It was so interesting.
If not revealing.
On the day Detroit Tigers owner Christopher Ilitch announced he had fired general manager Al Avila, Ilitch made an intriguing comment about a player in the Tigers’ minor league system.
“There has been continued progress in very important ways that will help us to find impact players for our roster in Detroit,” Ilitch said at a Aug. 10 newsconference. “We’ve seen continued development in the upper levels of our minor league system, players like Ryan Kreidler and Austin Bergner … ”
And then he listed several more players. But it was the first two that caught my ear.
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Kreidler, a talented infielder, has battled injuries this season. I’m convinced he would have made his major league debut already, if healthy.
But who is Bergner, the second prospect listed?
Many fans haven’t heard much about this talented pitcher who has quietly had a fantastic season. He is the Tigers’ 25th-ranked prospect by MLB Pipeline.
“He’s a very interesting young man, really intelligent,” Ryan Garko, the Tigers director of player development, said. “He asks good questions, kind of understands his body and his routine better than most young players.”
Bergner, a right-handed pitcher, was the Tigers’ ninth-round pick in the 2019 draft. After dominating at Double-A Erie, he was promoted to Triple-A Toledo in early August.
“He throws strikes and strikes people out,” Garko said. “He throws the ball in the zone, all the markers that we look at. That’s why he earned that promotion.”
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Making himself better
Bergner, 25, has always been able to throw a fastball and changeup; those two pitches have been his strength for years.
“We told him, ‘If he can’t improve his breaking ball, he would most likely end up in the bullpen,” Garko said. “We had told him, ‘You’ll get four or five starts and then we’ll re-evaluate.
“He worked really hard with Gabe Ribas (the Tigers director of pitching) and with our pitching group on making that slider a usable pitch.”
The Tigers forced him to throw more breaking balls, just to become more comfortable.
“Early in the year… We told him, ‘You have to throw 20 breaking balls in every start,’” Garko said.
Eventually, he figured it out.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Garko said. “We talk about how developing starting pitching is really hard but he pitches five or six innings and he doesn’t throw a ton of pitches, so it’s awesome. Obviously, we redid the whole pitching group, and it’s been a great story for our development group — a young player who’s really made himself better.”
Garko and Bergner go way back. Bergner was a high school phenom, who twice played for USA Baseball’s 18U team. Sports Illustrated named him the third best high school pitcher in 2016, and Garko recruited him to go to Stanford, when he was coaching there.
Bergner went to North Carolina but he had an inconsistent college career.
“He’d be the first to tell you that he was a really big recruit up in North Carolina, and had an up-and-down career there,” Garko said.
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‘We can’t ignore performance’
Bergner throws the same curveball that he’s used since he was 14. But the big key to his development has been his slider.
It’s a mix of concepts that he’s learned from several coaches.
“I took a slider grip that I learned from working with Willie Blair in High-A at West Michigan,” Bergner said. “And then I kind of built off of that in the offseason.”
During spring training, Bergner worked with Ribas on a new grip.
But after a few starts, he wasn’t happy with the results.
“It was just kind of, what we call, cement mixing and not really going the direction I wanted,” Bergner said. “The metrics were saying that it wasn’t going left. It was just kind of dying, like falling and working with gravity because it’s spinning like a bullet.”
He made a tiny adjustment, using the same grip but moved to a different lace on the ball.
Then, everything clicked.
“Now it’s turning into like a legitimate slider,” Bergner said. “It’s definitely helped because it’s hard to throw the righties at the Double-A level if you don’t have an off-speed pitch that’s going away from them.”
If there has been one negative this year, it has been his velocity. His fastball has topped out at 93 mph, in part, because he has spent so much time working on developing a slider and his command.
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“I need to practice throwing harder a lot more,” Bergner said. “I was very focused on trying to develop that slider and my command, and I wasn’t training as much as I should have to throw hard. In order to throw hard, you have to practice throwing hard, just like in order to throw strikes, you have to work on certain bullpens where you’re focused on command.”
In 21 games, he has 104 strikeouts in 99 innings with 1.07 WHIP.
“We can’t ignore performance,” Garko said. “This isn’t a good month or two, or a couple good starts, this is a good four-month run for him.”
There’s no doubt that Bergner has pitched well enough for people to notice.
Even the owner.
Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @seideljeff.