Change — Dereck Rodriguez. A lot has changed since the last time I…
By: San Francisco Giants
Tags: Sports, Jokers Corner, Dereck Rodriguez, MLB, San Francisco Giants

A lot has changed since the last time I posted here. It’s the nature of the game for things to change. You’re thinking you’re on one track, then you’re suddenly on a different one. You deal with it, of course, because you never forget how lucky you are to make your living playing a game you love.

But change is not always easy.

Returning to Triple A last month after a year in the big leagues was disappointing for a lot of reasons, the main one being that I didn’t pitch well enough to make that decision an impossibility. But you don’t have the luxury of dwelling on disappointment at this level of the game. You have to adjust your mindset. You work harder. Accept that baseball is a different animal in the minors compared to the big leagues, from the facilities to the crowds.

You’re used to playing in front of thousands of fans in the big leagues, and the first game you play in the minors there’s about 200 people in the stands. You realize, if you didn’t already, how much energy the San Francisco fans give off. They just lift you. In the minors, you have to find that inner energy to pump yourself up. (Also you have to talk in the dugout in a lower voice or the whole ballpark hears you!)

When I returned to the big leagues in late May, I was in the bullpen. Another adjustment to your mindset.

As a starter you’re used to having a routine. You know when you’re going to pitch. You know when you’re going to throw “bullpens,’’ which are pitching sessions off a mound between starts. Now as a long reliever, I don’t know when I’ll get into a game.

But you have to be on your toes. You could get called into a game at almost any time. This is only my sixth year as a pitcher, so the whole thing is relatively new to me, much less pitching in relief. Dutch (Derek Holland), who also went from the starting rotation to the bullpen this season, is helping me a lot with mental part of the game, keeping me focused.

He’s helping me learn how to get my body ready quickly in the heat of the game. He’s my throwing partner, my running partner. We pretty much do everything together in the bullpen right now. We basically have the same role, so it’s either going to be him or me getting the call in a situation. We know when to start stretching and get ourselves ready.

When you’re in the bullpen, you can go days without seeing any action. So, like starters, you stay sharp by throwing bullpens every few days. The challenge is figuring out when. This week, we were off on Monday and I didn’t get into games on either Sunday and Tuesday. I needed to throw a bullpen.

But I couldn’t do it before Wednesday’s game; I had to keep my arm fresh in case I was needed. I wasn’t. So after the game on Wednesday night, when the stands cleared, I threw my bullpen.

I loved spending time in Miami during the last road trip. My family lives in South Florida, so we all spent the off-day on the hotel beach in Key Biscayne. I visited my dad that night.

We hit the first wave of summer humidity in Baltimore, a huge change from the snow just two weeks earlier in Colorado! Then we took a train to New York, which was a lot of fun. I’ve never done that before. We had the whole four cars of the train to ourselves. This was a family trip, so everyone had their wives and kids. The train went straight to Penn Station. Our first day there was an off day, and I celebrated my 27th birthday with a big steak dinner with my fiancé, Ashley.

On your birthday you kind of look back on where you’ve been and where you’re going and maybe what you’ve learned. All I know for sure is that things change, and then they change some more, and you have to figure out how to change too.