After long road to MLB, Stone Garrett finding home with Diamondbacks

Stone Garrett doesn’t like to think about the past. Perhaps even moreso, he doesn’t like to think about the future.

“I just like to show up every day and put in the work that I need to be a better ballplayer than I was yesterday,” Garrett said. Even when pushed, it’s hard to feel that he’s telling anything but the truth.

Sometimes, though, Garrett is forced to reckon with where he came from and where he is now. It’s the confluence of those two that makes him stare across the Diamondbacks clubhouse, process his surroundings and break into a smile.

“When you look at it from the big picture, yeah, it's a big deal,” Garrett said. “… I don't like to downplay it, but I guess I do downplay it a lot. When you look at the bigger picture, it is a huge achievement.”

Two years ago, Garrett spent the off-season with a deadline placed on his baseball future.

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He was not among the players who were released in the spring of 2020, when COVID and minor league contraction combined to eliminate 1,400 affiliated roster spots. At the end of that season, though, the Marlins — who drafted Garrett in the eighth round in 2014 — let his contract expire.

For months, the only interest came from independent ball. With two weeks until Spring Training, he was set to report not to a major league camp, but to the Sussex County Miners, a Frontier League team that plays in a stadium of just over 4,000 people in New Jersey’s northernmost corner.

“After that year, if I wasn't signed affiliated, I was probably done with baseball,” Garrett said.

That version of Garrett’s future never came to pass. After a fortuitous LinkedIn message turned into a minor league contract with the Diamondbacks, he showed his pop with 25 home runs in Double-A Amarillo. This year, he was even better, hitting 28 home runs in Triple-A Reno.

Eventually, Garrett’s success forced the Diamondbacks’ hand. Despite a logjam of uber-talented outfielders — most of whom were drafted in the early rounds and progressed through the minors as blue chip prospects — the club called him up last month. In a sense, the move brought Garrett’s story full circle.

“Those are the guys that we all root for just a little bit harder,” manager Torey Lovullo said. “They're easy to root for.”

Garrett, though, wasn’t called up to tug at the heart strings. The Diamondbacks’ top four outfielders — Corbin Carroll, Daulton Varsho, Alek Thomas and Jake McCarthy — are all left-handed hitters, making them a simpler puzzle to solve for left-handed pitchers.

“We've been looking for right-handed punch, right-handed power, right-handed at-bats all year long,” Lovullo said. “There's no mystery to it.”

Garrett, along with midseason acquisition Emmanuel Rivera, has filled that role with aplomb. The sample size is small, at just 53 plate appearances, but the results are eye-catching. In 14 games, he’s batting .348 with three home runs and a 1.0 OPS.

“Getting Stone up here has taken the load off of some guys that may or may not have been ready to handle left-on-left matchups,” Lovullo said. “It's given him a chance to show what he can do and put him in an area of strength. … It's been a very, very healthy offensive punch for us.”

Given the Diamondbacks’ roster construction, it’s a stretch that has likely played Garrett into their plans for the short-term future as a power-hitting right-handed bench bat.

Even amid that possibility, Garrett isn’t letting himself get caught up in what this all means. Playing in the major leagues hit him once — when the Diamondbacks boarded their chartered jet to his first full roadtrip and bypassed airport security.

“That's one where it was like, ‘Oh, this is the big leagues,’” Garrett said.

Other than that, Garrett says his focus is on more pressing matters, like how to counteract pitchers who know exactly where his holes are and have the ability to find them. Thinking about what this season means is an exercise he’ll go through when the season ends. Even then, he’ll only allot himself a day or two of reflection.

Then it’ll be on to another off-season. Only this time, he knows it won’t lead him to independent ball.

Theo Mackie covers Arizona high school sports and the Arizona Diamondbacks. He can be reached by email at theo.mackie@gannett.com and on Twitter @theo_mackie.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Against the odds, Stone Garrett working his way into D-Backs future