OAKLAND – The question came out of nowhere, without warning or context, asking Blake Swihart to recall five baseball games, played in five different stadiums, seven years ago in the low minors. By any chance, would he happen to remember anything about Matt Barnes professional debut with Class-A Greenville in 2012?
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Swihart didn’t break eye contact, and he didn’t hesitate.
“You mean when he didn’t give up a run for a month?” Swihart said.
Yep, that’s the one.
As this year’s minor league season began on Thursday, young Red Sox prospects from Pawtucket to Salem, Portland to Greenville, were attempting to do what Barnes made look easy: make such a first impression that it’s still impossible to forget all these years later.
“I don’t know what to say, dude,” Swihart said. “He was nasty. He was good. He was better than everybody else at that age.”
He was too dominant for his own good, actually. In his first professional assignment, 10 months after the Red Sox had drafted him out of UConn in the first round, Barnes went four straight starts without allowing a run. In his fifth start, an earned run finally crossed the plate, but that was an inherited runner who scored off the first guy out of the bullpen. From April 8 to April 29, Barnes was never on the mound when a run scored. He struck out 42 and walked four. He had a 0.60 WHIP and a 0.34 ERA.
And then, he was gone, promoted to advanced Class-A Salem in hopes of finding some competition that might actually make him better.
“I was surprised he lasted that long,” said then-Greenville manager Carlos Febles, now Red Sox third base coach. “I mean, he didn’t last long, but to me, after two or three starts, he was ready to move up…. He needed better competition. If he had stayed there, he would have had probably the lowest ERA in the league.”
And there’s the rub for player development. For every player assigned to a minor league affiliate, success is good and dominance is great, but that’s not the goal. Each level is meant to challenge and teach. It’s meant to give players something to prove.
For Barnes, it was the breaking ball and the endurance of a full season. In his first eight starts after he moved up to Salem, he had a 1.37 ERA with 53 strikeouts and a .201 opponents’ batting average. In his last 12 starts in the second half of the season: a 5.74 ERA with 38 strikeouts and a .295 opponents’ batting average.
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“For me, (the learning curve) hit after the All-Star break in my first season,” Barnes said. “Everybody tells you it comes, but I went from throwing 97 (mph) to throwing 92 just because it was so much longer and I’d thrown so much more. I started to get hit around because my secondary wasn’t very good. I had relied on the fastball so heavily, so my learning curve came right after the All-Star break.”
Hard to believe there could be such a difference of performance in such a short amount of time, but wunderkinds like Mike Trout and Ronald Acuna – or even Andrew Benintendi and Rafael Devers – are the rarest of rare. For the most part, even the most talented baseball prospects need that long road through the minors in order to fully develop. They need to be tested and, in some ways, need to be beaten.
Barnes came into pro ball more polished than most. Undrafted out of high school, he’d thrived at the University of Connecticut and in the Cape Cod League. The Red Sox took him 19th overall in 2011 and signed him just before the deadline. He didn’t get into any professional games that season but began meeting his new teammates in instructional league. Among those new teammates was the high school catcher the Red Sox had drafted seven spots later.
“He didn’t like me at first,” Swihart said. “He was drafted before I was, but I got more money than him. That’s what it was. He didn’t like that. You can ask him about that.”
Said Barnes, “That’s not true,” laughing but shaking his head. “He tells everybody that.”
Assigned to Greenville together, Barnes and Swihart became friends, then they became roommates. Barnes swears Swihart caught both his first professional pitch in the minors and his first big league pitch at Fenway Park, though the box scores suggest otherwise (they say it was Jordan Weems who caught his debut in Greenville and Christian Vazquez who caught his first game in the majors). No matter. Swihart didn’t have to be behind the plate in Game 1 to recognize Barnes was beyond the South Atlantic League.
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“You knew he was on a different level,” Swihart said. “So, you knew he was going to move up quick.”
Barnes had nine strikeouts in his debut at home, then seven strikeouts with just one hit on the road in West Virginia. He pitched another nine-strikeout game in Lexington (Swihart had a double in that one) then another in Delmarva. Barnes was technically working with a four-pitch mix – the same fastball, slider, curveball and changeup he was using in college – but he was leaning heavily on the heater.
“I had a good fastball then and was able to command it well and had some success using predominantly that pitch,” Barnes said.
That was the problem. Febles said he remembered Barnes mixing in his other pitches, trying to make them better like the Red Sox wanted, but he could always fall back on that fastball. It was both a weapon and a safety net.
“I remember talking to (director of player development) Ben Crockett about it,” Febles said. “Like, listen, he needs to be challenged and face better hitters. He’s getting away with working behind in the count. When he gets to the next level, he’s going to have to rely more on breaking balls and stuff.”
Sure enough, after one more start with Greenville – Barnes pitched into the sixth inning, left the game with two outs and a runner at first, and the runner wound up scoring for his only earned run at that level – Barnes was promoted. He’d lasted the month of April and then was onto the next level.
“It was awesome,” Barnes said. “It was a lot of fun. We had a good team, and I was honestly just excited to get playing. I didn’t play the summer before that, but I came and I’d had a bunch of time off and felt good, and I was able to put up some pretty good numbers.”
Febles said there’s a funny thing that happens to every minor league manager or coach: within the daily grind of a season, it’s sometimes hard to recognize the strides of an individual player, but after a year or two away from them, those players seem lightyears ahead. Moving through the system, being challenged by better hitters, had exactly the desired effect. It forced Barnes to improve his secondary pitches. It taught him to prepare for the grind of a full season. It prepared him for the big leagues.
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The Matt Barnes now pitching in key situations out of the Red Sox bullpen is a refined version of the guy who dazzled for one untouchable month seven years ago in Greenville. Febles recognizes him, and sees clearly how far he’s come.
“He knows how to pitch,” Febles said. “He’s a pitcher. To me, that year, he was a thrower.”
But he was such a thrower that Febles might never forget it.
(Photo of Barnes: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)