Of all the plays in all of baseball, there is nothing more humbling than being picked off.
You can explain away a three-pitch strikeout. He had good stuff. Fine.
You can apologize your way out of an error. The sun was in my eyes! Gotcha.
You can even make amends for a failed sacrifice bunt attempt. I have bad knees! OK, pass.
But being picked off is a singular embarrassment. A pitcher with a good move is like a warrior with an axe in his hand. Quick. Deadly.
Being picked off means you were frozen, absent, somewhere else. It means your foot was stuck in quicksand, trapped. It means you were just plain slow. Whatever it means, it is more frustrating than a strikeout with the bat on your shoulders and more depressing than a White Sox game.
It is, in a word, humbling.
Luckily for Joey Rickard, he can handle being humbled.
Orioles outfielder and former Arizona Wildcat Joey Rickard has bounced around between the majors and Triple-A this season. “Baseball is an everyday battle to find your swing,” he said. Rickard, who was a major contributor to the Cats’ 2012 title run, was batting .349 in the minors.
‘An opportunity to retool’
There are few demotions in sports like being sent down to Triple-A.
In basketball, you may be relegated to the bench, but very rarely do you see a veteran NBA player down in the G League. In football, they’d cut you before they gave you a chance to regroup. Hockey players get demoted, but that’s usually a numbers game.
When Rickard was optioned to the Baltimore Orioles’ Triple-A affiliate Norfolk Tides on March 14, he could’ve been broken. His spirit, that is.
His swing was already bent, needing an adjustment after batting .152 in 15 games start to spring training. The weather in Florida was bad — even the Orioles’ manager, baseball stalwart Buck Showalter, will admit that — and it appeared to mess with Rickard. The former Arizona baseball standout, a key figure of the team’s 2012 College World Series championship run, needed to find himself, and to rediscover his form.
“I just knew it was an opportunity to retool and put everything in perspective,” Rickard said. “It’s not so much that anyone is giving up on you. It’s an opportunity to go and get better, which I needed to do to help this ballclub. It is perspective. I’m still playing baseball. That’s something I enjoy, something I’ve done my whole life. A lot of people haven’t played as long as I have. It actually takes some pressure off, to be able to go and enjoy the moment, to enjoy those bus rides, make some friends.”
Because of one of baseball’s funkiest rules — the Rule 5 draft — Rickard actually beat his 2012 teammates to the big leagues. A Rule 5 selection in 2016 by the Orioles, who snagged him from his original squad, the Tampa Bay Rays, Rickard started on opening day and batted a respectable .268 before a thumb injury ended his season.
Of all of Arizona’s players from that championship squad in 2012, Rickard has the most at-bats, home runs, RBIs — the most everything — in the majors.
“Joey is a contributor up here, and he’d just gotten away from some of the things that made him consistent,” Showalter said. “He trusts us. We were the ones who took him in the Rule 5 draft. He needed the opportunity to take a deep breath. Nobody was unhappy with him or dissatisfied. Sometimes you just need to start over. The good thing about Joe is we knew he was going to go there and treat it like what it was.”
So often, a promising prospect or a savvy veteran is sent back down to the land of long bus rides and off-the-beaten-path cities, and gets lost in his own head. He is heartbroken, his livelihood stripped, his confidence shot.
Rickard instead kept his head down and his heart up, worked to shorten his swing, tried to fill a few gaps and deliver a few knocks, and battled to convince his bosses that he was taking his demotion in stride.
“Mechanically, I was just trying to cut out some extra movement,” Rickard said. “I wanted to simplify everything, to go from point A to point B faster. With these pitchers throwing as hard as they do, some of them are quick to the plate and get on you, so you have to simplify everything.”
Within weeks, he found what he had lost.
Having spent several stints in the minors and the big leagues this year, ex-Cat Joey Rickard is working to carve out a role in Baltimore.
Trying to stick with O’s
It’s not as if Rickard has ever been a Silver Slugger candidate, but he’s been a solid bat off the bench for Baltimore, and a defensive star.
His swing rediscovered, Rickard delivered, and in a big way. He batted .349 with a .929 OPS before the Orioles called him up on April 28, topping things off with a 5-for-5 day at the plate on April 20. There wasn’t one day when Rickard felt like he was “back,” but by mid-April, he felt pretty good.
“It kind of just builds up to that,” he said. “One day you’ll feel great, the next day not so great. It’s a momentum thing. A week straight, a couple weeks straight I was feeling good. I looked at my video and I was pretty consistent. That’s when I knew I was on to something. Baseball is an everyday battle to find your swing.”
Eight days after his career day in the minors, he was back up in the bigs, back to chartered flights and Ruth’s Chris catering.
And right back down again one day later, only to be recalled on May 13. He hit two home runs with the Orioles the next day and hasn’t been back down since.
“It’s not easy, ever, for anybody, going back to the minors after being here,” Baltimore outfielder Trey Mancini said. “You have two choices. You can either sulk and take it the wrong way or work hard and get yourself back up here. It’s been really impressive to watch Joey. He’s a fantastic player, a great teammate, and I’ve become good friends with him. It’s really good to have him back.”
On this beautiful Wednesday afternoon in early June, Mancini will get the start over Rickard at New York’s Citi Field. Neither team will generate any offense — both manage just five hits on the day — and the Orioles will take a 1-0 lead over the Mets on an eighth-inning sacrifice fly by Manny Machado.
Rickard will enter the game in the eighth inning as a defensive replacement. He’ll come up in the ninth for his lone at-bat and be hit by Mets pitcher Robert Gsellman. Shortly after being plunked by Gsellman, he’ll be plucked by him, caught off first base. It will be an ignominious finish to a rather boring day.
But one day in the big leagues beats a thousand days at a desk, and if anyone knows that, it’s Rickard.
Rickard’s father, John, instilled a particular work ethic into his son.
A tilesetter by trade, the elder Rickard “still works seven days a week on his hands and knees,” his son said. “I can’t really call him up and complain about anything. Back to the perspective thing, it’s life and it’s baseball. Good things happen, good things don’t. It’s about being through enough ups and downs to expect it.”
Rickard “is a baseball player,” Showalter said. “Show him where the game is and he’ll go play in it. I don’t think he takes anything for granted, and that’s a real tribute to his mom and his dad. This guy has got his feet on the ground. He treats every day like it can be taken away. That’s why he continues to be coveted by people. You know what you’re getting from him.”