Oviedo quickly climbing his way onto spot with St. Louis Cardinals pitching staff
For several months now, Johan Oviedo has been climbing.
Sometimes the climb is literal.
As in, to the roof of his family’s home in La Habana, Cuba, where he spent baseball’s pandemic break trying to stay in shape on gym equipment underneath the open sky.
Early reviews have two thumbs up.
Oviedo, the 6-foot-6, 22-year-old fireballer was perhaps the most surprising name added to the Cardinals’ roster for Summer Camp at Busch Stadium. After uneven results in his first trip to Double-A last summer, he seemed ticketed for a return engagement in the Springfield rotation.
A promotion to Memphis could’ve been counted as a solid success. Instead, Oviedo set his sights higher, and could force a hard decision through his hard work.
“I knew this (was) going to be a big year for me,” Oviedo said Saturday evening. “The offseason was like, working, always right there, and (trying) to get ready for spring.
“I was getting ready for this opportunity. I’m not gonna say it was gonna go this far away, but in my mind, I was expecting to do more than I was supposed to probably be.”
The hard work has not gone unnoticed or unremarked upon. The seizing of the opportunity, too, could almost be expected from a player who, after having been in the United States for less than three years, taught himself fluent English from watching American television.
That willingness to immerse and drive to succeed translates on the field even as he largely eschews translation off it.
“The more you’re around it the more you get an understanding of where you fit,” Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said, “and it’s good to see he’s got his head around thinking he fits and belongs and is ready and wanting to.”
One of the places Oviedo has belonged — whether by volunteering or assignment — is as a de facto ball boy. Since MLB’s rules for returning to play during a pandemic have introduced limits on the amount of people permitted to handle equipment, Oviedo was drafted into service on Friday evening as the provider of baseballs and individual rosin bags for Kwang Hyun Kim and Adam Wainwright.
He sat on a folding chair next to the dugout, bright blue surgical gloves on his hands, running out to the mound between each simulated inning to make the necessary swaps. Between trips, he was observing the way established professional pitchers handle their business.
Shildt observed him observing.
“I watch a lot,” Shildt said. “That’s part of my job. And I watch how guys go about their business. With Ovi, you look in the dugout or you look at him in the stands and he’s paying attention. He’s studying what’s going on so he’s learning from others. And then he’s got the ability to ask questions, and the most important thing is to listen, and take the information and advice to heart.”
Back in Cuba this spring, when he wasn’t using his home gym equipment, Oviedo would climb the same side staircase to his roof to unleash pitches into a blanket. His father, Lazaro, taped a strike zone onto the blanket’s center and threaded a wooden rod through its bottom in order to help hold it more firmly in place.
All the better to protect the walls of the family’s home, too.
“I was working on especially my slider” during the break, Oviedo explained. “In the beginning of the season last year in Double-A, I was getting beat by lefties, so I was trying to figure out what pitch I can use to take them out, put them away. I found the slider can work a lot and become my second best pitch after working that much on that pitch.”
Matt Wieters, who caught Oviedo on Saturday night, was impressed by the newfound consistency in Oviedo’s breaking ball and his ability to throw it for strikes. That skill, paired with his substantial frame, makes standing in against him into a tall order.
“You can tell he has a special fastball,” Wieters said. “It kind of gets on you and you know that from the get go. But his offspeed stuff was much improved today from when I caught him in spring training.
“If he can mix in those two pitches, which are very good as well, but just getting the consistency of feeling the spin off it is going to take him to a whole other level.”
With perhaps as many as 17 slots available for pitchers on the opening day roster, Oviedo could be two weeks away from his Major League debut. That’s a breakneck climb for a pitcher who was more than three years younger than the average Texas Leaguer last summer.
“You always expect something more than what you can do in the field, sometimes,” Oviedo said. “You’re expecting good results, more when you work for it and you’ve got people waiting for those results, like my family.”
When Oviedo returns to his family in Cuba this winter, he’ll likely do so with Major League experience on his resume. Still, the work will continue, and the climb will begin anew.
