For the baseball team's seniors, June 2 was the end of an era. As the Ivy League Champions lined up to shake hands after being eliminated from the NCAA Tournament by Wake Forest University, most of the recent graduates knew that they had played their final game of competitive ball.
But for Devin Thomas '07, the dream of playing beyond the collegiate level has become reality. A week after that loss, Thomas was selected in the seventh round of the MLB Draft by the Detroit Tigers. Just six weeks removed from his final collegiate game, Thomas is a regular starter behind the plate for the Oneonta Tigers, a Class-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers.
After playing college ball at a high level all four years of his Brown career, Thomas says he is appreciative of his chance to play in the pros.
"Playing professional ball is something I've been hoping to do and looking forward to for a long time," Thomas said. "It feels great to make it here. It's really a validation for all the hard work that you put in."
The Brown star was selected by the Tigers as the 241st overall pick. Thomas said he was in the car on the way back to Providence when he received a call telling him that he'd been drafted.
"(Draft day) was kind of a tense day," Thomas said. "I had talked to some teams so I kind of had an idea who was interested in me, who wanted me. But it's tough to get a specific idea."
Thomas is Brown's 17th draftee since the MLB draft began in 1965. Thomas was the University's highest drafted player since shortstop Bill Almon '74 was the first overall pick in the 1974 draft.
After being drafted, Thomas reported to Lakeland, Fla., where all Tigers' draft picks gather for an orientation camp and prepare for a June-to-September season with a club in either Lakeland or Oneonta. Thomas was assigned to Oneonta because "the Gulf Coast League (and Lakeland Tigers) is more for younger guys and higher-round draft picks," Thomas said. When he arrived at Oneonta, he discovered that the team was about half rookies and half players who participated in extended spring training in order to fine-tune parts of their game, so there was a wide range of experience levels.
Thomas' new club plays in the short-season New York-Penn League and travels by bus to places such as Brooklyn, N.Y. and State College, Pa., for games. The entire team stays in dormitories at Hartwick College in central New York. The undivided focus on baseball makes the minor league experience and competition "similar to summer ball," according to Thomas, who played two seasons in the prestigious Cape Cod League. The intense schedule is the biggest difference, Thomas said.
"You play 70-plus games (in the short-season minor leagues) instead of around 30 in the Cape Cod League," Thomas said. "There's just so little down time. In college when you got home from an away series you'd have a couple days off, but here you have a game that next night."
One of the fresh experiences for Thomas has been the number of spectators at the team's games. Oneonta has the smallest attendance in the league with an average of 1,147 fans per night, but this still dwarfs the Brown baseball experience.
"There's definitely more support than at Brown," he said. "We got a lot of people for the Ivy Championship, but here there are a lot of people every night. Some of the other teams get four, five, six thousand people."
And Thomas has certainly put on a show. Just two months removed from leading the Bears in hits, RBIs and home runs, Thomas has made an immediate impact on the Tigers. He played in 20 of the team's 24 games through July 13, and has consistently hit in the middle of the lineup, logging at bats at anywhere from the second through sixth spots in the order. Thomas currently leads the team in walks and RBIs with 11 and 16 respectively.
Thomas has also focused on his defense and management of games behind the plate. One of the main keys to improving in this area is building a rapport with the pitchers on the staff. Thomas quickly discovered that he would need to work on his Spanish language skills to develop these relationships as about half the pitchers are from Latin American countries and speak little English.
"It's a great excuse to learn Spanish," Thomas said. "I took Spanish in high school, but speaking and using it here would be great for me. It's almost like study abroad."
As Thomas continues to try to improve every aspect of his game, he has kept his mind on the ultimate goal of moving up to a higher level of minor league play after the season ends.
"The ultimate goal is just to move up, but it can't drive you crazy," he said. "It's easy to look at your stats all the time, but you can't let them make you go nuts. The first day at Oneonta, someone from the team said 'Don't wait for us, let your performance move you,' and I've really taken that to heart. You can't control anything except your performance on the field, so that's where I have to show them."
