TAMPA — Before Carlos Rodon and Jose Trevino began sharing the same clubhouse last week at Steinbrenner Field — and soon to be Yankee Stadium — there was Amsterdam.
It was 2012, they were both 19 years old and had just finished their freshman years of college. Rodon was already one of the best players in college baseball. Trevino was a third baseman who was trying to make the most of a second chance.
Together, they helped the USA collegiate national team bring home the bronze medal at the Honkbal Week international baseball tournament in the Netherlands.
“Probably one of the most memorable summers of my life, for sure, especially with that group of guys,” Trevino said this week.
Eleven years later, Rodon and Trevino are teammates once again and will form a battery after Rodon signed a six-year, $162 million contract to land in pinstripes this offseason. Both were All-Stars last season in the best years of their careers, which took different paths to The Bronx.
“Those two guys together, I’d love them in my corner,” said former Yankee Andy Stankiewicz, who was an assistant coach on the 2012 national team and is now the head coach at USC.
The 2012 team was stacked with talent and future major leaguers, from Trea Turner and Kris Bryant to Michael Conforto and Marco Gonzales. Rodon was coming off a dominant freshman year at North Carolina State, where he was a finalist for the Golden Spikes Award as the top college baseball player, and his spot in the rotation was secure.
But Trevino, despite a strong freshman season at Oral Roberts, had to fight for his spot on the roster. Team USA began its summer by playing four games against Coastal Plain League opponents. Trevino started one game in right field, and entered the other three as a pinch-hitter (twice for Bryant) then played left field and third base.
In a June 28 game against the Catawba Valley Stars, Rodon made a rare pinch-hit appearance (for Conforto) and singled, putting him in position to score from first when Trevino came up next and hit a three-run triple.
Two days later, in the midst of the Prospect Classic series, Team USA faced a deadline to trim its roster to 22 players in advance of traveling to Cuba for a five-game series against the Cuban national team. In the game that night, Trevino got two at-bats and was going to be removed for a pinch-hitter in the third, but Stankiewicz told him that if the bases were loaded, he could get another at-bat. Sure enough, Trevino came up with the bases loaded and crushed a grand slam.
“As a coach, you get excited about certain players,” Stankiewicz said. “I just fell in love with his work ethic and the player he was. … He hit a slam, and it was just a big smile on his face. As a coach, those are the moments you get excited about because you see a young man do something great, and to be able to enjoy that greatness at that moment, I was obviously very excited for him.”
Still, after the game, general manager Eric Campbell and the coaching staff pulled Trevino out to left field and told him they had to send him home because of the numbers crunch.
Team USA then went to Cuba — its first series in Havana since 1996 because of strained relations between the two countries — for a five-game set. Cuba won the series, three games to two, but it was a special trip for Rodon, whose father immigrated from Cuba as a kid and whose mother is Cuban-American. Facing a Cuban team that featured future major leaguers Jose Abreu, Yuli Gurriel and Aledmys Diaz, Rodon threw six innings of three-run ball in the final game of the series, which Team USA won.
“You saw a young man at 19 years old: fearless, unafraid of anybody, just attacking the strike zone,” Stankiewicz said.
Rodon had to leave the team briefly at the start of the Cuba series to attend the Golden Spikes Award ceremony in New York. But he continued to get his throwing in, sending the staff a picture of himself throwing a bullpen session in the middle of Central Park.
“That just told me everything about him, that he found a way to get his work in, no matter where it was going to be,” said Dave Serrano, the manager of that summer’s team.
After the Cuba series, Team USA flew to the Netherlands for Honkbal Week. Before those games began, a roster spot opened because of an injury, and the coaching staff didn’t have to think twice about how they were going to fill it.
“The entire staff was like, ‘Trevino, Trevino, Trevino,’” Stankiewicz said. “We didn’t want him to go in the first place.”
Trevino met the team in Amsterdam, where the competition included games against Japan, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Chinese Taipei and the Netherlands. He started all eight games at third base, hitting .286, and Rodon posted a 1.42 ERA across 19 innings.
It wasn’t until his next college season that Trevino transitioned to catcher, so he did not form a battery with Rodon, but he remembers playing behind the left-hander and thinking he was “unbelievable.”
“We had a lot of fun, man,” Rodon said. “It was good to experience baseball somewhere else. … We stayed at this place, and they had an amazing breakfast. You walk in and it’s buffet-style, but there were, like, croissants and chocolate croissants and danishes and yogurts and puddings. It was just ridiculous.”
Asked about the breakfast spread, Trevino instantly let out an, “Oh my God,” before reminiscing about it.
The team ended up losing to Cuba in the semifinals and settled for beating the Netherlands in the bronze medal game. But in the process, they got to soak up a different cultural experience, and showed the coaching staff the traits that would make them successful major leaguers down the road.
“You get in Amsterdam and it’s like a parks-and-rec dugout,” Stankiewicz said. “It’s weeds here, weeds there. Bad playing surface. So as a coach, you’re looking to find guys that it doesn’t matter. ‘We’re playing baseball. It don’t matter if I’m playing in a sandlot field or in a stadium.’
“So that was the one thing I remember. Those two, watching them work, it didn’t [matter]. It wasn’t about where they were playing, it was about getting the chance to play baseball.”
Now that will come under the bright lights of Yankee Stadium. The day the Yankees signed Rodon, he and Trevino got back in touch and rekindled their relationship, 10-and-a-half years after entering the USA Baseball fraternity.
Serrano said both players had the work ethic and tenacity to set them apart, even if Rodon showed his competitive fire more outwardly than Trevino.
“I have a lot of respect for those two guys,” Serrano said. “They’re the same in some ways, but they’re very different in their ways. They were solid, solid players, and you could see the look on their face. A lot of those guys on these USA teams are. They walk differently, they talk differently, that’s why they’re part of that. But you could just see the vision in their eyes that they had a goal in mind and they weren’t going to be stopped before reaching their goal.”
Rodon’s undivided attention
Rodon went on a second tour with Team USA in 2013, which begs the question: Is he hoping for a third stint representing his country, this time as part of the World Baseball Classic?
“I would love to do it, it’s just hard — especially when I just signed,” Rodon said. “It’s definitely not the year to do that. Hopefully at a later date, maybe I can do it just to say I did it once. But now, it’s definitely focusing on what’s happening here. It’s hard to take away from that.”
Rotation mates Nestor Cortes and Luis Severino had hoped to pitch in the WBC this spring, but Cortes pulled out late because of a hamstring injury and the Yankees denied Severino’s request because of his injury history.
“It’s great, but there’s a lot of risk, especially for pitchers,” Rodon said. “When is the best time to do that? There is no best time.”
Gerrit Cole, the college baseball rat
Serrano, who played college ball at UC Irvine with current Yankees bullpen coach Mike Harkey, also got an early look at Gerrit Cole when he was the pitching coach on the 2010 national team that featured Cole, then at UCLA.
“What I loved about Gerrit was that with all his accolades … even when we had him, he was a baseball rat,” Serrano said. “He wanted to win, and he was a baseball guy. He knew his stuff, he knew his craft, and I had a lot of respect for him for that.”
Credit: Source link
