Baseball: Former Riverhead hurler Jimmy Powers signs with professional independent league

You can throw the ball hard and rip up the radar gun all you want but if your mechanics aren’t sound, it’s just a matter of time before a life-long pitching career catches up to you.

Take for example, former left-handed pitching prospect Jimmy Powers who donned the Riverhead blue just six years ago.

Powers was highly-recruited out of Riverhead and signed with Division I Temple University to extend his baseball career. That part of his career was unfortunately short-lived as he transferred after just one season as an Owl.

“It just wasn’t a good baseball program,” Powers said. “They were always finishing at the bottom half of the league so it just wasn’t fun. It stinks to go out there and lose every game.”

With a year of Division I pitching under his belt and his eyes set on getting drafted, Powers transferred to Kirkwood Community College, a premier junior college program in Iowa.

Powers cracked the starting rotation but in his first start, blew out his elbow. He needed to get Tommy John surgery to reconstruct his ulnar collateral ligament.

“It was devastating,” Powers said. “The whole rehab process took over a year.”

And when he came back, he still wasn’t right.

“There wasn’t so much pain as much as there was constant soreness,” Powers said.

So instead of going away again to school, he decided to just pitch for Division III Farmingdale State College at home and get a degree. But he only threw about 20 innings in two years. He just couldn’t get healthy.

“In college, I kept getting hurt so I was like forget baseball,” Powers said. “I’m just going to get my degree, start working, make some money and start my life.”

He worked for a few marketing companies for six months before realizing he couldn’t give up on baseball just yet.

“I got sick of it,” Powers said. “I was like ‘I can’t do this’ so I started working out again and throwing and my velocity was up so I figured why not give it a try?”

While working out at Torque Athletic Performance in Deer Park, instructors found issues in his mechanics. — issues that would cause injury if not properly adjusted.

“The way I used to throw made myself so vulnerable to injury,” Powers said. “I was kind of throwing like three-quarters sidearm and my elbow was always hurting me. After going to Torque, my mechanics are perfect and I can throw every single day. It’s effortless, it’s painless and it’s awesome.

“If I didn’t fix my mechanics, I wouldn’t be playing,” Powers continued. “I’d be throwing 85 MPH with arm soreness.”

Instead, he now throws 88-92 MPH and says he feels as healthy as he was in high school and can throw every day without an issue.

“The goal is to make it to affiliated ball,” Powers said.

Major league teams have affiliated programs which feature about five different levels of baseball. After being drafted, players are assigned to a level and then work on their craft  and move up the ranks before getting the call to the big show if they prove valuable.

For Powers however, he didn’t get a chance to show his stuff in college because of injuries and needed to take a different route. He tried out for the Ozarks Professional Baseball league last week and signed a two-year contract to play independent ball starting July 1st. It’s just step one in the process.

“If I do well enough, I can get picked up by a bigger independent league,” Powers said. “Hopefully they’ll buy out my contact after this season.”

If Powers gets into one of the premier independent leagues and pitches well, he could get right into a AA affiliated team which would put him two levels away from the majors.

“Because I’m a lefty, I think I have a good shot at making it,” Powers said. “I just hope that I can stay healthy.”