This story was excerpted from Daniel Kramer’s Mariners Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
HOUSTON -- Brock Rodden had all the jitters throughout MLB debut weekend against the Astros, and what the club has admired so much about the 26-year-old prospect is that he plays with no fear.
This is a guy, after all, who took down a literal bull to save his grandfather’s life.
Yes, the 5-foot-7, 170-pound infielder who was a sparkplug throughout Seattle’s huge series in Houston is the same guy who on an Oklahoma farm nearly a decade ago prevented a bull from further stampeding his loved one, Reedy.
Rodden will never forget this past weekend, which featured 35-40 family members making the eight-hour drive down from the Sooner State.
But the same could be said for that fateful day on his family ranch, when he was just 17.
The way Rodden recounts it, the bull was a youngster and recently procured by Reedy, and they were applying its standard shots in a small cattle corral. During the process and with his back turned, Rodden heard a loud thud -- the sound of his grandpa being bull-rushed.
“I'm freaking out,” Rodden said. “I don't know what to do. So I bust out of the chute and I run over there. The first thing I see is a PVC pipe. So I grab a PVC pipe and I hit this bull with it. And then the bull is looking at me and he's mad at me now."
The pipe shattered, but Rodden had finally broken the bull’s attention away from Reedy, who was charged four to five times and suffered a punctured lung, a broken arm and a few broken ribs.
“And then it's like looking at me now,” Rodden said, “and I'm like, 'Oh no, here we go.’”
As the bull charged Rodden, the versatile infielder flashed some of the athleticism he showed over the weekend by sidestepping it, grabbing its ear on the backside, turning its head and thrusting downward with the help of gravity.
“By the grace of God, the bull kind of fell, and I just put my knee on his neck and waited for my grandpa to get out,” Rodden said.
Harrowing, but heroic -- and an encapsulation to the grit that Rodden plays with.
“Brock, when he walks in the dugout, he doesn’t seem tall in stature, but he’s got big tools,” Jerry Dipoto, Mariners president of baseball operations, said. “He’s got power. He throws well. He’s an above-average runner. He plays every position on the infield. He can play some outfield; he’s athletic enough.
“He’s like a true ‘Super U’ guy.”
Rodden figures to have a sizable leash after a productive weekend. And more so, because rookie shortstop Colt Emerson is out for the foreseeable future -- and potentially the season.
Emerson was in the process of being optioned to Triple-A Tacoma on Thursday when he vocalized that the left wrist discomfort he’s been playing through may actually be more severe. He’s in the process of seeing a specialist in Arizona.
Rodden was going to be the corresponding move for Emerson regardless, having earned the opportunity with 19 homers and an .841 OPS at Tacoma. His versatility made the decision that much easier, as Rodden plays all three infield positions and switch-hits.
Rodden started at shortstop for all three games in Houston, though Leo Rivas and even Cole Young will be in the mix there, too. So will J.P. Crawford, whose status on the IL remains murky, Dipoto said. Rodden can also play second base and third base.
A fifth-round pick out of Wichita State in that loaded 2023 Draft class, Rodden is the Mariners’ No. 19 prospect by MLB Pipeline. He’s on the older end among the farm system, at 26, but is making the most of the opportunity.
On Friday, Rodden had a game-tying ground-rule double in the eighth inning, then brought home a key insurance run on a sacrifice fly in the 10th -- though the Mariners lost that one in a gut-punch walk-off.
On Saturday, he walked then punched a 100.1 mph, 376-foot double off Daikin Park’s quirky left-center wall that scored a run in Seattle’s rebound win. And he had an athletic rundown on Taylor Trammell on a daylight pickoff that helped Emerson Hancock clear the seventh inning.
On Sunday, he yanked a 98.4 mph single through the left-side hole while batting right-handed for the first time in the big leagues.
“I had so much fun out there,” Rodden said. “I was definitely a little nervous at first, but after a few pitches went in the zone, I was back to playing baseball.”