Detroit —The temperature in the Grand River — which is still the longest river in Michigan — topped out at 37 degrees on Friday. It was probably colder than that when the newest Tiger, right-hander Mason Englert, took his morning dip Friday.
“I’ve been doing it for about a year,” said Englert, the Forney, Texas native who lives now in the Grand Rapids area with his girlfriend. “I get up, eat breakfast, set a timer on the bank and just lay back in the water. Usually, have my eyes open. It’s early morning. I like to get the sunlight in my eyes to start the day. I focus on a point in the distance and like, breathe and allow myself to feel what I’m feeling but not react to it.”
There are two things that drive this 23-year-old, whom the Tigers on Wednesday selected away from the Texas Rangers with the fifth pick in the Rule 5 draft — clean mental health and becoming a starting pitcher in the big leagues. Sometimes, the pursuit of one benefits the other.
Like cold exposure. Like putting yourself in extreme environments and training your mind to remain calm.
“I notice in the game when the crap is hitting the fan, I don’t feel the old surge of like, ‘Oh, crap, crap, crap,’ like I used to,” he said. “Just stay really calm. It’s more taking an observant view of the situation and that makes it easier to decide how to get out of it.”
Being able to control breathing and channel adrenaline can be as big an asset as a riding fastball for a professional athlete. Englert didn’t go to college, but he’s got advanced knowledge of neuroscience.
“You probably know this, but adrenaline in the body and brain come from two different sources,” he said. “There is a way to get that body boost without having the adrenaline that causes the panic and anxiety in the brain. I’ve definitely played with the breathing methods and the cold to do that, and I can feel it when I’m pitching.
“I feel very calm and quiet, but I can feel that shakiness and excitedness through the body. It’s really cool and it has definitely helped out a lot.”
Englert’s baseball journey is just beginning, but he’s packed a lot already into his life journey.
He was born less than a year after his parents Tom and Leeann lost two older siblings — daughter Madison and son Morgan — in an auto accident.
“Mason pretty much saved our lives,” Tom Englert said in a 2018 article in The Athletic. “When he was born, it was like we had a purpose again and we started slowly to heal.”
Try carrying that through your life. But Mason never faltered.
“My parents were so excited (when they got the Rule 5 news),” Englert said. “My dad texted ‘BIG-LEAGER’ in all caps. That’s the opportunity and the mindset. My mom probably had some bittersweet behind her eyes. Like, with Texas, I was close to home. But she couldn’t be more happy. She knows how happy I am here in Michigan.
“They just have to travel a little more to see me.”
Bigger than baseball
Englert was a high school star in Texas, posting 55.1 consecutive scoreless innings in one stretch and was committed to Texas A&M before the Rangers took him in the fourth round.
But, going through Tommy John and the pandemic and then struggling through his first instructional league — he could feel the darkness seeping in.
“I had some pretty tough mental-health problems my first full season outside the field,” he said, candidly. “And it came to a point where it was so rough, I was like, ‘I can’t accept this is how I have to live for the rest of my life.’ So I did a deep dive into a bunch of areas like dieting, cold, meditation — all those things. And none of it was with the intent to improve my performance as a baseball player.
“Honestly, if my mind is not healthy, I could not care less about what I do on the field. It’s all about having a healthy mind and enjoying life; that’s more important to me.”
Fortunately, all those things also feed into being a better baseball player.
“All these practices I’ve done have made me love life to the fullest but also have contributed to my mental fortitude on the field,” he said.
Englert is only two years into his professional career, losing 18 months to Tommy John surgery and recovery and sitting out the pandemic year of 2020. And yet, with 21 starts at High-A Hickory and three at Double-A Frisco last year, he showed more than enough to get on the Tigers’ radar.
He has a mid-90s fastball that plays extremely well up in the zone and an elite changeup. He also features a slider-cutter hybrid that he figured out in the middle of last season and used effectively. In his 21 starts at Hickory, he posted 136 strikeouts with just 31 walks.
A strike-thrower who can miss bats with multiple pitches — yes, please, said Tigers president Scott Harris, who will give Englert an opportunity to compete for a rotation spot in the spring.
“It is a difficult task for any Rule 5 player, but for him, I think there’s a chance his stuff will tick up even more being another year out from surgery,” Harris said. “We think he has the (pitch) shapes and the power to compete against Major League hitters and we’re going to see if he can do that.”
Tough task ahead
Englert has already noticed his strength ticking up in the workouts. He’s training at Elite Performance in Grand Rapids and he’s topping his old personal bests by a couple of miles per hour.
“I’m not promising I’ll come out throwing 97 mph, but just beating my personal record by a mile per hour and it’s the second week of December — I’ve never done that before,” he said. “So I am looking forward to it.”
Englert, though, knows that velocity isn’t the end-all, be-all for him. He’s learned the danger of getting too high on his own radar-gun readings. Coming out of Tommy John, he was stronger and throwing as hard as he ever had in his life.
“I was feeling like, ‘Man, I’m never going to get hit again,’” he said. “I was 19 and I was on top of the world throwing to invisible hitters (in bullpen sessions) and striking everybody out. Then I really had to look inward after I started getting hit, like, obviously, there’s more that I need to do here.”
He got roughed up badly in his first instructional league with the Rangers. Which, he said, taught him more about pitching in those two weeks than his entire 18-month recovery.
“I absolutely got shelled for the first time in my life,” he said. “I couldn’t throw a strike. I was getting hammered everywhere. I struggled with my sleeping. It’s the first time I experienced anxiety from not performing well in my life. My mind was just a wreck at that point.”
That’s when he started researching and studying meditation, breathing techniques and cold exposure. It’s also when he taught himself a new grip on his changeup — also career-changing.
“I can’t side-spin the ball, so I was doing a deep dive on the internet on how to make the ball move without the ability to side-spin it,” he said.
He came upon an article by Utah aerodynamics professor Barton Smith.
“He had a good blog about seam-shifted weight and how the airflow is affected over the ball by different seam positions,” Englert said. “I really dove into that and caught on to it quickly and found a grip that gave me the right spin efficiency.”
All of a sudden, he had a changeup that not only had the right velocity contrast to his heater; it also had the sinking action of a splitter.
“It’s been huge,” he said. “I think it graded out as my best pitch last year.”
It would be extremely rare for a Rule 5 pick to win and keep a rotation spot in his first season. Even Johan Santana, probably the most decorated pitcher to come out of the Rule 5 draft, only made five starts his rookie year with Minnesota.
Englert, though, is not shying away from the challenge.
“I have to win it before I get there,” he said. “There is a great quote: ‘A victorious warrior wins war before he goes in and a defeated warrior looks for victory when he is in war.’ The best thing I can do is prepare my mind as much as possible, come as calm and as non-reactive as possible and just get myself as mentally prepared as possible.
“I know the physical part is going to be there. It’s just all about getting the mindset right, being quiet, being still.”
Like taking a morning dip in a chilly river.
Twitter@cmccosky