Coming into Wednesday’s game with West Michigan, Luke Hayden was the Dayton Dragons’ most successful starting pitcher this season. But he quickly found himself in a jam with the Whitecaps.
Although he usually opens with his fastball, the 22-year-old right hander opted to greet batters with his cutter, which so often is his go-to pitch in the course of a game. He thought the change in routine would throw off the hitters.
On this night the pitch wasn’t catching the strike zone, but he kept coming back to it and the first five West Michigan batters reached base on three walks and two hits.
Instantly, the Dragons were behind 2-0 and Hayden soon was one batter away from reaching his maximum pitch count for an inning – a plateau that would get him pulled from the game.
Todd Hayden, Luke’s dad, had made the drive over from Bloomington, Indiana that night and was in the crowd. A former junior college ball player himself, he had guided his son’s early career and knows him well.
“He was out there overthinking in the beginning of the game,” Todd said. “He’s still learning.”
No one knew that better than Dragons’ pitching coach Willie Blair, who not only is a longtime coach, but spent 12 years pitching for nine different Major League teams.
Blair made a trip to the mound, and he said his message to the young pitcher was clear:
“The cutter has been a pitch he could lean on when he needed to, but it wasn’t working now and he kept doing it. I just challenged him to make an adjustment, to do something else and he agreed.
“He told me he’d go to his fastball, and I was like ‘OK, we got to breathe now. Make the adjustment and let’s go!’”
Hayden was 3-0 on that next batter, which meant one more ball would put him at the 30-pitch limit mandated by the parent club, Cincinnati Reds, and that would be a ticket back to the bench. Instead, he settled in, got the hitter to ground out and escaped the inning without further damage.
In the dugout, Blair sat next to Hayden and gave him what he called a “firm” talk:
“I wasn’t in his face, but I was honest. I let him know he had to pick it up a notch. And he took it the right way, He understood.”
Hayden has a bond with the 59-year-old coach and not just because last year – after he was drafted by the Reds out of Indiana State and finished his introductory tutorial in Arizona – he played the final weeks of the season with the Reds’ Low-A Daytona Tortugas where Blair was the pitching coach.
Like the other Dragons’ pitchers, Hayden knows Blair speaks from mound experience of his own.
“Just about every emotion, every situation they are going through I’ve done already,” Blair said. “I’ve had times when I was really good; times when I was really bad. I’ve started, relieved, been injured, been released and everything in between.
“I’ve been confident and had times I really struggled with my confidence.
“I want them to know it’s not the end of the world when you struggle. You just have to fight your way out of it.”
Hayden buoyed himself before he returned to the mound:
“I was like, ‘All right, you’re not going into the fifth inning like always, so go as far as you can. Give the bullpen a break and put us in the position to win...Let’s go out there and just throw the (expletives) out of the ball!’”
He did just that. Riding his fast ball, he retired 12 of the next 14 batters and by the time he left the game after four innings, the Dragons were ahead, 4-2.
Although Dayton would eventually lose, 5-4, in 10 innings, Hayden again had shown something special that night.
As his dad put it, he showed “some guts.”
Making his mark
He had had a similar outing last spring against Southern Illinois and his Indiana State coaches had encouraged him to pitch his way out of the predicament.
“In the second inning he walked a guy and then a dude hit a two-run homer,” Todd said. “After that he pitched six scoreless innings and ended the eighth with a 6-2 lead.”
Todd said he would not have gotten that chance at Indiana University, where Luke played his first two years of college ball. The Hoosiers had a different pitching philosophy, piecemealing games between several pitchers and pulling them at early signs of trouble.
Hayden – who was” hard-headed at times,” his dad admitted – had struggled in that system.
“My confidence wavered at times, and I didn’t perform,” he said.
That was especially tough for him because he had wanted to be a Hoosier for much of his life.
He grew up in Bloomington, close to the IU campus, and his family has had a connection to the school.
His dad went there and played rugby, Luke said. His uncle graduated from IU and now his younger sister, Ella, is a student there. His mom, Michelle, grew up in Bloomington, though she went to Evansville University.
Growing up, Hayden said he went with his family to various IU football, basketball and baseball games.
“I remember seeing Kyle Schwarber (the Middletown product who starred at IU and now is a home run king with the Philadelphia Phillies) play at old Sembower Field before they moved to Bart Kaufman.
“And when I was young, there was one IU basketball team I really liked. They had Jordan Hulls, Will Sheehey, Christian Watford, Cody Zeller, a bunch of good guys. They beat (No.1) Kentucky that year.”
Soon Hayden was making his own mark on the ballfield.
As a 15-year-old playing in a tournament in Jupiter, Florida, he was clocked throwing 95 mph at 8 in the morning. That day, the park was filled with pro scouts and college recruiters. By freshman year of high school, he had a scholarship offer to Ball State.
As he made more and more of a name at Edgewood High, he began to draw lots of college interest.
Perfect Game USA rated him the No. 2 prospect in Indiana and the No. 1 right-handed pitching prospect in the state. Oklahoma offered a scholarship. So did Alabama and Cincinnati and several other schools.
But he wanted to play at IU.
“I liked it that I could play seven minutes away from my family,” he said. “I thought it was the perfect place for me.”
Freshman year he did make six starts for the Hoosiers and appeared in 20 games.
After that, his dad said he tried to convince him to transfer, but “Luke wanted to stay. He wanted another shot.”
Sophomore year he appeared in 14 games, had two starts and registered victories against Ohio State and Michigan State.
After that season Todd said: “It was time. They (IU) knew. He knew. It was time for Luke to move on.”
Hayden would be entering his third college season, and he could be drafted after that. To showcase himself, he needed to be able to start and accumulate lots of innings. That likely wouldn’t have happened at IU.
He entered the transfer portal and for him it became a magic carpet.
“’There’s a lot of different views on the portal,” Hayden said. “Certain guys coming out of high school secure a lot of NIL money and then use the portal to go to another school and do the same thing at another place the next year. But while they’re chasing money, I was in the portal chasing opportunity.”
When Indiana State sought him out, he knew it would not be the same as IU with its Big Ten affiliation.
He said the towns the schools are in are different, as are the schools, and all the amenities you’re offered at each program.
“I was playing in New Hampshire – in the summer league for two weeks – and the Indiana State pitching coach, Justin Hancock, called and was like, ‘Why don’t you come down and look at our facilities?’
“And I remember telling him, ‘I don’t need to. I’ve had all the facilities before. I’ve had all the gear and that kind of stuff.
“’As long as I can come there and have a mound, and a catcher and an opportunity, that’s all I need. That would be a good fit.’
“All I wanted was a clean slate and a chance to really show what I could do.”
And that’s what he did.
He ended up one of the best pitchers in the Missouri Valley Conference. He made the league’s All-Tournament team and finished the season 7-2. He was second in the MVC in strikeouts (81), third in ERA (3.81) and ninth in innings pitched (78.)
When head coach Mitch Hannahs left at the end of the season to take over the University of South Florida program and Hancock left too, as did several top players, Hayden knew he had to position himself in case the draft didn’t work out how he hoped.
He entered the portal again and eventually committed to LSU – which was offering substantial NIL money – but he let them know he was going to see what happened in the draft first. He said he’d been told he might go as high as the fourth round or maybe not until rounds 9 or 10.
The Reds ended up taking him in the eighth round – he was the 230th pick overall – and his dad said that’s what he always believed would happen:
“From the time Luke was little, there was never a day where I didn’t think he would be a pro ball player one day.”
Two peas in a pod
The day after he had answered Blair’s challenge and showed some backbone, Hayden was relegated to “bucket duty” at Day Air Ballpark as his teammates took batting practice.
That’s the no-frills job all Dayton starters get the day after they pitch.
They grab a big white bucket and collect all the batted and loose balls for the BP pitcher, which on this day was manager Vince Harrison.
After the team had finished its pregame prep and headed back to the clubhouse, Hayden took a seat in the empty stands and talked about his baseball journey.
As he did, you noticed the long sleeve that covered his left arm had bunched up and revealed part of the tattoo mural that stretches from his wrist to his shoulder.
When asked, he pulled the sleeve up farther to show off the ink work:
“Up top I have a coliseum and a lion and a Trojan,” he explained. “It reminds me I have to be a competitor every day.”
He rolled his forearm to show his Psalm 23:4 tattoo. “This means a lot to me,” he said.
“So how about your right arm?” he was asked. “What’s on there?”
“Oh no, I don’t want anything on my right!” he said. “Nothing goes on there. I’m leaving it just as it is.”
From the time his son was six, Todd said he saw he had a strong right arm:
“We put him at shortstop and right away we could see how hard he threw.”
From that day on, Todd began to help him develop it with long throws and all kinds of drills.
Eventually he could throw the ball from 400 feet, his dad said.
“They worked together all the time,” Michelle said. “They were two peas in a pod.”
Todd said they travelled all over the country – from Los Angeles to Atlanta and Florida – so Luke could play travel ball and be in showcases.
“By the time he was 14, I knew I had to turn him over to someone else,” Todd said. “He has a gift, and he needed to keep developing it.”
He continues to do that and because he parted ways amicably with IU, he now trains there in the offseason.
“They just want to see me develop and become the best I can be,” Hayden said.
And that could end up being really good, said Blair:
“He’s very talented. He’s got a great arm and he has good stuff. He’s confident and smart and he’s a competitor who works hard. He’s just a great kid with a lot of good intangibles.”
And that includes a pair of ears that stay open when the strike zone closes up.
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