In June 2010, the Cleveland Indians selected highly touted Ole Miss ace Drew Pomeranz with the fifth overall pick in Major League Baseball’s amateur draft. Six years later, Pomeranz is trying to prove he’s worthy of all that original hype.
The 27-year-old left-hander is in the midst of a career season, taking the sixth-lowest ERA in all of baseball (2.47) into his first start with the Boston Red Sox, which will come Wednesday night against the San Francisco Giants. He boasts an impressive 1.06 WHIP, managed to go 8-7 through 17 starts with the abysmal San Diego Padres and has allowed just one earned run in his last three outings combined.
If you told baseball observers back in 2010 that Pomeranz would produce these numbers in 2016, they likely wouldn’t be surprised. Why? Here’s a brief list of pitchers taken after Pomeranz in a stacked 2010 draft: Matt Harvey (7th overall), Chris Sale (13th overall), Aaron Sanchez (34th overall) and Noah Syndergaard (38th overall).
Of the four players taken ahead of Pomeranz, one is the reigning National League MVP (Bryce Harper) and another has a legitimate chance of winning this year’s American League MVP (Manny Machado).
“People kind of forget, when you follow this guy’s career, this guy was a premium guy coming out of college,” Red Sox president of baseball Dave Dombrowski, who was with the Detroit Tigers when the Indians drafted Pomeranz, said in a conference call last Thursday. “He was the fifth pick in the country back then. We absolutely loved him. We were sad he went to a club in our own division at the time.”
It’s been a bumpy ride for Pomeranz since then, however. Before he even reached the big leagues, Cleveland dealt the Tennessee native, along with three other players, to the Colorado Rockies in return for Ubaldo Jimenez. Pomeranz stumbled to a 4-14 record and a 5.20 ERA over three years in Colorado and was relegated to the bullpen.
He enjoyed better success in 2014 and 2015 after being traded to the Athletics, compiling a 3.08 ERA and 146 strikeouts over 155 innings pitched in Oakland, but still was used mostly as a reliever. He had to beg the Padres to give him a shot at starting in San Diego this season, and while their experiment paid off in the first half, Pomeranz still has yet to handle a larger workload than the 102 innings he’s logged in 2016 to date.
So, what made the Red Sox confident in trading for a guy who entered 2016 with a career 14-24 record and 4.07 ERA? For Dombrowski, it was the belief that Pomeranz’s recent success is a sign he’s finally harnessed the talent that made him one of the top prospects in baseball just six years ago.
“Sometimes it takes time for guys to find themselves,” Dombrowski added. “He found himself in the bullpen with Oakland. Actually, if you look at his numbers the last couple of years, he pitched well.
“This year he just took it to another level. We like his ability, we like his age — he’s 27 years of age and coming into the prime years of his life.”
Thumbnail photo via Brad Penner/USA TODAY Sports Images
