CHICAGO — Whenever Mark Prior comes to town, it’s a good reminder that your life doesn’t end when you’re 26 and your million-dollar shoulder stops working.
Seeing Prior on the South Side on Monday made me think about his second act.
Two decades ago, he was the toast of Chicago. Just as quickly as he came to symbolize the hope of a new Cubs era, he epitomized its abrupt ending.
Now, with a full beard flecked with grey, the 43-year-old Prior is the pitching coach for arguably the model team in baseball. And given that the Dodgers are dealing with a host of pitching injuries, who better to lead them?
“You know, he might be one of one as far as pitching coaches in the big leagues that has been a superstar, been hurt, been released, tried to make his way back in the minors,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Monday.
Do the coaches ever bring up his past when they play in Chicago? Once upon a time at Clark and Addison, Prior looked like a future Hall of Famer.
“He hates it,” Roberts said. “I do give him some jabs, but he hates it. He definitely owned the North Side for a little bit of time.”
Mark Prior was once one of the top starters in baseball and finished third in NL Cy Young voting in 2003. (Brian Kersey / Associated Press)
It was the first game of a series, a time for meetings and planning for coaches, so I didn’t get a chance to bother Prior before the Dodgers’ 3-0 win over the White Sox, but we talked at length last season when I was writing a 20-year anniversary piece on the 2003 Cubs season.
During that interview, we chatted about what he’s learned as a pitching coach and how pitchers are still getting hurt despite all the changes in technology, knowledge and pitcher care since he was toiling for the Cubs back in the towel drill days of yore.
“There’s been a lot of improvements over 20 years, but again, we’re still having injuries,” he said. “Guys are still having elbows and shoulders. I don’t know if we’re that much better at preventing them than we were before when we didn’t know all the information.”
The biggest difference today?
“I think teams have realized that it’s not a matter of if somebody gets hurt, it’s just a matter of when,” he said. “And then it’s like, have you constructed a deep 25- and 40-man roster to weather those storms for the year?”
Think about that the next time your team’s GM whines about injuries.
As it stands in Prior’s rotation, Walker Buehler is on the 15-day IL with inflammation in his right hip. Clayton Kershaw had a setback with shoulder soreness so his minor-league rehab start was scratched. Los Angeles’ big pitching addition this offseason, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, has a strained right rotator cuff and his return date is uncertain.
Go up and down the Dodgers’ depth chart and it feels like half the pitching staff is on one of the injured lists. (Not including Shohei Ohtani, who is still hitting.)
And yet, the Dodgers, who have the second-best record in the National League, persevere because they’re built for it. (The money helps.)
In a ho-hum shutout of the offensively challenged White Sox on Monday, Dodgers starter James Paxton pitched five innings and veteran Daniel Hudson, the first of four relievers, got the win in a 3-0 victory. In a more just world where Prior had a long, prosperous career, the 37-year-old Hudson, who debuted with the White Sox in 2009, would’ve been a contemporary of his pitching coach.
“He’s very, very smart,” Hudson said. “He’s very articulate in the way he explains pitching mechanics and stuff like that. But he’s also got a really, really good dry sense of humor too. He knows how to kind of needle that in there every once in a while.”
The influx of information is the biggest change from Prior’s playing days to now. He laughed about having to work with VHS tapes when he first came up. We live in an on-demand world now.
“There’s so much more information and you’re trying to consolidate a lot of different things and get it down to very clear, concise messaging,” Prior said. “The information is more readily available to the players and the coaches. There are just more systems in places to dig and dive and look at things.”
Also long gone are the days of a grouchy old pitching coach with a potbelly just telling pitchers what to do. These days, it’s a more collaborative environment. But it still helps to have a little gravitas when delivering a message.
“He’s really good at talking sequencing and scouting hitters and stuff like that because he’s been through all that,” said second-year starting pitcher Bobby Miller.
Miller, a suburban Chicago native, was born in 1999 so he doesn’t quite remember Prior’s pitching days — though he said he went back on YouTube and rewatched Prior’s playoff duel with Greg Maddux — but notes that his dad was “a huge Mark Prior fan.”
“I feel like I haven’t done as good as a job as asking him about his experiences,” said Miller, who starts Tuesday at Guaranteed Rate Field. “I should be digging more deep into that.”
Prior’s career wasn’t long enough for him to start thinking about coaching while he was playing, though he said he was always curious about how decisions were made during a game. He was consumed with trying to find his way back for years after he threw his last big-league pitch in 2006. In 2013, he had lunch with his old manager Dusty Baker, who was with the Reds. With Baker’s encouragement, Prior had been pitching for the Cincinnati organization that summer trying to mount a comeback. But the dream ended and a month later, they met up in San Diego when Baker pushed him toward a new kind of career in baseball.
“He said, ‘Don’t waste a lot of time, just get back into it,’ because players get older and you get older and you start getting disconnected,” Prior said.
So when San Diego offered him a job in the organization that year, Prior took it. He joined the Dodgers staff in 2018 and took over as pitching coach in 2020. He finally won that elusive World Series ring that season and now he finds himself looking for a second one.
Still a young man, Prior credits Baker for the push that gave him a second, more lasting shot at the big leagues.
“If I didn’t have that lunch, maybe I wouldn’t have been as quick to get back into the game,” Prior said.
The work of a pitching coach is difficult and all-consuming, but it’s also enjoyable. Prior never looked like he was having fun as a pitcher and he’s just as serious as a coach, but trust that he’s enjoying himself.
“When I started my coaching career, I was like, OK, this is really cool, you kind of see guys’ development and it’s a different type of satisfaction,” he said. “When you get back into the coaching and into the dugout or the bullpen, the competitive side comes back out. So it’s been unique and it’s been a lot of fun.”
It took a while for Prior to find peace with how his playing career ended, but as he told me last year, he doesn’t have any regrets. It was nice to hear.
“It all kind of worked out,” he said. “And now I’m here and I’ve been very fortunate and grateful for where I’m at.”
(Photo of Mark Prior: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
