Patrick Sandoval stood on the mound in El Paso, struggling to keep it together.

Making his first-ever Triple-A start in May, the Angels prospect was eager to make a strong impression, but by the third inning he allowed four runs with a pitch count sitting around 80. He got frustrated by the offense-friendly environment of the Pacific Coast League and some shoddy defense behind him. When the final batter he faced reached on an infield single that dribbled just past the mound, Sandoval spiked his cap.

Advertisement

He immediately realized what he had done, apologizing as he got scolded by Salt Lake Bees manager Lou Marson. Three months later, Sandoval is in the major leagues starting for the Angels and still learning to control his emotions and energy — a lifelong challenge — with the memory of that Triple-A game still fresh.

“I got really pissed,” Sandoval said. “But I think since coming up here, I’ve kind of had to tone it down. I don’t want to, like, make a fool of myself. But it’s still there. Still definitely there. I’d say I have a refined feel for the emotions, I guess.”

There are still glimmers here and there. In the third inning of his home debut on August 16, the White Sox took a 2-0 lead when a run scored on a wild pitch. After he got the ball back from catcher Anthony Bemboom, Sandoval angrily flipped it to home-plate umpire Bill Miller. He immediately apologized and locked back in to strike out the next batter and end the inning.

Sandoval, a 22-year-old left-hander whom the Angels acquired from Houston in July 2018, has allowed 13 runs in 17 1/3 innings over four outings with the Angels. His arrival in the big leagues came perhaps a bit before its time, so a learning curve remains.

“I think there is a good time for emotion, but Patrick is not the type of pitcher who thrives on emotion,” said Brian Strelitz, Sandoval’s longtime coach. “The way he goes about his job now is really, I think, one of the biggest improvements he’s made since he was a youth.”

Sandoval is reminded of the outing each time he looks across the Angels clubhouse.

When he was just a sophomore at Mission Viejo High School, 20 or so minutes away from Angel Stadium, he was a brash competitor with a mid-80s fastball, evaporating changeup and sharp curveball. He believed in his stuff.

As he prepared for his first-ever postseason start in the first round of the CIF playoffs, Sandoval was keenly aware of who he was facing. Santa Margarita was throwing its ace, a “tall-ish” junior right-hander named Griffin Canning known for his advanced command and stoic demeanor. Sandoval was a ball of energy and emotion, from his violent mechanics — he appeared to throw his entire body to the plate along with the baseball — to his mannerisms off of it.

Advertisement

For six innings, the two matched each other. Canning worked around trouble, with his steady command and personality carrying him through. Sandoval came out firing, too, expending his energy on the mound and in the dugout as his heart swung with each pitch.

In the seventh inning, Canning was replaced on the mound and saw his teammates cede a 4-3 lead. Sandoval refused to allow himself the same fate. As head coach Chris Ashbach approached him in the dugout to remove him, Sandoval quickly rebuffed him. A few minutes later, Sandoval jogged to the mound.

“I was kind of a dick to him,” Sandoval said, the misery of what was to come next still fresh in his mind.

Sandoval allowed a bloop double down the line, then hit the following batter with a pitch. After recording a pair of outs, he faced Canning with the winning run on base. Sandoval grunted his way through four pitches, walking Canning and loading the bases as Ashbach came to take the baseball. On the next pitch, Santa Margarita walked it off for a 5-4 victory en route to a CIF semifinal run.

Bring up the game now and Canning laughs. Sandoval can’t help but shake his head.

“I would love to just stay in there a little too long,” Sandoval said. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong. They should’ve taken me out earlier, probably.”

Sandoval prefers not to speak of their next matchup the following year when Canning, then a senior, “just shoved against us” as part of a state-title run.

“We had no shot,” Sandoval said.

Even after leading Mission Viejo to a CIF title during his senior year, Sandoval can’t shake those high-school battles against Canning. He’s now reminded of that each time he steps into a big-league clubhouse, where the two are now rookies trying to make their mark in the Angels’ rotation.

They have been called up out of necessity given the club’s endless struggles to find consistent starting pitching. But now the two Orange County natives are auditioning for roles in their hometown rotation for 2020.

Advertisement

Canning, the Angels’ second-round pick in 2017 and best pitching prospect since Garrett Richards, long has been the established and more polished prospect. He quickly rose through the system, taking less than two years after he was drafted to crack the major leagues. He now owns a critical role for the club.

Sandoval, meanwhile, has grown. The Astros drafted him out of high school in the 11th round in 2015, taking a chance on the athletic lefty with a low-90s fastball and a curveball with fascinating characteristics. The Angels acquired him a year ago at the trade deadline in exchange for Martín Maldonado and saw Sandoval take a similar trajectory to the big leagues this month.

Sandoval and Canning have taken to one another quickly, as each works in the offseason with Strelitz (who was Sandoval’s pitching coach in high school), and they have bonded over their hometown connections. Strelitz, the son of former minor leaguer and current Wasserman agent Lenny Strelitz, is a money manager with SunTrust Financial Services but has spent much of his free time as the workout guru for players such as Canning, Sandoval, Nolan Arenado, Trayce Thompson and others.

Strelitz first saw Sandoval at around age 14 when he was a three-sport athlete with, at times, over-the-top emotion and an uncanny feel for a changeup that fell off the table late. “That was before he knew what a changeup was. At a very young age, he had a high IQ for throwing the changeup, and the arm speed worked, and all those things,” Strelitz said.

Sandoval’s year was packed with activities to keep up with his energy. At Mission Viejo, he starred on the freshman basketball team as a shooting guard, averaging close to 20 points a game, and played wide receiver on the freshman football squad. All the while, he continued playing both travel and high school baseball.

At some points during the year, all three sports overlapped. Sandoval often went from basketball in the morning to a baseball game in the afternoon to a football game in the evening.

“I was just doing all of it,” he said. “I never stopped moving.”

Advertisement

But it quickly became apparent that Sandoval’s gifts on the mound were the best use of his energy and would allow him to channel his emotion with each pitch. His delivery was violent, but his velocity came easy, as he reached 80 mph before his 14th birthday. Working with Strelitz was as much about controlling his emotions as it was about refining his burgeoning arsenal and erratic mechanics.

It’s something Sandoval has continued to battle. At times in high school, he would find himself drained midway through an outing due to the weight he placed on each individual pitch. As games would spiral at times, he would lose focus or energy. Often, he would act or speak without thinking, resulting in immediate regret.

In his short stint in the majors thus far, the fire has been somewhat tempered.

“I feel like I’ve done a good job of not freaking out up here,” Sandoval said. “It’s good for me to tell myself, ‘Good, you didn’t lose your shit.'”

But it has always been there, the desire to compete. Every bad start would send Sandoval into a frenzy of yelling aimed at himself — “I’d keep it PG-13 … mostly,” he joked — to the point where Ashbach would have to rein him in. That patience was necessary for a still-evolving Sandoval.

Growing up, Sandoval also tried to meet the high expectations of his father Jorge. When he wasn’t playing hard enough or not being focused, Sandoval would be reminded by the whistling of his dad. The sound produced from Jorge’s pursed lips would be recognizable even in a packed stadium, Sandoval said. And it was so loud that it immediately sparked a reaction from him.

The whistle was eventually retired once Sandoval reached high school.

“Every parent knew the whistle. “It’d just be like, ‘Oh, there’s Jorge,'” Sandoval said. “Every time I heard that, I just knew I wasn’t doing something right. I’d freak out. I don’t know what it is, but even now when I hear that whistle …”

Sandoval also battled when it came to his own repertoire. From his earliest days in high school, he felt comfortable with his changeup, his fingers finding the four-seam grip on the baseball as he threw his circle-change. But he threw it out of necessity, not because he wanted to throw it. He found the pitch’s movement — tailing and dropping to his arm side — not as enticing as the sharp break on his power curveball or the lateral movement on his developing slider. Given his overpowering velocity, he hardly had to throw his off-speed pitches at all.

Advertisement

He threw the changeup anyway to keep it sharp, but did so begrudgingly.

“My best friends in high school that played with me were like, ‘Dude, your changeup is disgusting. Your changeup has always been really gross,’” Sandoval said. “It wasn’t fun to throw. I’d rather see this curve instead of just a slow ball dying.”

The Astros fell in love with Sandoval’s curveball as well, particularly how the high-spin pitch played off his fastball. After drafting him in 2015, Houston’s player-development staff quickly sat Sandoval down and ran through how each of his pitches played off each other with numbers and data. The availability of advanced analytics and player-development techniques stood out immediately to the 18-year-old Sandoval.

As the Astros worked with him, they emphasized the use of his breaking ball and allowed his changeup to remain secondary. Whenever Sandoval went home in the offseason to work with Strelitz, he conveyed those same messages and tried to use data to keep refining his skills. The curveball development still shows to this data. In Baseball Savant’s limited tracking of Sandoval’s arsenal, his average curveball spin rate ranks in the 80th percentile of the league, a true asset.

“He’s a spin-rate, analytical dream,” Strelitz said.

“He loves the analytics,” Ashbach said of Sandoval. “He loves getting the reports. He thinks it’s just like cheat codes. He thinks it’s fantastic to be able to have the type of analytics and reports where, if he can just execute, you know that he’s fantastic.”

The curveball Sandoval obsessed about for years remains in his back pocket, and it’s something he has worked to maintain. But shortly after he joined the Angels, Sandoval rediscovered the pitch that has brought him to the big leagues.

Sandoval’s 2018 season already had produced strong results before the trade, as he moved from Low A to High A with similarly strong results, including a 2.56 ERA and 97 strikeouts in 88 innings. After he was traded to the Angels, Sandoval started with High-A Inland Empire and quickly found success with his changeup. He didn’t allow a run through his first three starts, and upped his changeup usage each time. Once he got to Double-A Mobile, he continued to get results. The changeup was his pitch.

Advertisement

This season included a quick promotion and with it a bump to Sandoval’s stuff. He has noticeably filled out his frame in recent years, and in his first start with Triple-A Salt Lake, his pitches became more crisp. Angels minor league pitching coordinator Buddy Carlyle attended that infamous first outing with Salt Lake. When Carlyle spoke to Sandoval following the game, he didn’t bring up the spiked glove.

Instead, he asked Sandoval, “Since when are you throwing 96 (mph)?”

Sandoval had no idea. That peak velocity hasn’t dropped off since.

His Triple-A stint included mixed results, in part due to the league’s extreme offensive environment. But through those struggles, Sandoval learned to pitch through traffic, struggles and a mini-outburst here and there.

It also prepared him for the high-pressure, high-stakes environment he’s been thrown into in the major leagues. The Angels’ starting rotation, with its depth depleted, has had some of the worst production in baseball in terms of total innings pitched and ERA.

Sandoval is here sooner than expected and perhaps too soon. He’ll have to keep learning with each opportunity. But with Canning in the clubhouse, he has a regular reminder of how far he has come. He also has a fellow rookie and Orange County native trying to figure things out.

“It’s pretty neat,” Canning said of being able to rely on Sandoval, and vice versa.

Sandoval one-upped him. “Wild. It’s crazy,” he said.

“These guys have a long history together,” Strelitz said. ”Griff is there for Patrick now, and I think Patrick is there for Griff. They’re good friends who are hopefully going to feed off each other for a long time.”

Top photo of Patrick Sandoval: Louis DeLuca / AP Photo