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Justin Ramsey had it all planned out.
Grayson Rodriguez’s inevitable major league call-up was approaching last summer, and Ramsey, his coach through a climb to top prospect status, wanted to mess with Rodriguez in delivering the news. Maybe Ramsey would invent something Rodriguez was doing wrong and get him worked up defending himself before telling him with a smile he’d have to work on it in Baltimore.
Last week’s reality was a bit more chaotic. Ramsey, Norfolk’s pitching coach, pulled Rodriguez off the field during catch, and the coaching staff played it straight. It was still a rewarding moment for a coach whose instructional prowess, deft personal touch, and attention to detail have influenced a generation of top Orioles pitchers.
“I spent a lot of time with him, so for him to be the one that initiated that whole thing was pretty special,” Rodriguez said. “Really, I wouldn’t be here without him. He’s been a big part of my career, and just a blessing to me.”
‘A proactive coach’
Ramsey, a funky righty with a high leg kick, pitched at Oral Roberts for a man named Rob Walton — known then and now as “The Wizard” for his ability to work with any kind of pitcher — and used that as a model for his own coaching foundation.
He pitched for the independent Long Beach Armada for a few summers after graduating, but still found time to help coach the pitchers at the junior college he attended, Sacramento City College.
From there, he spent four years at Long Beach State, then four seasons at Nova Southeastern, a Division II power in Florida that won a national championship in 2016.
He learned plenty at each stop, including that he enjoyed the good-cop aspects of coaching rather than the other side. But with pitching development becoming more advanced with technology and analytics, he knew competence in that field was required to coach at higher levels.
One such enrichment trip brought him to an event called Pitchapalooza, a coaching clinic where in 2017 he met Chris Holt, then with the Houston Astros. A year later, Mike Elias brought Holt to Baltimore to lead pitching development in the minors.
“I was looking for guys who had experience with leveraging information for developing pitchers,” said Holt, now the Orioles’ major league pitching coach and director of pitching. “I talked to a handful of people in my due diligence, and Greg Brown, the head coach at Nova, said, ‘Look, Ramsey has been great. I’d love to keep him, but he’s way too good to be here.’ ”
Holt found that at a small school without the ability to bring in top recruits, Ramsey’s success “spoke volumes of just his commitment to being a proactive coach.”
“With the direction we were heading, that’s the quality that I was looking for,” Holt said.
A man called Dad
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Ramsey’s first stop was Low-A Delmarva in 2019, and he found comfort in coaching an age group he knew well. He understood that college-age players worked well in a loose atmosphere where they knew their coach was invested in them. Before long, they began calling him Dad.
“He’s a people person, as much as he doesn’t like to admit it,” said left-hander Drew Rom, who starred on that staff at age 19. “He likes being around everyone and likes having fun and everything, but he is very serious about his work. … As a person, he just wants to see everyone succeed.”
In 2019, doing so meant leveraging data and technology. Rom said that they viewed Ramsey as “basically Holt’s right-hand man” and that the philosophies he espoused were straight from the top. Ramsey was learning along with them in some cases, but still had his traditional coaching background to fall back on.
“I think he does a really good job at balancing the analytical part and then being a player’s coach,” said left-hander Nick Vespi, whose career took off that season in Delmarva. “He played Indy ball, he knows what it’s like to grind and do a lot of this stuff, so he’s easy to relate to.”
‘You feel like you belong’
Those Shorebirds won 90 games. Nearly every pitcher on the staff got better — Rodriguez, Vespi, and Félix Bautista are already in the majors. But one story involving Rodriguez, the previous summer’s first-round pick, has become legendary.
Rodriguez skipped a start in April to work on his changeup, a process that could have taken months. Using a TrackMan data-capturing system and an Edgertronic slow-motion camera, Ramsey helped Rodriguez learn to throw an elite changeup almost immediately.
Ramsey said: “I remember how much fun it was to have the technology readily available every day to go through and speed up the process of what I used to do without it: understanding break charts, how to apply it, where we’re trying to get pitches, and seeing how adjustments work through the Edgertronic and how the ball is coming out and adjustments in grips apply to the breaks and literally seeing it happen in real time as opposed to using the eye test in the bullpen and going and watching it in a game and finding out later.”
Ramsey is quick to push credit the pitcher, even if it also validated a coach in a new environment.
“The fact that his aptitude is off the chart made it a very easy coaching moment, but to see how it was applied, one, it helps you feel like you belong,” Ramsey said. “You think you do, but to actually have something like that solidified, and then two, it just kind of gives you confidence … to explore those possibilities with everyone.”
‘He was a guy I knew I could trust’
Ramsey was set to be at Double-A Bowie in 2020, but the pandemic meant he was there instead as part of the alternate site, where prospects and major league depth trained all summer. There, he said he received a “trial run” at handling older players either about to reach or coming down from the majors, and watched closely how coaches like Buck Britton and Kennie Steenstra navigated those dynamics.
The next summer at Bowie, many pitchers from that Delmarva team were back under his umbrella — as well as some of those experienced pitchers from the alternate site trying to move up.
Mike Baumann shared organizational pitcher of the year honors with Rodriguez in 2019 after a dominant year featured a no-hitter for Bowie, but a serious elbow injury in 2020 halted his climb. He still wasn’t himself in 2021 in Bowie, but wasn’t ready for Ramsey’s suggestions related to his delivery and arm path just yet.
In those situations, Ramsey said he has to be mindful that it’s the player’s career at stake, not his own. He understood why Baumann was hesitant to make a change, especially in a year he was trying to prove he was healthy and make it to the majors. Ramsey believes pushing a player who isn’t ready to listen can often have the opposite effect and delay the process, so instead he works on the pitcher’s terms.
Baumann said: “He’s always there for you. Every day I showed up to the field, he was right there to help me. He’d listen to what I had to say. … It was hard times for me. But he was a guy I knew I could trust, and we kind of laugh about it a year or two later and I tell him, ‘Yea, you were right about all that.’ He just says, ‘Yea, I know.’ ”
‘He’s going to be in everyone’s corner’
When he was elevated to Triple-A in 2022, all those relationships and success stories made a tough job a bit easier. Coaching in Triple-A is complicated by the reality that many players either are about to be or used to be in the majors, to say nothing of the constant shuttle of players going up and down.
Because of that, he and Holt try to be as clear as possible on what can get a player to the majors, and Ramsey works at the player’s pace to implement those plans.
“There’s still development because that’s why they’re in Triple-A, whether they’re on their way up or on their way down, they’re there for a reason — otherwise they wouldn’t be there,” Ramsey said. “They understand that.”
For Vespi, 2022 in Norfolk was his third season with Ramsey. Despite all the different responsibilities, he’s “been the same every year, and that goes to show you how good of a coach he is,” he said.
Baumann, who eventually made the majors in 2021 but spent long stretches in Norfolk with Ramsey last summer, was glad to have him as a resource.
“He just kind of took the time with me, like, ‘This is what you need to do to get back up and to stay there and be at your best against some of the best hitters in the world,’ " Baumann said. “It was just something where I had to continue to put trust in him. I know he’s going to be in everyone’s corner down there.”
Rom arrived in Norfolk at the end of last summer and was glad this spring to be returning in pursuit of his major league debut with a coach he trusts as much as anyone he’s ever worked with.
“To have that relationship with him and knowing he’s not going to steer me wrong — there’s nothing that he’s going to say that’s going to surprise me at all, because I’ve heard it all and seen it all from him, and everything that he does has worked,” Rom said.
His highest-profile pupil, Rodriguez, has the same kind of relationship. On the Baseball Bar-B-Cast podcast this winter, Rodriguez called Ramsey a “special human.” From Delmarva to alt site to Bowie to Norfolk, he’s made nearly 50 starts and worked daily with Ramsey for nearly four full summers, and believes the coach knows him “just as well as I know myself.”
That’s why the sit-down when a disappointed Rodriguez reported to Norfolk last month after not making the Orioles’ roster out of camp so meaningful.
When Ramsey and Britton, Norfolk’s manager, told him to just go be himself and be his best, they’d seen it plenty — and it meant something coming from them. And it meant a whole lot more when, barely a week later after a line drive to Kyle Bradish’s foot juggled the Orioles’ rotation and required Rodriguez to be called up, it was Ramsey who brought him into the office to deliver the news of his call-up.
“I guess it happened the best way possible,” Rodriguez said.
jon.meoli@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Jon Meoli is the Baltimore Banner's Orioles columnist and head women's ice hockey coach at Loyola University Maryland.
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