In the first round of the MLB draft on Sunday evening, the Giants looked at every amateur player available in the draft, every high school senior, JC transfer, and eligible college player, and decided they were going to take a pitcher.
In the second round, they did the same thing.
And the third. And the fourth. The fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth. It wasn’t until the tenth round that the team took a position player, and overall they took 14 pitchers out of 20 picks, which seems lopsided but not excessive, until you realize that the most likely guys to reach the majors got taken in the first few rounds, and everyone after that has a talent and maybe they’ll figure the rest of it out?
Friends, they will almost certainly not figure the rest of it out.
So the Giants looked at the amateur talent in this draft and made a big bet on pitching. Now, they weren’t the only ones: The Dodgers took pitchers with 17 of their 19 picks, and the Angels went with pitching for all 20 of their selections. Maybe they all saw something in the talent pool, or (as Grant argued) they wanted to load up on pitchers because of the elimination of the short-season leagues, or they were all just the best players available for their teams when they got picked.
Regardless, the Giants are looking to compete by developing pitching, just like they did back in the good times, when they were winning World Series on the backs of Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, and Madison Bumgarner. But this time, they’ll have to do it without Dick Tidrow.
Tidrow died suddenly yesterday at home in Lee’s Summit, Missouri at the age of 74. As a player, he played 13 seasons in the majors, making 620 appearances mostly for the Indians, Yankees, and Cubs, with a year each with the White Sox and Mets tacked on at the end of his career. With the Yankees, he won two World Series and watched his teammate Ron Guidry win the 1978 Cy Young; in his autobiography, Guidry would give Tidrow credit for helping him develop as a pitcher. In all, he won 100 games and had an ERA+ of 102.
But in these parts, we don’t remember Dick Tidrow for his exploits as a player. With the Giants, he was the pitching guru, who reshaped mechanics and made careers take off. Lincecum, Cain, and Bumgarner were all draft picks who Tidrow scouted as amateurs and whose development he oversaw, and then they became the core of three World Series winning teams. After a while, he moved upstairs, to a less hands-on role with pitchers, and as our good friend Roger Munter likes to say, the team’s pitching development was never quite the same afterwards:
It seems in retrospect that there was something magical about Tidrow, whether it was his eye for talent, his eye for mechanics, or some combination. Maybe his own professional career played a big part in it — George Anders’s book The Rare Find cites Guidry’s Cy Young season as a milestone for Tidrow. Tidrow was a towering 6’4”, while Guidry was 5’11” and 161 pounds, yet it was Guidry who dominated the AL that year. Maybe that was in the back of his mind when he pushed hard for Lincecum. Maybe it was in the front.
When Tyler Beede was drafted in 2014, then-scouting director John Barr cited Tidrow and the coaching staff in general as reasons that he wouldn’t have problems with control as a professional. Tidrow had a reputation, which meant the team had a reputation.
That reputation faded over the next few years, with Tidrow moving into his new role and the team’s pitching development languishing. At the major league level, it’s certainly picked up again in 2021, with career years from Kevin Gausman and Anthony DeSclafani, but instead of an old-school scouting approach, it’s a new-school scouting approach with a heavy emphasis on stats. The development staff tweaks this and measures that and tweaks some more until they come up with something new, something that works.
These are the next generation of Dick Tidrows. Their methods are different, but their goal is the same, and in just a few months they’ve resurrected the Giants’ reputation as a pitching development wonderland. If the team is going to experience the kind of success they did in the first half of last decade, they’ll need some new magic. They have the coaches, they have the tradition of success, and now they have the talent to mold.
I couldn’t say what the best way to honor Dick Tidrow the person would be. But you have to think that a strong homegrown pitching staff would make Dick Tidrow the baseball lifer very proud indeed.