Jered Weaver stepped on to the mound of San Bernardino’s San Manuel Stadium to face the Bakersfield Blaze in a rehabilitation assignment on Thursday, but it wasn’t the first time he had taken that hill. The first time would have been back in 2005 when he was a 22-year-old making the seventh start of his career as a professional baseball player. He had been out of the game for a year as he and his agent Scott Boras had held off from signing a contract with the Angels, whom had drafted him in 2004, until the very day before the 2005 June amateur draft. For their efforts, Weaver and Boras were eventually able to negotiate a four million dollar signing bonus to go with his contract to play minor league baseball. This lost year wrangling over bonus money was the reason Weaver fell to the Angels, who held the twelfth pick of the draft, in the first place.
Anyway, the Angels’ High-A affiliate back then was the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, and they were taking it easy with the former Golden Spikes Award winner from Long Beach State who had pitched just three innings in his first start for the Quakes on June 20th. In his seventh start of the season, the Quakes were on the road and were set to play the Inland Empire 66ers in San Bernardino. Jered pitched seven innings in this game and had a 1-0 lead when he left the game. He gave up just one hit and two walks in those seven innings. His fastball was zipping in somewhere between 89 and 91 miles per hour. His curve and change up were also on that night, and Jered, all gangly legs and long across-the-body right arm, was also good for 10 strikeouts against the hapless 66ers.
That seventh start of his season in San Bernardino would be the last he would see of the California League that year. After just seven games of gradually increasing action, Jered had 49 strikeouts in 33 innings pitched, and it was clear that, although he had just gotten started, Jered Weaver was too good for High-A competition, so he was promoted to the Double-A club right after his dominating performance in San Bernardino.
Jered went on to play in eight games for the Arkansas Travelers, and then he pitched for the Surprise Scorpions in the Arizona Fall League, with Howie Kendrick, Brandon Wood, Kendrys Morales, and Billy Butler as his teammates.
The next season, Weaver would start at Triple-A, play in twelve games and sport a 2.10 ERA, get called up to the big leagues twice to join the Angels and win the first nine games of his MLB career, tying Yankee great Whitey Ford‘s record. And then, of course, he would go on to become one of the greatest pitchers in Angel history, bringing him to this point in time as a ten-year veteran near the end of his career fine-tuning his mechanics at a Single-A game following a hip injury.
Weaver’s pitches looked good. His fastball and change up command were impeccable. I’m not sure how fast his four-seamer was going to home plate because the 66ers had the San Manuel Stadium radar gun turned off, but it looked normal, for Weaver. His change ups seemed to defy physics the way they floated the 60 feet, 6 inches to home plate without falling out of the strike zone. Of the eleven outs he accumulated in the 3.2 innings he pitched, three were ground ball outs and four were fly ball outs. Of the four fly balls, none were close to being a home run, as they all were hit to either the shallow or the mid-point of the outfield. But then, it was a very humid night, so that may have helped keep the ball down.
He struck out two, but he did give up three hits and two walks, for a 1.37 WHIP. In the third inning, with men on second and third, a Bakersfield batter hit the ball so hard up the middle that it knocked the glove off of Weaver’s hand when he made a stab at it. That loaded the bases, but Weave got out of the jam by striking out the next batter and then getting a lazy fly ball for the third out. But then came that slow walk at the the end of the inning Weaver customarily makes to the dugout that had gotten a little slower during his last few games with the Angels before going on the disabled list.
Weaver came out to face three batters in the fourth inning, getting two outs before walking his final batter, and then manager Denny Hocking, noticing that Weaver had reached his pre-determined limit, came out to relieve him with the 66ers down 1-0, Bakersfield having scored an unearned run in the second after the 66er catcher airmailed a throw to second base into centerfield. The Angel affiliate would stage a late inning comeback once the Bakersfield starting pitcher left the game and ended up winning the contest 2-1.
Afterwards, Weaver had this to say about his outing: “Mechanically, everything was coming together, so it was a positive and a step in the right direction, for sure. Just being able to throw my off-speed stuff out in front and getting out over my front side was a lot better.”
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