ALTOONA, PA – It doesn’t matter how talented or how special of a player you are… injuries can be absolutely devastating.
Curve outfielder Barrett Barnes has seen his career has been derailed on multiple occasions because of injury… after injury… after injury. Let’s take a look at what I mean:
2012: Barnes got hot in July and suffered a stress fracture in his leg which forced him to miss the rest of the season
2013: He opened the season in extended spring training due to back stiffness. In the beginning of May, he went on the DL with a right hamstring injury. He returned for a short time the went back on the DL, this time for the rest of the season, after straining his right hamstring again.
2014: This season was almost completely wiped out due to another hamstring injury. When he finally returned near the end of the season, he suffered an oblique injury and was done for the season.
2015: This was as close as it got to a complete season for Barnes, totaling 95 games between Bradenton and Altoona. He only missed a short amount of time at the beginning of the season.
To put things in perspective, Barnes played in a total of 101 games from the time he was drafted in 2012 through his 2014 season. As a player drafted out of college, who was already almost 21 years old when he was drafted, the injuries were ruinous to Barnes’ career and played a large role in the major stock in his prospect status as the years progressed. (To compare progressions of college-aged draft picks, Kevin Newman has played in 138 professional games in a little over a calendar year, and that is including a stint on the DL with his eye injury. It took Barnes over three years to play in as many games.)
With last year being his first full season as a professional baseball player, and finishing the year healthy for the first time in his career, Barnes entered 2016 with extremely high expectations to perform to the level that was expected of him when he was drafted.
“This is the first off-season that I came home healthy, so I didn’t have to rehab,” Barnes said. “I was able to work on strength and conditioning, building muscle, and leaning down. I actually could do that stuff rather than get treatment the whole time. I wasn’t going to Pittsburgh to get shots in my legs. I was actually able to go home and work for the first time ever.”
Then came the beginning of the season. Barnes was hit in the head by a pitch during the last day of spring training, right before the players were scheduled to fly north to begin the season. He began the year in concussion protocol.
Barnes really only missed a few games to begin the season, but something was definitely amiss. He began the season hitting a lowly .103 in his first ten games. The slump continued until the middle on May, when Barnes was only batting .221 through May 12th.
He not only had the look of a player that was in a slump; he personified a player who felt as though everything was amiss. What could go wrong, went wrong. I don’t know if it was the realization of the events that led to a disappointing career so far or the fact that he felt this year was his time to break out and the opposite happening, but Barnes seemed distraught, distracted, and helpless.
“I just woke up one day at 8 AM, came to the field at 10 AM, and got to work.”
He couldn’t specify the exact day, what he ate the night before, or what he dreamed that night, but Barnes can remember the moment when the light bulb turned on.
“I wouldn’t consider it an ‘ah-hah!’ moment,” Barnes said. “I just woke up one day and said to myself, ‘the things that you did to get yourself here are the things you need to get back to, so you can get where you want to be’. It was more of a work thing than anything. There wasn’t anything offensively that just clicked, per se. It was more just coming to the ballpark and preparing every single day and giving myself the best opportunities.”
When talking to Barnes and his manager Joey Cora about the changes he made, both made note that it was a change in attitude and work ethic that helped swing the pendulum the other way.
“I think the biggest difference in Barnes is not about health; rather, it’s about work ethic, concentration, and focus,” Curve manager Joey Cora said. “That’s why he has turned his season around. He made a commitment to his workday and routine, and he made a choice to do what he needs to do to prepare for the games. It’s not about health; it’s about preparation.”
And that preparation has worked. When asked when exactly Barnes made some of those adjustments, Cora said to “look at the numbers and figure it out.” Those numbers almost fly off of the paper, too.
- He hit .407 in July, which is best in the Pirates minor league organization.
- He had an OPS of .978 in July, which was among the best in the organization, helping him to be our Player of the Month for July.
- From the span of July 4th through July 28th, he reached base every game for a 22 game on-base streak. He had hits in 20 of those 22 games for an average of .436 (34/78). He had eight extra base hits in that span with an OPS of 1.040.
His batting average has risen from .221 on May 12th to currently at .299, which is seventh best in the Eastern League. I’ve been able to speak with Barnes on multiple occasions, and we’ve talked about if there have been any changes to his approach at the plate to help lead to this recent success. Unlike a lot of players that have a great run of success, Barnes didn’t change to something new to help; rather, he dug into the past to rediscover what got him drafted.
“We kind of just reverted back to what I did before that got me drafted and the things that work for me,” Barnes said. “We were trying to make some adjustments that, on pen and paper, you’d think they would be good for me. I was trying it, but I didn’t believe in it. It just kind of got to a point where we sat down and said, ‘hey, you have what you have, and if it plays, it plays’. If I don’t make it, I wanted to look back and say that I used what I had and wasn’t trying to be anyone else. That’s the big thing I’ve gotten back to. I’m playing the way I played when I was 17 or 18 years old when they picked me.”
Barnes said that he would not allow the injuries, or time away from the game that resulted from injures, to be an excuse, but he needed to overcome those hard times to get to this point. He needed to take a newly discovered ownership of his career and make the conscious effort to make himself better.
“I’ve just gotten back to being a workaholic like I was in college, and that has gotten be back to being in the position I was when drafted with the Pirates,” Barnes said. “I kind of got away from it for personal reasons. I made the decision to get away from it, and it didn’t work for me.”
As well as family members, Curve manager Joey Cora was a big part of bringing these struggles to Barnes’ attention. Altogether, they helped him figure out that the time, effort, and energy Barnes spent to get himself drafted was nowhere near where he was right now.
“When I didn’t put the work in, it translated on the field,” Barnes said. “When I did put the work in, it translated on the field. It’s as simple as what you put into it, you’re going to get out of it. It’s as simple as that. It’s difficult and complex to do on a daily basis, but if you go at it one piece at a time, it becomes a routine, and you can continually do the right things.
Cora was a major part of Barnes discovering this, saying that Barnes had taken ownership of his game preparation and the results were obvious.
“There has been a lot of talking with Barnes,” Cora said. “Obviously, he has matured, and he has taken it seriously. His work days are extremely well executed, and he has shown the results. At the end of the day, I could talk all I want to him, but it’s about him taking ownership of his career, his work day, and his preparation. He has done that.”
Barnes has been extremely grateful for the time and energy that his coach put into him, saying that he couldn’t have rediscovered his career if not for his manager.
“You can’t really put it into words,” Barnes said. “What we’re doing is very difficult, and it’s hard to come across people that have actually done it at the highest level like Joey [Cora], and he’s played with probably the greatest player of this century in Ken Griffey, Jr. and A-Rod. He knows what it takes and what it’s like, and he knows what his life is like with the grind that’s involved with it. If you’re not going to listen to him, you might as well walk away from the game.”
“Your age doesn’t necessarily match your seasoning.”
Cora told Barnes that his age doesn’t match his seasoning when they were having discussions about his career over a month ago, and it is such a true statement. This is really only Barnes’ second full season without any major injuries, and he is now beginning to take advantage of it.
He looks much quicker on the field in the past month than I’ve seen in the past year. On multiple occasions, he has made great defensive plays in foul territory, displaying some bursts of speed that he did not show last summer in Altoona. He also has turned a few singles into doubles by simply not hesitating around first base and kicking on the afterburners on the base paths. With all of the leg/hamstring issues that Barnes had in the past, he looks to be in great shape and well conditioned.
“It still all comes back to your legs,” Barnes said. “I can be here everyday, shag balls, and work on reads. I don’t need to worry about saving it for 7:00 PM anymore, because my legs are there and strong, and they are conditioned now.”
Last off-season, Barnes worked out at Fairchild Sports Performance in Houston, Texas, and he said that the plan would be to go back there this off-season if he continues to remain healthy. He worked out with Jameson Taillon, Mark Melancon, and Brandon Waddell last year, and he credits his off-season workouts for helping him be in great shape mid-season this year.
Overall, Barnes is thankful for his health this season, and he feels fortunate that he gets the opportunity to play the game he loves.
“I’m just so grateful, man. I’ve put in the extra work. You’re going to have your highs and lows, and I’m just grateful that I’m healthy. We are at 100 games and everything feels healthy, and that has never happened before. I’m just going to keep coming out and working, and I’ll keep trying to get better every day.”
Obviously, from a prospect rankings perspective, Barnes dropped to Tier 7 in our Mid-Season Top 50 list from Tier 4 last season. Much of that is because Barnes just turned 25, and simply was not showing any signs of this outbreak before the rankings were released. The struggles were also paired with the long injury history. All that we saw leading up to the rankings was a player who was scuffling, and Barnes was ranked accordingly.
If he has truly turned things around, I would expect Barnes to be on the short list of players to move up to Triple-A from Altoona later this season, possibly if even for a very short stint. He will be Rule 5 eligible again after this season, so he would need to continue to put up big numbers for the Pirates to even think about protecting him.
