Austin Riley Looking For An Encore Performance

LAKELAND, Fla.—Low Class A Rome manager Randy Ingle warned his players last season before they left spring training for what, for most of them, would be their first full season as professionals. He told them the 140-game slate in the South Atlantic League would be unlike anything they’d experienced as amateurs. And it certainly wouldn’t be anything like their experiences in the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League, where the games are played exclusively in Florida.

The long nights followed by early mornings and compounded by lengthy bus rides, sometimes in the dead of night, would be arduous. But words, even from a manager with decades of experience in the minor leagues, can only go so far. The players had to experience it to understand.

“You don’t know it until you experience it,” Austin Riley, the Braves’ No. 11 prospect and the starting third baseman last season for Rome, which won both the South Atlantic League championship and Baseball America’s Minor League Team of the Year award. “You honestly don’t know what to expect. You talk to some of the guys and they say, ‘Yeah, it’s long,’ but it flew by for me all the way up until August. I kind of hit a wall that month of August and then it sped back up.”

Riley ended up with an excellent first year in the minors, hitting .271/.324/.479 with a system-best 20 home runs and 80 RBIs. He didn’t dominate right away, however. He hit just three home runs and produced an OPS of just .671 in the season’s first half before exploding over the final 66 games.

Part of the reason for the turnaround, he said, was simply getting a breather at the all-star break. Another part involved a few mechanical adjustments.

“In the first half I was looking curveball, which I shouldn’t have been,” he said after a game against Tigers minor leaguers that included a double to left-center field off of Michael Fulmer, the reigning American League rookie of the year who threw four innings. “That was kind of my mental approach at the plate. Just trying to hunt that fastball seemed to help. . . . I also backed off the plate a little bit (on inside pitches) and started trying to rotate my hips more instead of sliding my hips.”

Riley wasn’t the only Rome Brave who scuffled through the first half of the season. The team was stacked with high-end prospects and was expected to be successful on the field and from a developmental standpoint. The team finished the first half just 27-42, the third-worst record in the 14-team league.

Not only was his team losing, Ingle noticed, it was losing sloppily. After one particularly ugly game, he’d had enough.

“Right after the second half, (Ingle) did something I’ll never forget,” Riley said. “Randy kind of came in—and he’s super mellow (normally)—to the locker room one day after the game and jumped on us pretty good about ‘Who cares if we’re the youngest team in league?’ that kind of stuff. It made us realize that we have a chance to do something special. It just kind of went from there.”

Did it ever.

Rome went 43-27 in the second half and clinched a spot in the SAL playoffs. There, the Braves were positioned with a rotation composed of four first-rounders in Mike Soroka, Touki Toussaint, Kolby Allard and Max Fried. Rome dispatched Yankees’ affliate Charleston in the first round before drawing Lakewood (Phillies) in the championship series.

There, Toussaint, Allard and Fried spent three games one-upping each other. Toussaint whiffed six in eight one-run innings in Game One. Allard followed that effort with nine punchouts over six shutout frames the next night.

Fried struck out a career-best 13 hitters in Game Three to deliver his club a championship.

Ingle has managed 25 seasons in the Braves’ system, and claimed his 1,500th managerial victory in August of last season. Even with all that experience, he thinks the 2016 Rome Braves might have been his most talented bunch.

“It’s up there right near the top,” he said. “If it’s not the top it’s near the top. . . . I’ve had some good clubs in the past, but that club last year was probably the best, talent-wise, that’s been accumulated, I think, on one team that I’ve managed.”

The majority of that group that will likely head to high Class A to begin this season. Having experienced the gauntlet of a full season in the minor leagues for himself, Riley believes he’s ready to open 2017 the way he closed 2016.

“I’m just trying to start off the way I finished,” he said. “Not trying to do too much. It’s a long season and I’ve got 500 ABs. I’m just trying to take it day by day. I don’t think I did that in the first half last year, so I’m just going to try to start off strong and play solid baseball.”

GETTING WORK IN

In addition to Fulmer, the Tigers also brought righthanders Francisco Rodriguez and Alex Wilson to get in some work. While that was going on, Detroit’s youngest prospects held a very informal scrimmage. So informal, in fact, that the players didn’t wear jerseys and the coaches did the umpiring.

The standout arm during that game was righthander Wladimir Pinto, the Tigers’ No. 21 prospect entering the season. Pinto, listed at 5-foot-11 and 175 pounds, showed a heavy four-seam fastball that touched as high as 97 mph as well as a two-seamer with excellent life in the low 90s. He used a low-80s curveball as a putaway pitch and struck out two in as many innings.

Righthander Drew Smith, the system’s No. 24 prospect who was drafted out of Dallas Baptist in the third round in 2015, showed a hard-boring fastball up to 95 mph and a swing-and-miss curveball in the high-70s. His fastball command wandered a bit during his two innings, however.