CHEYENNE – Trenton Rodriguez’s trust in his fielders helps shape his approach on the mound.
Rodriguez isn’t worried about opposing batters making contact with his pitches. Instead, the Cheyenne American Legion Post 6 hurler anticipates his pitches to be put in play.
“It’s not trying to make them miss, it’s been trying to make them hit it, so when you focus on that and try to get outs, it becomes more beneficial,” he said. “It’s just been finding the plate and trying to make them hit it.
“A lot of it has to do with trust on the team and trusting those guys to make that play. I think I’ve been trusting my teammates this year a lot more.”
The mindset seems to be working.
In his last two starts, Rodriguez tossed consecutive no-hitters. The first was a 10-0 win over the 406 Flyers (Billings, Montana) on July 10 and the second came last Sunday in a 11-0 victory against the Colorado Rogue in the semifinals of the Gabe Pando Memorial tournament, which Post 6 went on to win.
“Everything was connecting, everything was feeling good,” he said.
The two no-hitters came in different fashion. The first featured Rodriguez doing a lot of the work himself, piling up 11 strikeouts. The second saw three strikeouts and help from the guys behind him. He said center fielder Wyatt Haught made a couple of no-hitter saving plays in both outings.
“He’s dominated the strike zone and he’s been able to do it with three different pitches. His fastball is firm and tough to hit, and then when he mixes the breaking ball and change-up off the fast ball, he’s able to collect a ton of outs,” Post 6 manager Ty Lain said. “He’s not falling behind, he’s working ahead and just dominating the other team.”
Rodriguez has posted a 6-2 record in nine starts this summer with a 1.76 earned-run average. He can build on that next week at the Wyoming Class AA state tournament. The top-seeded Sixers open the tournament against eighth-seeded Evanston at 10 a.m. Monday in Sheridan.
The righty’s strong season has come as he battles a hearing disease known as Ménière’s disease. It causes hearing loss, ear ringing, and vertigo. And in Rodriguez’s case, severe vertigo.
The condition started during Christmas break, he said, and forced him to redshirt during his freshman campaign with Mount Marty University, which is a National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics school in Yankton, South Dakota. By the time the end of spring rolled around, he had learned how to live with the rare, incurable disease. The treatment helped, and he was back with the Sixers early in their season.
“I know how to cope with it now,” he said. “You just have to deal with it. When it comes it comes, when it goes, it goes.”
Rodriguez’s second no-hitter was a walk away from being a perfect game. The free base came in the final inning.
“I didn’t even realize it was a perfect game until I stepped off the back of the mound and I looked at Mason Tafoya at third (base) and his jaw dropped, and then I realized,” he said. “But that took the pressure off. Even though I knew it was still a no-hitter, it took the pressure off.”
Rodriguez’s change-up helped him keep batters off balance this season, and has improved since last year, Lain said. Once he got back for his final season with the Sixers, he had shaken off the symptoms from Ménière’s the best he could and was putting everything together.
“By the time he got to us, he seemed like the same normal Trenton – just a little bigger, a little stronger, a little more athletic,” the skipper said. “You could see he’d done a lot of work on his change-up and really developed that pitch.”
Rodriguez said he’s also developed the mentality of preparing for things to not always go as planned. When he prepares for something to go wrong, it doesn’t affect him as much as when something does go wrong, he said.
He didn’t go into those contests expecting to throw no-hitters, he said he just went into those games trying to pitch the best he could.
“He’s not nibbling, he’s going right into attack mode and throwing his stuff in there, and he has really good stuff,” Lain said. “So when he does that, he’s very difficult to hit … hopefully we can keep him rolling.”
