ATLANTA — In the past seven years, Atlanta is the 11th different team Michael Tonkin has played for and only the second MLB team, the Twins being the other.
Since 2017, the last season he pitched in the majors before this one, the 6-foot-7 reliever pitched for teams in — deep breath, we’ll go chronological order — Rochester (Triple A), Sapporo (Japan), Long Island (independent), San Antonio (Triple A), Reno (Triple A), Long Island (again, 2019 and 2021), Tijuana (independent) and Aguilas in the Dominican winter league, his last stop before a full season at Triple-A Gwinnett in 2022.
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And that doesn’t include one appearance for the Dominican entry in the 2021 Caribbean World Series.
It’s a lot. He’s 33 years old and got married after the 2015 season.
“I didn’t have any kids the last time I was in the big leagues,” Tonkin said. “Now we’ve got two. My daughter (their first child) was born in ’19.”
Dues? Tonkin has paid a few, and not too few to mention.
He’s the latest Braves bullpen reclamation project, after Tyler Matzek and Jackson Stephens. And like those two, Tonkin credits his wife with convincing him to keep pitching when he was ready to give up after being released and rejected almost more times than he can count.
“You’ve got to give them guys a lot of credit,” Braves reliever A.J. Minter said. “This game, you can be taken out of it so quickly, and it takes forever to get back in. It takes a lot of just heart to just stay with it. And you’ve got to give all the props to (Tonkin). I mean, he deserves to be here. He showed it in spring training and he’s going out there and pitching meaningful innings for us.”
Tonkin, who features a 93-95 mph sinker, slider and occasional cutter, has a 3.38 ERA and 0.56 WHIP (walks-plus-hits per inning pitched) in three relief appearances for the Braves, with four strikeouts, one walk and two hits allowed in 5 1/3 innings.
“His ball, it tails but also rises — that’s very hard (to hit), especially at his arm angle, which is kind of a low three-quarter arm slot,” Minter said. “For him to get that much ride on his ball is pretty impressive.”
Tonkin was added to the Braves 40-man roster in November and made the Opening Day roster after an impressive spring coupled with a couple of pitching injuries elsewhere on the roster. So far, he’s making the most of his long-awaited return to the majors.
Entering Monday, only two of the 43 major-league relievers with five or more innings pitched had a WHIP as good or better than Tonkin’s — the Angels’ Andrew Wantz (0.20 in 5.0 innings) and the Mets’ John Curtiss (0.56 in 5 1/3 innings).
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“He should be here — because he’s got all the talent in the world,” said Braves reliever Collin McHugh, an 11-year veteran who is a year older than Tonkin. “But from a mental perspective, it’s hard to do. That’s a tough grind, especially when you’re an older guy and especially when you’ve got kids and a family. You wonder a lot of times, ‘Is it worth it? Is it worth it to keep going?’”
So, just to see kind of the fruit of that labor — it’s cool to see.”
Between his last appearance with the Twins in September 2017 and his first with the Braves this season on April 2, Tonkin made at least 215 relief appearances for nine teams in four countries, sometimes barely making enough to pay the bills for his growing family.
What can make toiling for such far-flung outposts even more difficult is having once pitched at the highest level and making a major-league salary for all or parts of five seasons as Tonkin did with the Twins during 2013-2017. The first three of those seasons came before he married Becky Feeney, and all of those seasons were before they became parents.
“So, my last year in the big leagues was 2017,” Tonkin says, beginning a rundown of the most itinerate stretch of his journeyman career. “I was in Japan in ’18, got released there after ’18. I signed with the Rangers, got released by them in the spring (of 2019). Signed with the Brewers, got released by them two months into the season. Went to indy ball for a couple of months, signed with the Diamondbacks at the end of that season — that was all 2019, Rangers, Brewers, indy ball, Diamondbacks. So I went to (Diamondbacks Triple-A affiliate) Reno for, like, two weeks.”
He thought he might’ve found a new home with the Arizona organization and was in spring training with them the following year.
“And I got one inning,” he said, with a tone more matter-of-fact resignation than frustration. “I got one inning (in spring training), and in late May they released me. So then I was going to go to the Dominican for winter ball — I had already signed to go do that — but a month before that, they released me because of budget cuts because they weren’t going to have fans (during the pandemic). But then they ended up signing me back for, like, the playoffs.”
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Tonkin enjoys telling this part of his story, which exemplifies the turns his career has taken.
“They literally called me after I hadn’t been on the mound for two months, and they’re like, ‘Can you come out here (to the Dominican Republic) for the playoffs?’” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’ That was Dec. 22, and they flew me out the 26th. I didn’t even throw a bullpen or anything before I went out there. But I threw well, and it was enough to where I was, like, ‘I can’t be done playing.’ I was up to 96 (mph) and thought that was good enough to keep playing.”
He credits Becky with encouraging him and keeping him going through the darkest of times, not just in 2021 but throughout his time between major-league stints.
“Without her, I’m not playing,” Tonkin said. “She’s at home taking care of the kids. But I mean, without her support I wouldn’t be here. Because there were many times where I was like, ‘It’s obvious nobody wants me. The writing’s on the wall, I’m not a major-league player.’ As much as I believed I was, if no one else believes it you’re crazy.
“But I felt like I could still pitch; I was still throwing hard. And I talked to her, and she’s like, ‘If you still feel like you can pitch, go. Go to indy ball.’ Really, it’s not an easy decision when you’ve got kids at home, and you’re leaving to go make not enough money to eat. It’s not easy.”
McHugh, who also has young children, said, “You can do things pretty easily by yourself. You get married and it’s a little bit harder, when you have a significant other it’s harder to do things because you’ve got somebody else that’s kind of relying on you as well. You add kids to the equation and it gets more and more complicated. So to stick with it, it speaks a lot to his mental toughness.”
During Tonkin’s three-country trek in 2021, he caught the eye of a scout from the Braves, who took a no-risk gamble signing him to a minor-league deal.
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The player sometimes called Tonk had a stellar season for Gwinnett in 2022, posting a 3.17 ERA in 47 appearances and totaling 73 strikeouts with 15 walks in 48 1/3 innings. But he wasn’t on the 40-man roster, so he got passed over when the Braves needed to bring up arms. But in November, Tonkin was added to the roster to protect him from the Rule 5 draft, not typical for a player in his 30s.
To say this was a circuitous road back to the majors would be a supreme understatement. But he had tasted life in the big leagues, knew he still was throwing as hard as ever and felt like he had learned enough through struggles to be better than before if he could just get a chance.
Tonkin was a 30th-round draft pick by the Twins in 2008 out of Palmdale (Calif.) High School, and he worked his way steadily through the minor-league system, becoming a top relief prospect. He made an auspicious MLB debut with Minnesota in 2013, posting a 0.79 ERA in nine appearances and striking out 10 with three walks in 11 1/3 innings. Tonkin had arrived.
He never had that level of effectiveness for an extended period in the majors, and Tonkin’s 4.33 ERA in 141 appearances over five seasons with Minnesota included a 5.02 ERA in a career-high 65 appearances in 2016, the only season he spent entirely in the majors.
“So, 2018, 2019, those were bad years, I didn’t throw the ball well,” Tonkin said of two seasons spent in Japan and in Triple A with the Brewers and Diamondbacks. “Aside from those years, I feel like I’ve always thrown the ball pretty well and done alright. But after 2019 I realized I needed to do some things different. Went to a place to do weighted balls, kind of Driveline-type training. I did all that and changed a bunch, and then I went to spring training and I got one inning — literally all of 2020, I got one inning. So I was kind of frustrated, obviously. I had put in a lot of time and effort to get one inning, and my one inning I was, like, 94-95 (mph), which for my first inning in spring training that’s not bad.
“So obviously I felt like I was on to something. But I was home (in California) during the whole pandemic, and I tweaked some more things — shortened my arm path, used my legs better. Tweaked some things, and I felt like it got me back to where I was when I was in the major leagues back in ’16.”
It took a few more years, but Tonkin is finally getting another chance to show what he can do.
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“I remember when he was up with Minnesota back in the day,” McHugh said. “I remember hearing his name, remember seeing him throw. And then … baseball is a transaction-heavy industry, so you kind of lose track of guys and wonder what’s happening, where guys have been. I saw him this spring, throwing a bullpen, and I was like, ‘Is that the same Tonkin kid?’”
Same kid, only now he’s got a couple of kids. And a burning desire to stick around now that he’s back in the bigs.
(Top photo of Tonkin: Brad Mills / USA Today)