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Tribe’s ‘Little Cowboy’ got his start with Scrappers
By Chuck Murr
GOODYEAR, Ariz.
Hard to believe it has been nearly 11 years since Josh Tomlin began his pro baseball career in the Mahoning Valley.
“Some days it seems a lot longer, sometimes it’s like yesterday,” the right-hander said after a morning practice at the Cleveland Indians spring training camp.
Tomlin is certain of one thing: the groundwork for accomplishing his lifelong dream of pitching in the World Series last fall was established at Eastwood Field in 2006 with the Scrappers.
“It has been a fun ride and it started there,” he said. “I remember my first game. I went three or four innings and had a lot of butterflies. I still do, whether it is a spring game or the playoffs. The day you don’t, I think that’s when it is time to quit.”
Tomlin does not have much quit in him. He overcame long odds to get to the majors, and longer odds to get back after Tommy John surgery in 2012 and shoulder surgery in 2015. He came back last season to go 13-9 and then get key playoff wins over Boston and Toronto.
“I’m grateful to the team for not giving up on me,” he said. “I sure wasn’t going to quit, but they made it easier by having confidence in me.”
His gritty determination underscores what Brad Grant, the Indians’ scouting director then, said when Tomlin signed his first contract on June 9, 2006, as a 19th-round pick out of Texas Tech.
“He’s an athletic right-handed pitcher who we are excited about entering into our system,” said Grant. “As a two-way player at shortstop and a Friday night starter, we feel Josh still has some upside developmentally once he starts focusing solely on pitching. He is a very good strike thrower.”
Over his last three seasons in Cleveland, Tomlin has issued only 42 walks over 339 innings.
“Sometimes it’s a fault. I’m too much around the plate and give up homers,” he admitted. “I find it hard to give in. You are going to have to beat me. Sometimes, I get beat.”
He didn’t give in or get beat in his big-league debut on July 27, 2010, keeping the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez from hitting his 600th career homer. Tomlin allowed one run and three hits over seven innings — naturally without a walk — in a 4-1 win.
“It was an outstanding effort,” recalled then-manager Manny Acta, now third-base coach in Seattle. “He was very poised. He had heart. That’s why I call him, ‘The Little Cowboy,’ because he won’t back down from anybody.”
Tomlin doesn’t recall feeling poised and said advice from former Indians star Charles Nagy gave a needed boost.
“I had to try and slow myself down,” he said. “I was pretty excited when I thought about my first pitch was going to be to Derek Jeter. I almost hit him.
“Before the game, Nagy told me not to change a thing and that my stuff would work up here. I believed him. I had to.”
Tomlin was not quite sure what to believe at age 21 when he arrived at Mahoning Valley.
“I’d never been up north and it was quite a change, not just baseball-wise, “ he said “I was fortunate to live with a good host family. They told me what guys had done and the path they had taken. It was kind of cool to hear stories of guys like C.C. Sabathia and others.
“At first, it seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Your goals seemed so far away. You think, ‘What kind of path am I going to take?’ You realize a lot of guys had to take the same road.”
In 2006, “the road” meant long bus rides.
“You’ll never forget ‘em,” Tomlin said. “It could be a grind. Guys dealt with it differently. Middle of the bus, guys were quieter, thinking about home, thinking about life. Back of the bus? Let’s just say crazy. I was a bit of both, not always a saint, but knew when it was enough and got back to what I was there to do.”
Tomlin says everybody in the Indians clubhouse is focused on what need to be done to get back to the World Series.
“It was a great experience that didn’t quite end how we wanted,” he said of the extra-inning loss in Game 7 to the Chicago Cubs that kept the Indians without a world title since 1948.
“There’s 30 teams right now pushing for the same thing. We know what it took, how hard it was to get there, and then how crushed we were to be so close. But we went out and added a big bat [Edwin Encarnacion] and some others. That helps your mindset. It shows guys want to come here, shows the owners want to win.
“When you get all the guys pulling the same way on the rope, great things are possible. We saw that last year.”
“The Little Cowboy” would love to be the one to use that rope to finally lasso a world championship for his teammates and fiends in northeastern Ohio.