PORT CHARLOTTE, Fla. — By this time last year, the future was officially an afterthought.
Shane McClanahan had been reassigned to the minor league camp midway through spring training and was destined to begin the season at the team’s alternate training site.
The Rays were days away from beginning the season in Miami with Tyler Glasnow on the mound, and McClanahan was holed up in a Venice-area Airbnb with teammate David Hess.
“I’ll be the first to tell you that I was disappointed,” McClanahan recalled on Tuesday. “But, ultimately I had a job to do at the alternate site and that was to work my tail off. I was down there for a reason. They might not have thought I was ready, and every day my goal was to prove them wrong.
“I was ready whenever they needed me to show them that, you know, I can do it.”
It’s not that the Rays needed convincing, it was more a question of simplifying McClanahan’s journey to the big leagues. So it was a month or so at the alternate site, a late April call to Tampa Bay, a few starts in the four-inning range, and then it was up to McClanahan to dictate how quickly he would progress.
Turns out, pretty darn fast.
Not quite one year later, McClanahan was named Tampa Bay’s starting pitcher for opening day of the 2022 season. McClanahan has come so far so quickly that the announcement was practically anticlimactic. No call to the manager’s office, no formal announcement.
Assuming McClanahan already had a pretty good idea he was in line to pitch on April 8, manager Kevin Cash casually made it official while meeting with reporters Tuesday morning. His would-be ace got word himself just before a post-workout massage.
“I saw it on Twitter,” McClanahan said.
It really is indicative of how rapidly McClanahan has risen in the rotation’s hierarchy. Back in the 2020 World Series, the Rays rotation included Blake Snell, Charlie Morton and Glasnow. At the time, McClanahan was more of an oddity. A secret weapon in the bullpen, the first pitcher in history to make his MLB debut in the postseason.
Now, Snell and Morton are gone, Glasnow is likely out for the season following elbow surgery and McClanahan is the closest thing the Rays have to an ace.
“There were a lot of questions in 2020, bringing him up,” Cash said. “His stuff got him up there. We didn’t know a ton about him at the alt site, but we felt confident enough that he could contribute and be one of our best pitchers when we were making playoff rosters.
“And then last year, we had some honest conversations with him. The lack of (previous) workload made us be pretty strict, stringent with his workload early on. And it takes a mature mindset to understand that. When you’re his age, it’s basically, ‘Give me the ball until I run out of gas.’ We wanted to make sure we had him available in September, where he was a healthy pitcher and could contribute in any capacity. That’s a lot for a young pitcher to understand that in April and May, and he did.”
The Rays ran through nine different starting pitchers in 2021 before McClanahan made his regular-season debut on April 29. By the season’s end, he was 10-6 with a 3.43 ERA and was the No. 1 starter in the American League Division Series against Boston.
“I feel like I’m a different pitcher as opposed to last season,” McClanahan said. “I’ve definitely worked on being more consistent, getting a little stronger and just trying to improve any way I can, whether it’s conditioning or pitch selection or anything I do, honestly. I think I’m in a good spot.”
McClanahan, 24, called his mom and dad to give them the news Tuesday morning but otherwise seemed unfazed to be Tampa Bay’s youngest opening day starter since Scott Kazmir was 23 in 2007.
“I think you get what you work for,” he said. “And I’ve had this mindset my entire life of, you know, I want to do what I think I’m capable of. And I think I’m just starting to find out what I’m capable of. So there’s a lot more to go.”
