TCU counts on phenom Baker at plate for playoff push

Luken Baker can describe his emotion when he felt pain in his arm after a pitch in a start last month at Oklahoma State.

“I was terrified,” he said. “I’d never felt anything like that before.”

The TCU freshman immediately signaled the dugout, came out of the April 22 game and hasn’t thrown a pitch since.

The diagnosis was a muscle strain. Not good. But not the worst.

“Luckily, the ligament wasn’t torn. It was just a few strained muscles,” he said. “That was actually huge news that I wouldn’t have to get any surgery. It wasn’t on a breaking ball or anything. It was on a fastball. It wasn’t from throwing wrong or overuse. Just a freak thing that happened on one pitch.”

But he won’t pitch the rest of the season, and that provides another kind of pain for the right-hander as TCU enters the final series of the regular season Thursday against K-State, trying to pick up momentum for the Big 12 tournament next week and the NCAA postseason to follow.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had any troubles with my arm,” Baker said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been cut out from throwing since I was 10 years old with a broken arm. It’s rough. I definitely miss it.”

But he can still swing a bat, and the 6-foot-4, 265-pound cleanup hitter reminded the Frogs — and himself — of his impact at the plate when he homered in the series finale at Baylor on Sunday.

“He knows he can still change the game from the batter’s box,” catcher Evan Skoug said. “He’s bummed out because he can’t compete on the mound, but he’s all right. He’s accepted it. He gets in there, does his rehab every day and knows he can change a game in the batter’s box every day for us.”

The homer Sunday, to just a little left of straightaway center at Baylor Ballpark, was Baker’s fourth of the season but his first since the West Virginia series, the opening series of the Big 12 schedule two months ago.

“Way overdue,” Baker said.

Why had it been so long? The young DH hadn’t been aggressive enough, perhaps.

He leads the team in on-base percentage and is second in walks and runs scored. But four other teammates have out-homered Baker, who arrived at TCU heralded as a power hitter. He won the Junior Select home run derby at the 2014 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.

“I love that he gets on base, and I love that he doesn’t swing at balls out of the strike zone,” TCU coach Jim Schlossnagle said. “As he matures as a hitter, you’d like for him to be a little more aggressive when he gets in hitters’ counts. That’s just part of the maturation process of a young hitter.”

And Baker agrees. The 36 walks in 49 games is nice, and he’s tied for the team lead in RBIs.

But he wants to do more damage.

“I didn’t realize it until probably that at-bat that weekend that I was taking all the good pitches and swinging at the bad ones,” Baker said, remembering the home run ball. “That at-bat, I took the first pitch for a strike, and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ I was, ‘All right, I’m just going to swing at everything else I can hit.’ ”

That philosophy can now get at least a two-week test run.

“His identity is being one of the best two-way players in college baseball,” Schlossnagle said. “You just took half of him and took it away. But the beauty of being a two-way guy is you have something else you can hang your hat on.”

So does TCU.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 6:47 PM with the headline "TCU counts on phenom Baker at plate for playoff push."