The dining options were limited for Liam Hendriks and the rest of the Gulf Coast League Twins in the summer of 2007. The players lived in a hotel in Fort Myers, Fla., that, according to Hendriks, “has now been demolished, because it was a cesspool.” No one really had much money. Next door was a Walgreens that did brisk business in frozen pizza. Taco Bell and IHOP were nearby. And a little further down the road was a restaurant marketed to remind Hendriks of home: Outback Steakhouse.
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Hendriks was one of three Australians on the GCL Twins that year. At 18, he was in America for the first time. The Aussies decided they would check out the Outback. They soon discovered the limits of cultural exportation.
“We were just sitting there, looking at the menu, being like, what the hell’s a Bloomin’ Onion?” Hendriks said. “Like, what the hell is that? I mean, it’s delicious. But what is it?”
Hendriks chuckled as he relayed this memory on Tuesday from his hotel in Denver, where the Athletics were finishing up a three-city, six-day, eight-game road trip. The title of “Best Reliever In Baseball” is fleeting. For now, the crown resides with Hendriks. He was an All-Star last season, back when seasons still had All-Stars. No reliever has been worth more wins above replacement since 2019, according to FanGraphs. No reliever had saved more games in 2020 than Hendriks (12) as of Wednesday morning. His 1.33 ERA was the fourth-lowest among all pitchers with at least 20 innings.
The journey from that summer in 2007 to the hotel in Denver spanned 14 years, nine demotions, six organizations and four DFAs. Hendriks has overcome injuries and his own ineffectiveness to emerge as the end boss in baseball’s best bullpen. But the route he took to get to the summer of 2007 might be just as interesting.
It started, in one sense, with shattered lights inside a carport in Perth.
Hendriks’ father, Geoff, had spent a decade as a professional Australian rules footballer. Liam thought he might follow the same path. In his spare time, though, he dug baseball.
The cultural penetration of the sport was limited in Australia. Kids played T-ball, but interest often faded. Major League Baseball games were televised early in the morning; Hendriks was occasionally late for school because he’d gotten sidetracked in front of the tube. At the gym, where it was easier to find games, he admired St. Louis Cardinals workhorse Chris Carpenter while pedaling on a stationary bike. He watched Carpenter dominate with his fastball and curveball. “I was like ‘OK, I want to learn this,’” he said.
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Which led him to the carport. The dimensions were close to perfect, “almost exactly 60 feet, six inches,” he said. At the end was a wall with a limestone brick at the center that served as a credible simulacrum for a strike zone. Hendriks spent hours trying to hit the spot. Mishaps abounded. “Because I didn’t throw hard, with breaking balls, you had to start them a lot higher,” Hendriks said. “So I ended up smashing lightbulbs that way.” His parents learned to live with it, so long as Hendriks swept up the mess.
Despite the ruined bulbs, he was developing a skill cherished by a baseball team a hemisphere away. The organizational philosophy of the Minnesota Twins prized command. They built the pitching staffs of playoffs teams around it. And they also had a scouting foothold in Australia.
Howard Norsetter had left his home in Wisconsin to play baseball Down Under in 1984. He has never left. He started a 27-year stint as a Twins scout in 1990. Along the way, he signed future big-leaguers Grant Balfour and Peter Moylan. Norsetter had been tracking Hendriks since he was 14 years old, watching him split his time between the outfield and the pitcher’s mound in national tournaments.
“He had really tremendous drive, those things you look for in a competitive athlete,” Norsetter said. “He had a will to win, a will to impart his will on the game. Some people sit by the sidelines. Not him. He wanted to get his nose in everything. He wanted to be the guy.”
Hendriks preferred the daily buzz of hitting over pitching. His velocity lingered in the mid-80s. Even so, Norsetter likened him to 17-year veteran Jeff Suppan. He appreciated the steadiness of Hendriks’ delivery and the athleticism he displayed in the field. He thought there was a chance his fastball would improve. And he didn’t issue many walks. “He could throw strikes all day long,” Norsetter said.
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Norsetter also saw value in Hendriks’ background in Australian rules football. The sport required some combination of resolve and absurdity. “You throw on some underwear and you run around and you beat the sh*t out of everybody else,” Norsetter said. “There’s no padding. You’re leaping and hitting the ground and getting crunched all the time. That’s a tough, tough sport.”
Mike Radcliff, then Minnesota’s scouting director, said it would be disingenuous to claim the Twins unearthed Hendriks like a gem from untrod ground. “Everybody knew who he was,” Radcliff said. “He was one of the better pitchers in the country.” But other teams saw Hendriks as a hitter. In January of 2007, Hendriks started fielding offers from the Angels, Padres and Red Sox. Based on Norsetter’s recommendation, Minnesota won the bidding with a $170,000 bonus. The two sides reached an agreement on the day Hendriks turned 18. “Who knows? I was $15,000 from signing as a position player,” Hendriks said.
Hendriks packed for the States a few weeks later. He was unsure how he would fare. He figured a career in football awaited him if he crashed out of baseball.
Until then?
“I was taking it like Frodo Baggins: I’m on an adventure,” he said.
One day in the summer of 2007, Dan Rohlfing heard a commotion in the parking lot of the GCL Twins hotel. He was a catcher from St. Louis, on a roster that included players from Canada, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Russia, Venezuela and Taiwan. The melting pot also featured the Aussies making that racket. Rohlfing went outside, where he found Liam Hendriks and James Beresford dropkicking an oddly rounded football.
“These guys are like 100 feet apart and they’re kicking the ball to each other’s chest every single time,” Rohlfing said. “I’m like, ‘What in the world is going on?’ So we go out there, and they say, ‘Hey, you want to have a kick?’ We would try to join them, and we’d be hitting all the cars in the parking lot.”
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Hendriks knew Beresford from Australia’s national circuit. He roomed with Jarrad Eacott, a reliever from the country’s southeastern coast. The players dealt with a bit of culture shock in the States. There was no language barrier. But restaurants didn’t sell the meat pies and sausage rolls they grew up eating. The time difference meant they were 12, 14 hours behind their friends and family. And then there was the drinking age. Back home, it was 18. “You come from Australia where you’re legal, and you come over here where they’re like: ‘Sorry, you can’t drink,’” Eacott said.
The Gulf Coast League schedule offered heaps of downtime. The players reported to the Twins complex in the morning, played games on the back fields and went home in the early afternoon. That left lengthy opportunities for mischief, and the Twins had signed enough Aussies over the years to form preconceived notions. They operated with a certain, ahem, rambunctiousness, Radcliff said. “There is a personality about Australians,” Radcliff said. “They’re outward. They’ve very extroverted. I mean, these are all the good terms.”
Partying wasn’t much of an issue for Hendriks, who considered himself a light drinker. He had been diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis before he signed, which required medication plus regular bloodwork. (He gave up drinking after his condition flared up in 2015.)
Hendriks often stayed at the park to lift when most of the players returned to the hotel, Eacott said. But there were still so many hours in the day. Hendriks came to kill time as many adolescent Americans do: He bought a Playstation 3. There were endless rounds of “MLB: The Show” and “Call of Duty.” If they could find someone with a car, they went to the mall. Some nights they just sat outside and watched the sunset.
Any apprehension about whether he belonged faded after the first few weeks at extended spring training. Hendriks did not throw particularly hard, but he could spot his breaking ball for strikes. Bigger, stronger prospects were spraying balls to the backstop, but Hendriks personified Minnesota’s pitching philosophy, explained Ivan Arteaga, who was the GCL team’s pitching coach: “Pitch ahead. Stay ahead. Throw strikes.”
“He didn’t face the challenges that some of the guys will face when they first get to the GCL,” Arteaga said. “I want to say that Liam was advanced just because he was more mature than guys his age at that time.”
For Rohlfing, catching in the GCL could be a nightmare. The fastballs sailed high and low. Curveballs crashed into the dirt. A lot of pitchers were incapable of making the baseball cooperate. Hendriks was an exception.
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“He just painted at the knees,” Rohlfing said. “He was so easy to catch.”
All those hours in the carport paid off.
Hendriks finished that season with a 2.05 ERA in 10 starts. It was only the start of his journey; there would be surgeries and setbacks, trips back to the minors and trips through the waiver wire. The Twins cut him loose after 2013, and he ping-ponged through the sport before sticking with Oakland. He changed roles. He picked up velocity. He became a star.
The distance from that summer in the States grows wider with each year. But Hendriks believes all the upheaval he experienced, starting with the cheap food and homesickness and boredom of that first professional season, shaped him into his current form. “Everything you do in minor-league baseball is to build you into the best person you can be in the big leagues,” he said.
Every spring he spent with Minnesota, Hendriks took part in a small tradition. All the Australian players went out for a meal. The most senior Aussie picked up the check. The bill was never much of an issue. The Outback, after all, serves steak at an affordable price.
(Photo: Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images)
Andy McCullough is a senior writer for The Athletic covering MLB. He previously covered baseball at the Los Angeles Times, the Kansas City Star and The Star-Ledger. A graduate of Syracuse University, he grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Follow Andy on Twitter @ByMcCullough
