The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Higgins, Short fielding for big league dreams in Iowa
Any kind of Northeast accent P.J. Higgins may have had is no longer evident. The Wallingford product has more of a Southern/Midwest twang to his voice these days.
“That’s what they tell me,” the former Lyman Hall star said. “I’ve lost my Connecticut accent.”
It makes some sense. Higgins played for three years at Old Dominion (located in Norfolk, Va.) before being drafted by the Chicago Cubs. Over the past three seasons, he’s played in locales like South Bend, Ind., Myrtle Beach, S.C., Knoxville, Tenn. and, currently, Des Moines, Iowa.
He’s now one step away from the ultimate goal, playing for the Cubs — the ultimate Midwest team. But Higgins isn’t letting his hopes get ahead of him. Promoted to TripleA Iowa a few weeks ago, he’s still settling in at a new level, not daydreaming of if and when he might get a call to “The Show.”
“I’ve learned to let all that stuff play itself out,” he said by phone earlier this week. “I feel like, if you try to think about it over and over again, or if it’s gonna happen … that’s just added pressure to yourself. At the end of the day, you still have to go out and play baseball. Whether you’re hitting .350 or .200, you’ve still got to go out and play the game and enjoy it. The game’s hard enough as it is, especially the higher levels you go. I just kind of go out, play, have fun, do what I need to do, and that’s all I can ask.”
Higgins, 26, spent most of last season with HighA Myrtle Beach, hitting a solid .289 while playing mostly catcher, but also some first and third base. On July 11 — just a few weeks before his parents, Duke and Kim, moved down to South Carolina for good — Higgins was promoted to DoubleA Tennessee, where he hit .241 over 41 games.
Higgins began this season back in Tennessee and was hitting .276 with five homers in 72 games when, on July 11 (that seems to be a good date for him!), he was promoted to Iowa.
“It’s awesome to hear that they had faith in me to come up to TripleA, advance a level,” Higgins recalled. “It honestly kind of caught me offguard, because I wasn’t really too focused on doing that. I was just playing the game. But I’m excited to be here. I’ve definitely learned a lot in the short period I’ve been here, and I’m excited to keep learning.”
Higgins entered the weekend hitting .229 with a pair of homers in 48 atbats. He’s moving around between catcher, first and third even more now, playing almost equal amount of games at the three positions this season.
“I’ve been filling in because we’ve had injuries and other catchers and stuff,” Higgins noted. “So, being able to play other positions helps.”
Higgins was almost entirely an infielder at Old Dominion and was drafted as an infielder by the Cubs. But in 2016, the organization converted him to catcher — which he still considers his primary position.
“I put in enough work over the years to get to where I am, where I feel comfortable enough back there,” he said. “At first, if you asked me that question, I’d say honestly that it wasn’t my favorite position. But I’ve adjusted to it, and I feel really comfortable back there.”
Since being promoted to TripleA, Higgins hasn’t got the chance to spend much time in Des Moines, as the team has been on the road quite a bit. He’s familiar with the area, however — his grandparents, Ralph and Trudy Yoder, live about 45 minutes away in Ames. Higgins used to visit them when he was younger, and his grandparents have been at nearly every Iowa home game since his promotion.
Higgins hopes to stick around Iowa for a while and, who knows, maybe some time next season — probably July 11? — he’ll get the call every baseball player dreams about.
SHORT STOPPED
Zack Short spent the entire 2018 season with DoubleA Tennessee, bashing 17 homers but hitting just .227 while committing 18 errors at shortstop. With that in mind, he figured he’d likely begin 2019 back with the Smokies.
“I wouldn’t have been too mad if I went back to DoubleA,” he confessed. “I had to work on some things.”
Much to his delight, however, he broke spring training with Iowa.
“It was nice the Cubs showed some faith in me to put me in TripleA,” he added. “That’s what made it more frustrating when I got hurt.”
Indeed, after hitting .368 in the ICubs’ first five games, Short was hit by a pitch in his first atbat of Iowa’s homeopener on April 9, breaking the fourth metacarpal bone in his hand.
At first, he figured he’d only be out for a week or two. But while rehabbing down in Arizona, it just wasn’t getting better.
“That was really frustrating,” he recalled. “I was pretty testy.”
It wound up taking Short more than two months before returning to play — first at Rookie level, then a handful of games at Tennessee before returning to Iowa on July 5.
“It was frustrating,” he said, “but I tried to keep a lot of positive with it. It really put things in perspective. I’m not saying I took the game for granted, but I had never even been put on the I.L. before, and now I was forced to miss two months. It really brings you back to (the fact that) this game can be taken away pretty quick. It really puts things into perspective how lucky we are to play.”
It also didn’t prevent Short, 24, from rising to the No. 9 prospect in the Cubs’ organization, according to MLB.com.
Short had four hits in his first three games back at TripleA before, incredibly, getting hit by a pitch in almost the exact same spot about two weeks ago. It’s still a little tender, and it’ taken Short a little bit to get back in the flow. Entering the weekend, he’s hitting just .161 over his past 10 games — though he did hit his fifth homer of the season on Wednesday.
“It’s been a little frustrating, a lot of ups and downs,” he noted. “It’s tough not having a lot of AB’s under your belt and you’re trying to get everything back with one swing. But, I’m very happy to be back playing, for sure.”
NORTHEAST BOND
Higgins was out at ODU while Short, a Kingston, N.Y. product, was starring for Sacred Heart, so the two didn’t know each other much until joining the Cubs’ organization. They’ve been teammates the past three seasons now, however.
“He’s a great guy, great teammate,” Short said of Higgins. “It’s nice having somebody from the Northeast like that. You know some of the same people, especially him being from right where I went to school, he knows a bunch of people that I know. It’s just nice to reconnect with someone like that.”
david.borges @hearstmediact.com