Blue Jays farm team Las Vegas 51s a mix bag of rising prospects, declining ... - Toronto Star

Brendan Kennedy Sports Reporter

LAS VEGAS, NEV.â€"It was in Salt Lake City, just two weeks into the season, and the Las Vegas 51s had already lost their 12th game, a 10-2 shellacking at the hands of the Salt Lake Bees.

Loaded with talented young prospects and established veterans, the 51s looked on paper like they could be a powerhouse of the Pacific Coast League this season. But they were underachieving.

Players were distracted by jobs they had just lost in the big leagues or when they might get their first call up to The Show. They were cutting corners in the here and now.

Manager Marty Brown called a team meeting, where the club’s veterans, guys like Chris Woodward and Bill Murphy, did most of the talking and the highly touted young prospects â€" Anthony Gose, Travis d’Arnaud, Adeiny Hechavarria and Moises Sierra â€" did most of the listening.

If you guys want to make a difference in the big leagues, Woodward told them, you’ve got to figure this out first. “This is the time, right now, when we define ourselves,” said the 35-year-old infielder. “As people, as teammates. This defines our character.”

The meeting proved a turning point for the 51s, who have since posted a 36-19 record. They sit in third place in their division, with a 40-31 record prior to Wednesday’s games.

The Blue Jays’ Triple-A minor-league affiliate is an exciting team to watch.

Just a step below the majors, the roster is a mixed bag of players heading in different directions: a combination of rising prospects, recently demoted big leaguers and aging veterans fighting to stay in the game.

Last week, the 51s’ lineup included 37-year-old Vladimir Guerrero, a former all-star and MVP attempting a major-league comeback; 28-year-old Adam Lind, trying to work his way back onto the Jays’ roster; and the likes of 21-year-old Gose, and 23-year-olds d’Arnaud and Hechavarria, considered key pieces of the Jays’ big-league future.

As manager, Brown is entrusted to corral the diverse personalities that make up the 51s’ fluid roster while also containing all the jubilation and disappointment that comes with an unstable minor-league existence. Earning player trust is important for managers at any level, Brown says, but especially in Triple-A, where they are closest to grasping, or losing grip of, their dreams.

“They have to trust the fact that I’m putting them in situations to succeed,” he said.

Brown spits discreetly into a styrofoam cup as he answers questions in his clubhouse office. A ballplayer refined, but still a ballplayer.

A former manager of the year in the International League, the 49-year-old has coached minor-league ball players for more than a decade.

He knows that in order to win, he has to get his players to believe in something beyond the disparate trajectories of their individual careers. They have to forget where they have been or where they might be going and focus entirely on the present.

It’s his biggest task, and the best way he knows how to get them to buy in is through hard honesty.

“Some guys can’t look in the mirror very well and see where they’re at,” he says.

During the 51s early-season losing skid, some of the team’s young prospects were letting the finer points of the game slip, Brown says, while trying to rely on their talent alone to get by.

“When veterans on the staff would try to tell them, ‘You know, we can’t do that at this level,’ it was kind of like your big brother telling you you can’t do something, and they took it a little bit the wrong way.”

Since the meeting, however, all the players have bought in and the 51s haven’t lost more than three in a row.

Other times, it’s declining veterans who don’t want to hear that their best days are behind them.

Hitting coach Chad Mottola, who spent the bulk of his 16-year professional playing career in the minors, said it’s a lot easier to coach players on their way down, like Lind, because you have their attention.

“You can be brutally honest with them and say, ‘You need to fix this,’ and they can look you in the eye and say, ‘OK, we’re on the same page here, what’s the plan?’

“It’s the guys on the way up that read all their clippings and believe all their hype,” Mottola says. “The guy on the way down is so thirsty for whatever they need.”

It’s the shorthand players use to differentiate the majors from the minors: “up there” and “down here.”

For Eric Thames, who was demoted to Vegas on May 29, the biggest difference between “up there” and “down here” is that down here you have to work harder to get pumped for games.

“You’re missing the natural adrenalin. Up there you can be on two hours of sleep and no caffeine, but you’re still ready to go at game time because of the crowd, the energy,” he says. “You come here and it’s just not the same. You have to really kind of get in the game and play for the love of it, you’re not playing for the glamour and the fame.”

Though they occasionally sell out the 10,000-seat Cashman Field on weekends, the 51s averaged less than 3,000 spectators a night in three weekday against against the Tucson Padres last week.

Thames won the Jays’ starting left field job out of spring training, beating fan favourite Travis Snider to earn the spot. He started the season as one of the team’s more consistent hitters, but struggled in the month of May, hitting only .193, compared to .303 in April.

When he hit that rough patch in the second month of the season, he says he let the pressure of the big leagues get to him and as his mistakes piled on they seemed impossible to stop. “The wheels just got spinning so fast.”

Among the friendliest faces you could ever find in a big-league clubhouse, Thames is also one of the more intense competitors and has a habit of beating himself up when he’s down.

Although he was shocked when told of his demotion, he soon realized he needed to take a breath from the big leagues to clear his head.

He says he’s not worried about when he might get back.

“I’m an employee. So it’s not really about how I feel personally or if I’m upset. When I get the call, I’ll get the call and I’ll be ready. And if not, I’ll just be down here grindin’.”

When the tables turn and the game starts to grind on him, Thames tries to remind himself of how fleeting the opportunities are in professional sports.

“Ten years from now am I going to look back at my performance in a game and wonder if I worked hard enough? I don’t want that.”

By the end of this season, Chris Woodward will have played 1,000 minor-league games. He also has 659 games in the big leagues.

Though he never became an everyday starter in the majors, when he retires he’ll be able to leave the game knowing he made a career out of baseball.

Drafted by the Jays in the 54th round of the 1994 amateur draft, Woodward ended up playing a mostly backup role in Toronto over parts of six seasons. He was signed by the New York Mets in 2004 and ended up playing for six other teams over the next six years, bouncing back and forth from the majors and minors, before he was brought back by the Jays last season.

He figures this will probably be his final year.

“Not because I don’t want to play anymore, but I just need to move on and work towards something new as opposed to just hanging on to something.”

Woodward appeared in 11 big-league games with the Jays last year â€" going 0-10 in a handful of spot at-bats â€" and played in 8 games for Seattle the year before, the lowest totals of his career.

With his major-league dreams falling further and further out of reach, it’s getting tougher to be away from his wife and three children â€" a 10-year-old daughter, and two sons, aged 5 and 2 â€" who live three time zones away in Florida.

“You don’t see them for a month and you feel like they’ve grown five inches and they’re saying more words,” he says, wiping sweat from his face as his teammates head out to take batting practice under the 38 C Las Vegas sun. “It’ll be satisfying when I’m done and I can spend more time with them.”

Woodward is hoping to stay in baseball and make the transition into coaching or front-office work.

He was brought back by the Jays this season specifically to help mould the organization’s young prospects into professionals.

“It’s something I take a lot of pride in,” he says. “They’re really talented players, but they’re starting to learn that there’s more to this game than just playing; they’re learning how to be good teammates, how to be good people. They’re actually turning into some quality leaders on this team, which I’m hoping they can continue up there.”

Woodward looks at Gose and d’Arnaud, in particular, as surefire major-leaguers who can make it on their talent alone. But if they can learn how to be good teammates, he says, their potential is unlimited.

“I tell them, ‘I expect a lot out of you, because you have a chance to be a leader not only here, but up there. You got a chance to be there for a long time. If you do things right, people will follow you. The entire team will follow your direction.’”

For d’Arnaud and Gose, their manager’s preaching about focusing on the here and now appears to have sunk in â€" at least when they know they’re on the record.

“Of course I’d like to break with the (Blue Jays next year),” d’Arnaud says. “It’s been my dream since I was a little kid to go and play in the big leagues. But right now all I’m thinking about his playing with the 51s.”

Acquired from the Phillies with Kyle Drabek in the Roy Halladay trade, d’Arnaud is the highest ranked prospect in the Jays’ system by MLB.com.

The 23-year-old from Long Beach, Ca., is expected to challenge J.P. Arencibia for the starting catcher’s job next season, which will present the Jays with a problem other teams might wish to have.

Always a talented hitter, d’Arnaud continues to impress with his bat, hitting .336 with a team-leading 15 home runs and 48 RBI through 61 games. But where he’s making his biggest improvements are on the defensive side, where he’s learning how to manage a pitching staff and call games.

Meanwhile, Gose, a speedy centre-fielder who ranks just behind d’Arnaud on the prospect list, leads the team in triples and stolen bases. He continues to work on becoming a more complete hitter.

Brown says Gose is “probably the best centre-fielder” he’s ever had.

That’s high praise from a manager who also coached the A’s Coco Crisp and Cleveland’s former all-star Grady Sizemore back when they were in the minors. “But to make that statement about Gose, for me, is easy,” Brown says.

Like d’Arnaud, Gose can look up to the big leagues and already see a young player filling his position.

“In my honest opinion Colby Rasmus is the best defensive centre-fielder in the major leagues right now,” Gose says. “Maybe we’ll play next to each other, maybe one of us will be gone, who knows?”

Also like d’Arnaud, Gose is saying all the right things. Sure he’s anxious to get to the majors, like everybody else. “But you can’t anticipate a phone call to the big leagues.”

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