantes del Cibao. Over 14 relief appearances, he was basically the same pitcher he’d been all summer: 15 strikeouts and only three hits allowed in 13 innings . . . but 11 walks. Winter ball ended in January. Spring training was less than a month away.

Leclerc wanted to work.

“I always try to go to the D.R. during the winter, mainly to check on our guys who will be coming to the U.S. for camp,” says Jaimes. “This past winter I got together with Jose, too. He didn’t finish well last year and didn’t have a good winter ball season.”

The 24-year-old pitcher, sensing a career crossroads, and the man whose own career crossroads made him a coach at age 24, looked for solutions.

“One of the things that makes Jose so special is that he listens and is willing to try anything,” Jaimes says. “He told me that he didn’t know what he was doing that was causing him to throw so many balls. I noticed that he was doing something different mechanically. We talked about it. We watched videos. We made some adjustments.”

Jaimes recognized that Leclerc had been coming set with his hands too high and getting his front side too high as well. They got on a mound and began to redirect his arm action and his leverage down the mound. With a better understanding of his own mechanics, Leclerc found added consistency — and confidence. He began to command the fastball.

The cut change was the separator. But the fastball was the problem. Without fastball location, hitters could sit on the change and water down the young righthander’s biggest weapon.

“Once again, Jose put in a lot of time and a lot of work to fix things,” says Jaimes. “When I saw him a month later in camp, the difference was pretty obvious. He was throwing strikes.”

The rest, on an entirely different level, has been history.

Jaimes and others in player development with the Rangers are quick to credit Leclerc not only for the work he put in, but also for “getting over the fear of throwing strikes” with his fastball, for developing the confidence that he could throw the pitch over the plate and not get punished. Big league hitters weren’t going to chase the four-seamers that they did in the Dominican Summer League or in Hickory. They also weren’t going to be able to sit dead red, not with the plus-plus off-speed weapons Leclerc has. He had to learn that, and believe it himself.

“The confidence of the fastball in the zone was the major lacking component,” says one club official. “Now that Jose has added that, it’s allowed the cut change to be more effective.”

So effective that, according to FanGraphs, it has the second-lowest contact rate this year of any individual pitch thrown with any regularity.  FanGraphs has Leclerc among the 2018 relief leaders in the following categories as well:

• Opponents’ batting average: #2
• Strikeout %: #5
• Least hard contact: #6
• Infield fly ball percentage: #1
• FIP- (basically, ERA if getting league-average defense, and adjusted for park effects): #2
• Z-contact % (contact in the strike zone): #4
• wCH (how well any pitcher’s changeup has performed): #1
• WAR: #4

As for that infield pop-up rate (which, FanGraphs notes, means Leclerc is getting automatic outs, either on strikeouts or pop-ups, a staggering 46% of the time), it’s not only baseball’s best among relievers this year — it’s the best ever recorded since they started tracking such things in 2002. The runner-up: Mariano Rivera.  As you might be aware, Rivera used to cut the ball with some success himself.

Since August 16, Rivera has allowed as many base hits as Leclerc.  Since July 25, as many runs.

Leclerc is legitimately one of the game’s best relief pitchers right now, and was so even before Kela’s departure elevated his role. (Leading, on occasion, to an intrepid Twitter proclamation.) The stuff has been there from the days of DSL anonymity. Now Leclerc is harnessing it.

Jaimes doesn’t want to take credit for Leclerc’s breakout season. But that isn’t to say he isn’t proud of the work the two have put in together. “Jose’s development has been incredible,” Jaimes says. “I can say that because I got to see him when we first brought him into the system, when he was just a baby in baseball. Jose has always been extremely talented, a great worker, and an awesome person. He’s earned this.”

Daly’s feelings about Jaimes, whose coaching career he helped launch, strike a similar chord. “He really kicked off the current run of DSL pitching development and on-field success. Jose Jaimes is tremendous. He’s an A+ person and coach.”

Leclerc has taken his game to a new level. He’s in select company. When his season ends in a few weeks, he’ll likely head off to winter ball, and then, in January, to a place and setting he’s come to rely on. He and Jose Jaimes will meet up again this off-season, back in the Dominican, and look together, even as special as 2018 has been, for more things to work on.

The job, for the young pitcher and the young pitching coach, never ends.

EXIT VELO

• The Rangers announced over the weekend that Bartolo Colon, who trails only Mike Minor in games started for Texas this season, will move to the bullpen.  September call-up Adrian Sampson will replace Colon in the rotation as he makes a case to maintain his 40-man roster spot this winter.
• Kenny Holmberg’s Spokane squad kicked off the best-of-five Northwest League finals with a 3-2 loss to the Eugene Emeralds on Sunday night.  Fourth-inning home runs from Julio Pablo Martinez and Diosbel Arias kicked off the scoring, but the Emeralds tied things up in the fifth inning and took a lead in the eighth that held up.  Spokane had the tying run on third base when Hasuan Viera grounded out to end the game.  The entire series is being played in Oregon, as the Spokane County Interstate Fair is being held this week at Avista Stadium in Spokane.  The Indians are considered the home team, however, for the first two games of the series.  Spokane looks to lock the series up tonight.
• Righthander Abdiel Mendoza, picked up from Oakland in the Cory Gearrin trade, debuted with Low-A Hickory (the highest level the 19-year-old has pitched at) on August 2, firing three scoreless innings (two hits, one walk, one strikeout) in the Crawdads’ next-to-last game of the season.
• Baseball America named outfielder Bubba Thompson and righthander Tyler Phillips the Rangers’ best minor league player and best minor league pitcher in 2018, and right-handed reliever Demarcus Evans one to “keep an eye on.”  The three were Hickory teammates this season, with Phillips making a season-ending start for High-A Down East.
• Many thanks to Levi Weaver and Saad Yousuf, who contributed to this story.