Major League Baseball fits Oakland Athletics’ Liam Hendriks to a T

OAKLAND — A 5-year-old Liam Hendriks, like most other Australian kids, had to decide on a summer sport to pursue.

T-ball or cricket?

Tradition might’ve pulled Hendriks toward cricket — a more popular sport among Australians than baseball — but there was just something a bit more logical about T-ball for a young, short-attention spanned Hendriks and his friends.

“T-ball is thirty minutes long every Saturday and cricket starts turning into three hours, six hours,” Hendriks said. “And my parents were supportive of anything I wanted to do, so they were going to be at every game regardless. They said, the choice is yours, but they were obviously nudging more toward T-ball because of the time frame.”

That choice put Hendriks on a high-speed track from the tee-ball diamonds of his hometown Perth to the recent MLB All-Star Game, representing the Oakland A’s amid a breakout season in which he’s accumulated a 16 2/3 innings scoreless streak and 0.92 ERA, the lowest among relievers in the MLB.

Hendriks struck out three in Cleveland in his one inning, but his sixth inning wasn’t perfect. He gave up a home run to Colorado Rockies’ Charlie Blackmon.

That inning wasn’t his favorite part of his trip, though. Watching Vladimir Guerrero Jr. mash 91 home runs in Monday’s Home Run Derby (even if his teammate Matt Chapman was on the receiving end of the young home run masher’s wrath) hyped up his entire American League team (which eventually won the main event 4-3). Most of all, he just liked meeting his opposition.

“You’ve always played against them but never had a chance to have a conversation with them apart from brief conversations you have with them in Oakland because they have to run to center field to go to the batting cages,” he said.

The decision to abandon his two-seamer and opt in to his four-seamer, plus a slider that’s hovering closer to the strike zone and inducing more swings-and-misses, along with an experimental curveball — is making magic.

“I didn’t realize how bad my two-seamer was. I remember the good times it was like selective memory recall,” Hendriks laughed. “I always remember the times I used it well, and it was a good pitch for me. But looking at the numbers, it wasn’t good. The average was high, the OPS was high.”

But how does one go from hitting a motionless ball off a tee for a half-hour every weekend to world-class closer? In Australian baseball, like in American Little League, kids play any position they’re asked. He’d displayed a strong arm throwing javelin in high school, so pitching just made sense.

“It’s pretty much just like playing catch, just toward the catcher,” Hendriks said.

Baseball isn’t the highest echelon of Australian sports, Hendriks said. But an innate knack for the game nudged him onto a fast track to the States. At 10, Hendriks moved off the tee, a few years later he was scouted to play for the Carine Cats and Wanneroo Giants of the Western Australia State League.

Hendriks played all over the field — outfield, third base — and won MVP as a first baseman in the league’s yearly tournament on Australia’s Gold Coast. Standouts can sign with a big league team once they turn 16-and-a-half.

Hendriks waited until he was 18 to sign with the Minnesota Twins. He was also eligible to play in the Australian Football League — his father is an AFL scout — but baseball was calling.

A couple tweaks to his repertoire altered Hendriks’ career; before 2019, he’d bounced from the Twins, around waiver wires and within trades between the Kansas City Royals and Toronto Blue Jays before eventually landing in Oakland.

Hendriks is just the third Australian player to make the All-Star game, along with former A’s reliever Grant Balfour and David Nilsson. Lewis Thorpe, out of Melbourne, made his debut with the Twins this summer.

His ascent, he hopes, will inspire more Australian players to choose a Saturday afternoon T-ball game over the traditional cricket match.

“I’m hoping that this has a chance to get another wave of young kids coming through,” Hendriks said. “Like Grant Balfour did in 2013. He made it, and you’re seeing the fruits of labor coming through now. The more Australians do anything the more publicity it gets down home and more kids get involved, and we can grow the sport to rival some of the bigger ones.”