Until this season, Rick Langford wasn’t always a guy you wanted to see if you were a Toronto Blue Jays pitching prospect.
Nothing personal, understand: Langford is a man of infinite patience and deep baseball knowledge who authored one of the most remarkable seasons of pitching post-World War II. He was also the organization’s roving rehabilitation pitching coach; the man you’d see after visiting the trainer and Dr. So-and-So for such-and-such a procedure. He was there to help you on the long road back — or the other, less-successful path far too often travelled.
But this year, Langford was given a different task, and some of the fruits of his labour are on display whenever Marcus Stroman takes the mound — as he is expected to do Saturday at Yankee Stadium — or whenever Aaron Sanchez, Daniel Norris or Kendall Graveman are out there. Far away from the majors, but not as far as they were a year ago, prospects Roberto Osuna and Miguel Castro have also been subject to his influence.
“Rick has always been a great asset for us in player development, and this year we utilized him in a different way,” said Blue Jays assistant general manager Tony LaCava. “We prioritized a group of pitchers and had him focus on them. He worked closely with Dane (Johnson, the organization’s pitching coordinator) on individual programs. He is a difference maker.”
Langford, who has been with the organization since 1996 after an 11-year major league career in which he averaged 222 innings pitched with 85 complete games in 196 starts, described his task thusly: “They asked me to spend a little more time with our prospects, maybe help speed up the development with them.”
Mission accomplished: Stroman is scheduled to make his 25th major league start a little more than two years after being drafted 22nd overall; Sanchez has appeared in 21 games in relief after making 22 appearances this season at both the double-A and triple-A level; Norris and Graveman earned September call-ups after progressing through three and four minor league levels, respectively, this season. In addition, Osuna (a 19-year-old right-hander who appeared in eight games after Tommy John surgery and is considered the organization’s No. 2 prospect in some quarters) and Miguel Castro (a 19-year-old, 6-foot-5. right-hander from the Dominican Republic who had a WHIP of 0.992 with 78 strikeouts in 80 2/3 innings over 16 games at three levels) have also had sessions with Langford.
They are different personalities in addition to pitchers, from various backgrounds and with various strengths and arsenals. Sanchez, for example, had difficulty with what Langford described as “timing.” Langford and the Blue Jays stressed finding a right, comfortable arm slot for the lanky right-hander. “Elbow higher than shoulder … hand higher up … try to get a downward plane to the plate and let the action of the pitch take care of itself.
“What they have in common is the ability to be intense and compete well,” said Langford. “We stressed getting on top of the ball; getting late action in the strike zone … basically, understanding what each of them were good at and then trusting themselves. In the minors, you can get guys to chase pitches. That doesn’t work in the majors; you need to create late movement within the strike zone.”
Next season will be the 35th anniversary of a season turned in by Langford that remains one of the most remarkable individual pitching performances post-World War II. Langford tossed 28 complete games for the Oakland Athletics in 1980, setting a club record with 22 of them coming consecutively between May 23 and Sept. 12. That was the most by a major league pitcher since Hall of Famer Robin Roberts finished out the 1952 season with eight complete games and finished his first 20 starts in 1953.
Langford followed up his 1980 season with 18 complete games in 1981, accumulating 195 innings. One year later, he had 15 complete games. Langford eventually needed elbow surgery in 1983, but to this day he believes it had less to do with wear and tear and more to do with ripping muscle around the elbow when he hurried back after deciding against skipping a start following a game in which he was struck by a line drive.
Remember: by this time teams had already started to expand bullpen usage. The difference with the Athletics was the man in the dugout, manager Billy Martin, who in addition to Langford’s 290 innings in 1980 allowed Mike Norris 284 1/3 innings, Matt Keough 250, Steve McCatty 221 2/3 and Brian Kingman 211 1/3. That Athletics’ per-innings start average of 7 2/3 innings holds up compared to the great staffs of the 1920s and ‘30s.
Langford, who has been with the major league club this month and still throws batting practice at the age of 62, chuckled when he was asked if he ever drops those numbers on his protégés.
“The complete games do give me a little credibility, I guess,” he said. “But the game has changed so much since I was pitching. Hitting’s different. There are a lot of foul balls, now, for example; hitters keep their bat in the zone longer. They seem to pull the ball less than when I pitched.”
Langford believes this young group compares favourably to the turn of the century class: Roy Halladay, Chris Carpenter and Kelvim Escobar.
“These kids now are ‘pitching savvy’ guys who were able to go up level by level and accept the challenges they faced,” said Langford, clearly reveling in his new role as a bringer of good pitching news to an organization sorely lacking in that commodity in recent seasons.