It was 1980 when Calgary spirited Mike Soroka’s favorite hockey team out of Atlanta to the far province of Alberta. It wouldn’t be the last time that strange, cold game skipped town.
Thirty-eight years later, Calgary has given back in a way, in the form of a young, tall, square-cut pitcher who is as cool as Banff in November. Let’s call it even.
“As good Canadians, we try to do our best,” laughed Jim Lawson. “Although, I wouldn’t say we felt guilty about taking (the Flames) to Calgary.”
Lawson is just one of many of our northern neighbors who took note of the 20-year-old Soroka’s major league debut against the Mets on Tuesday. As Soroka’s travel-ball coach back home in Calgary, make that special note – as in flying to New York to pay first-hand witness to the kid’s six-inning victory over the Mets and their Norse giver of lightning, Noah Syndergaard.
“That was the true epitome of how high you can get at the ballgame – hot dogs, beer and one of your students on the mound. Couldn’t get any bigger than that,” Lawson said.
The Braves’ 25-man roster is an ever-evolving organism, undergoing transformative change. Soroka’s place on the team in transition is not assured – but a few more outings like Tuesday’s would go far toward securing that locker in the SunTrust Park home clubhouse he moved into Friday.
Soroka, not the veteran Anibal Sanchez, is scheduled to make Sunday’s start against San Francisco, marking the kid’s home debut. The news took him by surprise when congratulated by a sportswriter Friday afternoon – “Am I? ... I didn’t know. ... I am, OK. ... I was told to get ready for Sunday. ... That’s awesome.” The unpretentiousness of youth is one of the endearing qualities of this entire Braves makeover.
Soroka, for one, wears that attribute, but you must look reeeeal close to see it. He sported a beginner’s goatee Friday, faint to be sure. A sign of his tender years that otherwise go unseen on the mound.
This is Braves baseball today: Soroka’s facial-hair schedule is somewhat more relaxed than his career one. “I’m hoping it will come in in the next year or so,” he said.
His unveiling this week was big, like North American big. Certainly big for the Braves, whose young position players have hijacked this rebuild. Soroka this week, along with 24-year-old Sean Newcomb, served a reminder that this process was supposed to be arm-based, the theme upon which this whole experience was based.
As John Smoltz, both baseball pundit and Braves Hall of Famer, put it: “For them to get back to the promised land, they have to develop young pitchers. There hasn’t been a young pitcher developed in a long time. They have to be able do that from within. If you have six prospects, I think you have to hit on three of them. Two is the bare minimum.”
Here was another step toward filling that prescription. A young pitcher of uncommonly mature presence, Soroka brought steel to his first start. So, if the Mets got a couple of runners on in the fourth and brought the venerable Adrian Gonzalez to the plate, just settle in, get the double-play ground ball and shamble back to the dugout like you’ve been there before.
Far to the north of Atlanta, Soroka’s initial success resonated throughout Calgary and the rest of Canada. The country’s national sports network, TSN, trumpeted the debut. According to Baseball Canada, Soroka now is just the seventh Canadian on a major league roster, so any additions are broadly celebrated.
“You feel (the pride) from coast to coast,” Greg Hamilton, head coach and director of the Canadian national teams. “Certainly from perspective of somebody (like Soroka) growing up here and going through the system and getting to the major leagues, it’s very special. It allows everyone else to dream and touch it and have a sense that it’s possible.”
Soroka’s part of western Canada in particular produces little in the way of enduring baseball talent. In its manufacturing profile, Calgary turns out about the same number of major leaguers as it does string bikinis. “One player per 20 years (out of Alberta), I guess,” chuckled the travel team coach, Lawson.
“It’s a pretty short list,” said Chris Reitsma, an early 2000s reliever who spent three of his seven MLB seasons in Atlanta. “Myself, guy by the name of Jim Henderson who pitched for a couple clubs out of the bullpen (currently on minor league deal with Milwaukee). Besides us two, (Soroka) makes a third one.”
Working with Soroka as a teen in Calgary and with the national junior team, Reitsma grew into the big brother/mentor role. He really couldn’t help himself.
“Whenever you’re a teacher or coach, there are not too many 15-year-olds who are going to have a mature conversation with you about the mental side of pitching. And he did,” Reitsma said. “When you have a student who is physically able to do things, but then also mentally is able to really learn and ask the right questions, you develop an affinity for the kid.”
Working in the Baltimore scouting department, Reitsma would be even happier if Soroka was doing all this in an Orioles uniform.
“We had one crack at him in the draft in 2015. We got word from higher up they wanted a mature bat,” Reitsma said. The Orioles took FSU outfielder D.J. Stewart with 25th pick. Three picks later, the Braves took Soroka.
“We had him lined up for a second pick (the Orioles next picked 36th), but he just didn’t get there.”
The Soroka who controlled the moment Tuesday was old news to those, like Reitsma, who had followed each step of his development.
Yeah, he toyed with the idea of hockey because such flirtation is expected in his part of the world. Soroka thought he wanted to be a goalie, like one of the Flames heroes from their 2004 run to the Stanley Cup final, Miikka Kiprusoff. By the time he rethought his position – believing he might actually like to skate – the other kids had passed him by. Baseball was an agreeable alternative.
“He always loved to be on the field in baseball. He couldn’t wait to hit the field and practice baseball. He had a smile on his face all the time,” Soroka’s father, Gary, remembered.
Soroka didn’t come to that game fully formed. He had begun pitching before the dramatic growth spurt – sprouting nearly eight inches between eighth and ninth grades. Before his velocity could catch up to his size – unable to get by on brute force – he had learn to rely on the nuances of the craft. Many see that was a big benefit to him now. (See the 311-to-76 minor league strikeout-to-walk comparison).
The more he worked with the Canadian National team, the more Soroka was thrown into situations that tested his mental toughness. He held it together in difficult settings in Latin America and the Domincan Republic. When at 17 he started a spring game for the junior national team against the Toronto Blue Jays – and the Jays roughed up both him and the ham-handed defense behind him – Soroka never blinked.
“From the very beginning, he was never afraid,” Reitsma said. “He kept on asking the right questions. He kept on getting better and better. And always loved to compete.”
“You never want to build things too big, everyone has a learning curve, but I think the nice part with Mike you’re getting the potential for a front-of-the-rotation arm who’s a front-of-the-rotation-type human being,” said Hamilton, the national team leader.
Soroka’s beyond-his-years outlook was obvious when answering the question of whether he could have envisioned even a small measure of major league success this soon.
“Envision it, yes. Expect it is a different thing,” he said. “They always told us to envision yourself at this stage because it might happen one day. Kolby (Allard, another pitching prospect) and I spent a lot of days talking about it, especially since the Braves made the rebuild very obvious. It was another thing that made us prepare mentally for that day.”
So, thanks for that, Calgary.
Now, what might Winnipeg and the rest of Manitoba have in the way of reparations for snatching away Atlanta’s hockey mulligan, the Thrashers, in 2011?
“They have quite a few good (baseball) players now, a lot of college guys,” assured Soroka, now one of the leading voices of his country’s prospects.
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