There were dewy mornings during the fall of 2020 when Kerry Carpenter would go out to the fields before anyone else. He would sit in a dugout before instructional league workouts and look out at the grass, breathing in the thick Florida air. So often, he thought about his father, the man who coached him growing up and cheered on his home runs in junior college. Ken Carpenter had died only months earlier, in May 2020, from a rare form of liver cancer.
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So now here was Kerry Carpenter, trying to move on in his own way while the rest of the world still wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic.
He was, at the time, a nobody, a 19th-round MLB Draft pick, an outfielder from Virginia Tech, a late bloomer whose love for baseball didn’t blossom until his final years of high school. In the baseball-crazed state of Florida, Carpenter was an under-the-radar player. By the time he started to improve and decided he wanted to play at the collegiate level, it was his senior year and so many area schools had already wrapped up their recruiting cycles. A friend’s father helped him get in touch with one junior college, then another. He found a home at a place called St. Johns River State College. He starred there and went on to play at Virginia Tech, where he was a good player but not a great one.
And so it was surreal enough for Carpenter when he sat there on those Florida mornings, wearing Tigers apparel, competing in instructional league along with some of the best prospects in the sport. Sometimes he would wish his father could be there to see it. Other times, he believed Ken was seeing it, that he was there in spirit.
But even back then, Carpenter never would have believed where he would be less than two years later.
🚨Kerry Carpenter Grand Slam🚨
His 30th HR of the year puts Toledo up 8-0. pic.twitter.com/sIVHrSYkJK— Tigers Minor League Report (@tigersMLreport) August 7, 2022
Kerry Carpenter spent another part of the 2020 offseason working at Dick’s Sporting Goods. It was a way to make money he needed on top of his meager minor-league salary. It was also a way to adhere to a set schedule, to have some sort of structure and challenge while the world slowly climbed closer to normalcy. People would ask whether certain clothes in certain sizes were in stock or where they could find this or that in the large store. Carpenter, admittedly, did not always know the answer.
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“I probably wasn’t the best worker there,” Carpenter said on the “Road to Detroit” podcast hosted by Dan Hasty.
Carpenter, though, still has his Dick’s Sporting Goods experience listed on his LinkedIn profile.
A few months later, he went to spring training, and a few months after that, the Tigers started him in Double-A Erie. He had played rookie ball after getting drafted in 2019. But there was no minor-league season in 2020. And because he was an older prospect out of college, the Tigers had him skip Low A and High A. He was thrown into the fire at a level some of the minor leagues’ top pitching talent often calls home. He did some good things but wasn’t considered a true “guy” in the Detroit system. He hit .262 and had a .319 on-base percentage. He showed an ability to pull the ball for some power, finishing with 15 home runs. But he struck out 94 times compared to only 29 walks. In the outfield, he had a ton of work to do.
Not many people saw the makings of a major leaguer from afar.
But for those who were there every day?
“You could always see it, that he could hit,” Tigers rookie Riley Greene said. “I’ve always seen him as a really, really good hitter. Not many people did, but he was in the same lineup as me, and I always knew when he was up, he was going to do some damage.”
When Carpenter showed up to spring training in 2022, he again wasn’t much of a name anyone was talking about. An older prospect, maybe good for organizational depth. But not everyone knew the work he put in over the offseason, a swing change he made with the help of Tigers prospect Jacob Robson and St. Louis-based hitting coach Richard Schenck. He started swinging with a dramatic launch of his back leg, a change that took time to get used to. But when the adjustment finally clicked, it clicked in a big way.
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Maybe more than that, there was no way to quantify all the personal changes Carpenter had experienced since the death of his father. They had found Ken’s cancer late, when it was already Stage 4. That kind of profound loss makes a person look inward. Everyone processes grief differently.
Carpenter was looking back on all this over the past week. He says he learned familiar lessons, about not taking any day for granted, about how short and special our time on this Earth really is. He also did a lot of thinking, about his life and his lifestyle, about where all this was heading, about why he was here and why he had devoted everything to playing a most difficult game.
That led him back into his faith, something he had grown up with but not necessarily taken seriously.
“I started asking myself questions,” Carpenter said, “and didn’t really love the answers I was coming up with. God didn’t let that go and didn’t let my heart go.”
This new Kerry Carpenter? He would go on to become, statistically, one of the best players in all of minor-league baseball.
Here he is today, standing in the Detroit Tigers clubhouse, a Twitter sensation suddenly turned into a big leaguer. It has been a long journey that came with fast advances.
Carpenter started the year slowly in Double A, but then something happened. He started driving the ball to the pull side. Once, then twice. Then again and again and again. By late June, he was hitting .302 with 22 home runs in Double A. Once easy to brush off as a college hitter who was on a little hot streak, his success suddenly couldn’t be denied. The Tigers promoted him to Triple A, a way to push him a little more, to see if his bat might be for real.
Other players in the organization, such as Beau Brieske, a 27th-round pick who also proved his way to the majors, followed along closely.
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“I think we’ve had a bond over (being late-round picks) in particular,” Brieske said. “I think it puts things in perspective for anyone watching. It doesn’t really matter where you start. If you believe in it and are constantly trying to grow and expand your game, then eventually you could have a breakout season like he’s had.”
It was still easy to doubt Carpenter, to look at the 16 walks and 72 strikeouts and see a hitter with no chance of succeeding at higher levels. But in 34 games with Triple-A Toledo, Carpenter kept showing up on highlight reels. Videos of his home runs kept gaining traction among Tigers fans on social media. He was hitting .331 with eight home runs after 34 games in Triple A. His 30 total homers led all of the minor leagues.
More importantly, his strikeout-to-walk ratio looked vastly different. He had 17 walks and 17 strikeouts in Toledo. Tigers officials still weren’t sure exactly what they had, but they knew they had to find out.
On Aug. 12, Triple-A manager Lloyd McClendon called Carpenter into his office. McClendon asked Carpenter if his father had died a couple of years ago. He asked him where he was from. He asked him if he thought his mother would be home. McClendon then told Carpenter he should call his mom. He was going to Detroit. And his father would be proud.
“We were both screaming when he called,” Julie Carpenter told Bally Sports Detroit on the night of Carpenter’s MLB debut. “We kind of figured what it was going to be about.”
So often over these past few days, Carpenter has thought of his father.
“A good amount,” he said. “It’s always like, ‘I wish he was here to witness it.’ But that wasn’t God’s plan.”
Carpenter still has videos on his phone, taken by someone in the stands. In them, he can hear his father cheering as Carpenter would belt a hit in college. They’re bittersweet to look back on. They can bring about a somber feeling. They also exist as a reminder of a father’s love and support.
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“It’s here one day and gone the next,” Carpenter said. “Take advantage of every day you have. Being around people you love, that’s really what it’s all about. (God) used that to kind of get my perspective back in line.”
Some of Ken lives on through Kerry and all he is doing now. The reminders came right away, like when Tigers manager A.J. Hinch sat down with Carpenter in the manager’s office. Hinch and Carpenter share a perspective. Hinch’s father died unexpectedly when Hinch was a freshman in college. He often thinks of his father in the quiet moments just before games.
“Neither of our fathers are going to get to see a major-league debut, but that doesn’t mean he’s not proud,” Hinch said. “I’m rooting hard for this kid.”
And for Carpenter, that support remains in a different way. When he made his MLB debut, it was overshadowed because it was the same day the Tigers fired Al Avila. But as the rest of the organization sifted through chaos, there were Carpenter’s mother, Julie, and sister, Haley, in the stands. They were surrounded by more family and friends, including several old friends of Ken’s who have remained in touch with Kerry, who traveled from Florida to Detroit to see their old pal’s son make his major-league debut.
“All the love and support was amazing,” Carpenter said. “That’s the biggest thing about his legacy — how many people loved and cared about him, and they still care about me.”
Amazing to the point that Carpenter’s phone was buzzing with messages for days. The Carpenters started hearing from anybody and everybody around their hometown of Eustis, Fla.
“I can’t even tell you how many,” Julie said on Bally Sports. “People that we don’t even know are following, they’ll say their phones are blowing up. All over the community in Eustis, Lake County.”
On the field, the first games were a struggle. Carpenter started his MLB career 1-for-11 with seven strikeouts, looking overmatched at the plate, showing signs of being another Triple-A hitter who wouldn’t be able to translate his minor-league stats or groundswell of Twitter support into results at the MLB level.
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But as we’ve learned time and time again this season, write off Carpenter at your own risk.
“We talk about wanting guys to earn it,” Hinch said, “and he’s done it.”
Carpenter went 3-for-4 and belted his first MLB home run on Aug. 15 against Cleveland. The next day, he again homered in the first inning and finished the day 2-for-3 with two walks and two RBIs.
“It was weird, what happened those first two days,” Carpenter said. “My timing was off, just wasn’t seeing the ball clearly. Back in Cleveland, like the game I played in Chicago, started to see it better. In Cleveland it felt like I was back to normal, doing what I was doing.”
Two days, two home runs.
Kerry Carpenter is fitting in just fine with the @tigers. pic.twitter.com/INa5KOqOtn
— MLB Pipeline (@MLBPipeline) August 16, 2022
Fitting of Carpenter’s journey, sustained success does not come easily. He is hitless in his nine at-bats since. He’s been spotted before games working with bench coach George Lombard on fielding fundamentals because he still has to improve defensively. His history of low walks and high strikeouts creates a large question mark. But Carpenter is likely to keep playing in the majors this year, with a chance to establish himself as someone who could compete for a more permanent job next spring.
That’s a long way from the dugout bench at instructionals less than two years ago.
Hard to grasp even for the central character in one of this season’s best baseball stories.
Said Carpenter: “If you would have told me a year ago, right now, this is where I would be, the year I’m having, I don’t know if I would have believed you.”
(Top photo: David Richard / USA Today)
