published on May 11, 2024 in celeb

Rangers prospect Kumar Rocker is finally ready to speak with his arm

The uniform, Kumar Rocker says, is “sneaky.”

It’s an all-white set with “Rangers” in blue script and red outline on the front. Red and white piping accent the sleeves and legs, and a waving Texas flag adorns the left shoulder. To complete the look, Rocker wears a necklace with a small, diamond-encrusted letter R that dangles right above his collar, popping against a blue undershirt. Through the hole in his black glove, one can just make out the letters tattooed across the fingers on his left hand: R-O-C-K.

Rocker has a thing for uniforms, he admits. When asked why he chose to attend Vanderbilt, the alma mater where he became one of the most accomplished collegiate pitchers ever, “the uniforms” comes out of his mouth before “the education, the city” and head coach Tim Corbin. When you think of Vanderbilt’s all-black pinstriped jersey, you probably conjure an image of it on Rocker. The gold tops bring to mind his no-hitter against Duke as a freshman in the 2019 NCAA Super Regionals. He struck out 19 that day.

Rocker celebrates his June 8, 2019 no-hitter against Duke. (Wade Payne / Associated Press)

It’s good that Rocker likes his new duds, which he’ll wear when he makes his Rangers’ organization debut tonight with the Surprise Saguaros in the Arizona Fall League. (Indeed, the only thing that mars the whole ensemble is a green-and-black Saguaros cap.) Jerseys have a way of defining a player, after all. For good or for ill, what a man accomplishes in them sticks in the popular imagination. And nothing will cement Rocker’s baseball legacy more than what he does in Texas’ red, white and blue.

A year ago, the Mets flunked him on his physical after taking the right-hander 10th overall in the MLB Draft, opting not to sign him and casting Rocker into the baseball wilderness with a scarlet letter attached to his name. For the next 12 months — a period that encapsulated what Rocker calls a minor shoulder surgery, a revamping of his delivery and a short, show-me-what-you-can-do stint in independent ball — questions hung over him. Was he healthy? Would he remain so? What did the Mets see, and how long would it be until Kumar Rocker broke down?

When the Rangers stunned the industry and drafted him at No. 3 this year — paying him a bonus just under what the Mets initially offered a year ago, when he was a year younger and had more leverage — it ironically settled little. How could two teams view the same player so differently? “Either the Texas Rangers are going to be the smartest guys in the world,” says one person from an organization that shied away from Rocker in this year’s draft, “or there’ll be egg on their face.” The same questions that have dogged Rocker for a year have persisted. Was he healthy? Would he remain so? How long until Kumar Rocker broke down?

The debate has raged around Rocker for 14 months, yet the right-hander has to this point been only a bystander. He kept quiet during his baseball sabbatical, working by and on himself outside of the spotlight. During his few public appearances — while pitching for the independent Tri-City ValleyCats, when introduced as a Ranger after the draft — he has held his true feelings close to his broad chest. But now, on the brink of his official professional debut, the 22-year-old is ready to talk.

Over the course of a nearly hourlong interview with The Athletic a few days before his fall league debut, Rocker opens up about the unique path he took to reach this moment. He recounts the highs of his dazzling college career and the disorienting low of being left at the altar by New York. The Mets, he says, never told him what scared them off. “Kendrick Lamar said, ‘It’s rare when somebody takes your dreams back,’” Rocker says. “I got my dreams taken back without any explanation.” He’s given up hoping for one.

But he hasn’t abandoned his desire for the career that some wonder if his body will allow. So, after a year of silence, Rocker is inserting himself back into the conversation swirling around him. Tonight at Surprise Stadium, when Rocker toes the rubber, flips the ball from his glove to his right hand and delivers a pitch, all the questions hanging in the air will begin to find their answers. It will take years, but eventually everyone — all the skeptics and all the stans — will know for sure. Rocker will remain healthy, or he won’t. The Rangers will look smart, or the Mets will. The person with the ultimate say is him.

A year after feeling hopeless and lost, Kumar Rocker is in control.

“Why did this happen?”

For Lu Rocker, the dashed innocence in her son’s eyes was heartbreaking. It was Aug. 1 of last year, and what should have been a celebratory moment instead had left Rocker roiling and confused. In the draft a month earlier, the Mets had taken him with a promise of an above-slot bonus of $6 million. He’d flown to New York for his physical, and then everything had unraveled.

Reports surfaced claiming the Mets had found issues with his elbow or shoulder or both, endangering his deal. But whoever was talking to the press was not talking to Rocker. He says that no one with the Mets ever gave him any indication something was amiss, before or after the 5 p.m. Eastern signing deadline passed. He liked pitching because it gave him control, but now he’d been cast adrift. “I was the No. 1 pitcher in the country,” he said after his deal collapsed, perhaps as much to himself as to his mother. “I performed.” Since when was performance not enough?

Rocker was not exaggerating his résumé. Though he pitched just two seasons at Vanderbilt, having lost his 2020 sophomore season to the pandemic, his collegiate career stacks up as one of the best ever. He forced his way into the rotation as a freshman midway through the 2019 season. By the end of the year, he’d become all but unstoppable. With a high-90s fastball and a devastating slider — inspired by “Grey’s Anatomy,” his mother calls it the McNasty, although Rocker insists he has never called it that himself — he mowed down opponent after opponent in the postseason. His no-hitter against Duke, with Vanderbilt’s postseason on the line, was one of the most dominant performances in NCAA history. He did it again two starts later, striking out 11 against Michigan to send the Commodores to a title-clinching final game. He wouldn’t be draft eligible for another two years, but in June of 2019, he looked like a lock to go No. 1 overall in 2021.

Coming out of the lost 2020 season, Rocker’s redshirt sophomore campaign in 2021 was even better by many measures — a lower ERA, more strikeouts and the most innings pitched of any starter in Division I — but the vibe around him was different. His velocity dipped from 98-99 mph to 93-94 by the end of the season. Now confronted with the decision to draft him, evaluators graded more stringently. He was aware of that at the time, and it bothered him. Even now, sitting at a picnic table outside at the Rangers’ spring training complex, he’s irked by it. A reporter begins a question about that season — “Talking to scouts, it almost seemed that” the questioner begins — when Rocker interjects.

“That I got worse,” he says with a grin.

Rocker admits he didn’t have his best stuff, that he wasn’t as dominant in 2021. After flirting with 100 mph earlier in this career — out of principle, he won’t round up from his max of 99.5 — he’d lost a few ticks. But he delivered. If his body ached, he was just doing his job. “I’m posting the most innings out of every starter in college baseball,” he says. “When I wake up, my body should hurt.” Some players, with their pro fortunes in mind, will take a breather, but Rocker insisted on making every start and throwing every bullpen. There was another national championship to chase.

Was his stuff down? Sure. But nobody around Rocker thought he was on the verge of breaking. “We know when guys are getting dinged up and things aren’t going well and you’ve got to try to get him to the finish line,” says Vanderbilt pitching coach Scott Brown. That’s when coaches start skipping starts and managing workload. “That never happened” with Rocker, notes Brown. Despite it all, Rocker still recorded a 2.75 ERA and struck out nearly 37 percent of his batters. The McNasty remained McNasty.

When the Mets deal cratered, Rocker’s immediate reaction was white-hot anger. “I was pissed off at 5:01 after the signing deadline,” he says. He doesn’t boil over with fury anymore, at least not when speaking to reporters, but the insult the Mets gave him is never far from his mind. He may have turned the page, says his father Tracy, but “he ain’t let nothing go.”A bookmark pokes out from the top of the previous chapter, marking the place of his lowest moment in baseball. Over the next year — a year of self-discovery and a year of reinvention — he’d return to it again and again.

“I’m a worker,” Rocker says, “so I got back to work.”

Rocker’s first order of business, somewhat ironically, was right shoulder surgery.

He claims the procedure was to address an old high school football injury, what he calls “a pretty standard shoulder clean-out” that might have ultimately been required “five years down the road.” Since the game had so rudely gifted him the time, he decided to have it fixed now, although it was also meant to clear up any misconceptions about his health. After the procedure, which was first reported by ESPN, Kumar’s agent Scott Boras declared that “we have a very clear understanding, after a minor scope, of Kumar’s medically documented health, which has allowed him to perform at the highest levels.”

The rehab period for that surgery is 12 months, Rocker says, but he proudly notes that he “came back in nine and I was throwing 99.” In between, he reworked his delivery. Rocker is big and strong, having inherited his father’s frame for football. (Tracy coaches for the Philadelphia Eagles and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2004 for his exploits as a defensive tackle for Auburn.) At 6-foot-4 and weighing between 240 and 260 pounds during his college days — he’s now a lean 242 — the younger Rocker had a tendency to raise his arm slot, putting more strain on his shoulder.

It hadn’t gone unnoticed. “You’re getting pushy,” Brown would tell him during his junior season. “You’re not as whippy with the arm.” Back in Georgia, his high school coaches thought he didn’t look right. So, even before he was cleared to throw in January, Rocker began working with a performance coach. Eugene Bleecker runs 108 Performance in Knoxville, Tenn., and preaches that “throwing is about rotational rate of force development.” He wants a pitcher’s arm to act like a whip, and Rocker’s had been working like a catapult. He’d bend forward at the waist, moving his head out of the way so his arm could fly over the top. “Everything was kind of pushing forward,” Bleecker says.

That was the diagnosis, but the cure would take months. Even before picking up a ball, Rocker would report to 108’s facility sometimes six days a week. In a long, small room with wood-paneled walls hanging with framed jerseys, he lofted a two-handled cylindrical tube of water onto his shoulders, performing exercise after exercise focusing on how he rotated his trunk.

(Courtesy: Eugene Bleecker)

It was grueling work, but work had never been an issue for Rocker. It was better than staying idle. In high school, he’d fetch the gym keys from his coach’s mailbox on weekend mornings and return them as the sun began to set. During the 2020 shutdown, he was so restless that he picked up a side hustle. For about three weeks, DoorDash users in his hometown of Knoxville had their food delivered by the future No. 3 pick. But this was different, the kind of repetitive, monotonous training required to rebuild yourself from the ground up. And it worked — when the time came to grasp the seams of a ball again, a lower arm slot came naturally.

By June, he was ready to pitch again. In his first start in the Frontier League, scouts immediately picked up on his new delivery, comparing it favorably to his high school mechanics. Rocker says he feels looser, like “the old-school pitchers, the Cy Young-looking guys.” The repaired shoulder had helped, too. “I had a better range of motion,” he says. “I was more smooth.” He made five starts with the ValleyCats, giving up just three earned runs and striking out 32 in 20 innings. They were maybe the 20 most important innings of his life. Without them, says Rangers amateur scouting director Kip Fagg, “it would have been a lot harder to take him.”

But that doesn’t mean it was easy. As the 2022 draft neared, scouts had difficulty pegging where Rocker would fall. FanGraphs predicted 13th to the Angels, while The Athletic ventured 17th to the Phillies. Baseball America said 24th to the Red Sox. Going third to the Rangers was indeed a shocker, even to the pitcher himself. After the disappointment of the year before — and even some residual sadness at not going in the first round out of high school, despite his avowed commitment to Vanderbilt — Rocker watched the draft with guarded hopes. Then Boras called.

“Hey Rock,” the agent said, “I’ve got the Rangers on the phone and I can’t advise not to take it.”

Rocker tried to formulate a response but instead found himself stammering, although he eventually managed a short but vital word:

Yes.

Consider a scenario:

Two organizations put a pitcher through an extensive physical workup. One team’s medical staff is so scared by what they find, they completely rescind a $6 million offer. A year later, the other team’s doctors say the same player passed their examination with flying colors, clearing the front office to award him a $5.2 million bonus.

Who got it wrong?

Rocker may be out of limbo, but the industry can’t help but continue to view him with curiosity. The health of his arm and shoulder is a persistent mystery. In this year’s draft, says one high-level amateur scout, “a lot of teams struggled to consider him.” Teams don’t punt on signing undeniably talented pitchers without a good reason, evaluators note. The Mets must have seen something. Though Boras did provide all 30 teams with some of Rocker’s medical information prior to the draft, one official said it was very little. The uncertainty caused at least two teams, according to officials who spoke to The Athletic, to remove Rocker from their draft boards.

Had Rocker submitted to a pre-draft MRI a year ago, he would have been guaranteed at least 60 percent of the slot bonus for the No. 10 pick, netting him about $2.8 million. Given that he landed nearly twice that amount a year later, he does not regret opting out of the MRI. But he does smile at the fact that in the new collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners, draftees who submit to a pre-draft physical are now guaranteed 75 percent of their selection’s slot value. That doesn’t mean he would have taken the physical, but the new regulation does feel a bit like a legacy. “I got a little rule out of it,” Rocker says. “I got a little Kumar Rocker rule.”

However tentative teams were to select Rocker — Fagg claims that several teams behind the Rangers were poised to draft him, and Rocker says other teams in the top 10 saw his scans and “were expecting something a lot worse” — all it takes is one team to make a player a first-rounder. Owners of the No. 2 pick a year earlier, when they’d selected fellow Vanderbilt product Jack Leiter, the Rangers and Rocker were well-acquainted. More importantly, Texas felt he would hold up. “Doctors are like scouts sometimes; they ain’t always right,” Fagg says, a sentiment many in the game wouldn’t dispute. Other teams may have viewed Rocker as a gamble, but the Rangers did not.

“Everybody was like, ‘It was a shot in the dark,’” Fagg says, “but it wasn’t.”

Clearly, the Rangers didn’t see what the Mets saw, and whatever the Mets saw remains a mystery to Rocker. “If they would have told me,” he says, “I probably would have been able to sleep better at night.” But more injurious was the implied notion that he was a ticking time bomb, that sooner than later, he’d be cooked. The Mets, he says, “made it seem like I wasn’t going to throw again.” Team owner Steve Cohen hinted at as much in a tweet he issued after the signing fell through.

“Education time,” Cohen’s tweet began, going on to note that draft picks are worth up to five times their slot values. Cohen would “never shy away from investments that can make me that type of return,” his missive concluded. The tweet, which did not name Rocker and spoke about him as only an investment, was loudly criticized, although Rocker says he paid it little mind. “I don’t talk money. I play ball,” Rocker says. “His tweet, it was like, ‘I guess you shouldn’t have said that, guy.’ I didn’t really care.”

(Through a team spokesperson, the Mets declined to comment when presented with Rocker’s assertions that the team left him in the dark. At the time, then-Mets general manager Zack Scott issued a statement that read: “This is clearly not the outcome we had hoped for and wish Kumar nothing but success moving forward.”)

But the ordeal had left him scarred enough to be nervous entering his post-draft physical with the Rangers. It was here, at this very stage a year earlier, his dream had crumbled faster than he can fling a ball to home plate. He felt like a better pitcher than he was the year before, and healthier than he had been, but his fate was once again out of his control. But as he arrived in Texas for what he says would wind up as “two weeks collecting medicals,” the Rangers medical staff quickly put him at ease. “Hey, don’t worry about it,” he remembers being told. “We got you.”

The future again seemed bright.

Rocker limbers up at Surprise Stadium. (Zach Buchanan / The Athletic)

The sun beats down on Salt River Fields, bathing the bullpen in 94-degree heat. That’s where Rocker stands, sweat glistening on his skin and drenching his blue Rangers undershirt, as he limbers up his shoulder. Sufficiently warmed, he wanders out to the right field grass, firing a ball back and forth with a Saguaros teammate. His arm is loose and lively, his body muscled and lean. Externally, at least, he appears to be the fittest he’s ever been.

Rocker is here for the fall league’s media day, his first appearance in front of prying eyes since his introductory Rangers press conference. (Rocker didn’t pitch any official innings after signing with the Rangers. Generally, the Rangers do not send out many draftees during their draft year, instead bringing them up to speed on pro ball at the team’s spring training complex.) It’s sparsely attended — this is the fall league, after all — but a smattering of cameras keep pointing his direction. At one point, Rocker dons his Rangers jersey top to take a posed photo alongside top Pirates prospect Quinn Priester. That he’ll make his debut in these uniforms, not ones that say Crawdads or RoughRiders, is a bonus. It makes it easier to envision himself in the big leagues.

Pitching in the fall league will be a small but crucial step in that direction. He’s been in Arizona for nearly two months, throwing bullpens and facing hitters as he prepares to debut, and scouts are interested in how he looks. One recently spotted Rocker in the stands during Rangers instructs. “He has a super imposing body when you see him and carries himself like an alpha,” says the scout, and Rocker will need that kind of swagger. While fall league crowds are notoriously thin, the competition isn’t. Several of the game’s top prospects play in the league each year, and Rocker will have less professional experience than just about every batter he faces.

But starting with his first pitch and with every subsequent one he delivers, the lingering questions about his health will be replaced by hard data. Rocker insists those doubts are not on his mind. “I don’t care about answering questions,” he says. “I don’t care about proving to anybody about anything.” Yet, even as he says that, he seems to be caught between two existences. There is the context-free present — just a pitcher on a baseball field — and then there’s the backdrop of everything else. He’s here to pitch for the team that wanted him, not to talk about the team that didn’t. “They gave me an opportunity to play,” he says of Texas. “They gave me a lot of money to play. I’m going to go play.” But the Mets will draw his attention at some point. One day, he’ll pitch against them. How will that feel? “It’s going to be lit,” Rocker answers. Then he quickly softens his response to something more non-committal. “It’s going to be what it is.”

Though he may never throw a pitch in their uniform, he and the Mets are inextricably linked. He wouldn’t be here if not for them. The best thing to do with misfortune, Bleecker would tell him, is to turn it into “the greatest thing that’s ever happened to you,” and Rocker used his unwanted gap year as a chance to remold himself. He fixed his shoulder, at least to the Rangers’ satisfaction. He remade his delivery. He may never post another line as impressive as his 19-strikeout no-hitter, but he feels like the best pitcher he’s ever been.

So, the evaluators can keep their questions and the Mets can keep their concerns. Their relevance will wane with each batter he retires, and he can already sense them fading already as the sun begins to dip beyond the stadium. The workout is now ending, and Rocker gathers his gear and treks across the outfield to a door cut out of the center field wall. As it closes behind him, so does a trying and transformative period of his life. A couple of days later, his name on the back of a Rangers jersey, he will emerge again.

The catcher will flip him a ball, a batter will dig in, and a new chapter of his baseball career will, at long last, begin.

(Top photo: Zach Buchanan / The Athletic)

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