D-Backs’ Widener a real ‘keeper’
What Taylor Widener liked best were the early mornings. They were quiet and peaceful. The air was crisp. He could see the sun rising over the mountains.
“I enjoy the silence,” Widener said. “I could just go out there and relax.”
Widener is a right-handed pitcher for the Diamondbacks. He made his major-league debut last season and has a chance to make the Opening Day roster this year.
He also is a seasonal greenkeeper at Westin Kierland Golf Club in Scottsdale, a job he has held the past two offseasons. His days would start at 5:30 a.m. His responsibilities would include raking bunkers, mowing greens and doing any other sort of
landscaping work required to prepare the course for the day.
Widener took the job, in a roundabout way, as a result of his brutal 2019 season and his desire to get himself in better shape. A year earlier, he came to the Diamondbacks as part of the Steven Souza Jr. three-team trade, arriving from the New York Yankees. He enjoyed a terrific season in Double-A, earning minor league pitcher of the year honors in the Diamondbacks’ system.
But 2019 was different. He had decided the previous offseason to try something different with his workout routine. He tried bulking up by using heavier weights. He showed up to spring training weighing 232 pounds; looking back, he said it was a combination of good weight (strength) and bad (fat).
“I found out real quick it didn’t work and got rid of that real fast,” Widener said.
By then it was too late. He had always considered himself a loose and flexible athlete. His added heft made him feel tighter, more constricted. His stuff that season was not the same. His fastball velocity fluctuated. His slider, a putaway pitch the year before, was not as effective, nor was his change-up.
His season in Triple-A Reno — an unforgiving place for pitchers — was miserable. He logged an 8.10 ERA, serving up 23 homers in 100 innings.
He vowed to get in better shape in the offseason and decided to remain in Arizona to work out. That led to the job at the golf course.
“I was like, ‘Well, I might as well make some money,’” Widener said. There was another important factor: “The main reason,” he said, “was the free golf.”
Widener lives close enough to the course that he could ride his bike there in the mornings. Despite the early start times, Widener was never late to work, according to Dan Figueras, the director of agronomy at Kierland.
“This isn’t intended to have a negative connotation about other athletes, but if you were to talk to him, you would never get a sense that he was a professional athlete,” Figueras said. “Just from his personality, he is the most humble, best team player that you could ask for. We loved having him.”
Figueras recalls the day in November 2019 that Widener learned he had officially been added to the Diamondbacks’ 40-man roster. That same day a rainstorm inundated the course.
“You would have never guessed that he just signed a big contract to realize his dreams,” Figueras said. “He still upheld his responsibility to come in on a day when it wouldn’t have been a whole lot of fun to go out and work in the rain.”
Widener said working outdoors has always been something he enjoys. When he was a teenager, he would traverse his Aiken, South Carolina, neighborhood cutting lawns, trimming hedges and spreading mulch in gardens to earn money. He likes the rhythm of the work, the chance to turn his mind off and immerse himself in the labor.
Widener said he came to appreciate the habits the greenskeeper job instilled; he thinks the early-morning wake-up calls got his body into a good routine. He said he would walk anywhere from 10 to 15 miles a day on the course.
Last
year, he showed up
at spring training weighing 202, a 30-pound drop from the previous spring.
“I was going to send the Diamondbacks organization an invoice for his trimmed new physique,” Figueras said.
Widener last year got his career back on the path it had been before. He made the club’s Opening Day roster out of camp in July and turned in a handful of impressive outings in relief. His fastball sat in the mid-90s. His slider regained its old bite. His name is mentioned often by people within the Diamondbacks’ organization; he is viewed as someone for whom a breakout season would not come as a surprise.
“He showed me last year flashes of dominance,” pitching coach Matt Herges said. “He’s very interesting. We’re extremely high on this dude, as a person and a competitor, too.”
Widener isn’t sure if he will return to Kierland this offseason — he might go back to South Carolina instead — but Figueras would be happy to have him.
“We really exposed him to a lot of different things we do because he proved he was really good at it,” Figueras said. “He had a great work ethic. He was really a standout employee.”