B-Lark University: Barry Larkin shapes young stars ... until he’s ready to manage the Reds

ORLANDO – It wasn’t yet winter break, but the walkways at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Disney World were teeming with people. The Pop Warner football national title game was about to kick off on an oddly muggy day in early December, and everywhere parents were leading their children by the hand.

There was a special guest for the coin toss. Mickey Mouse, the Don of Disney World himself, walked up the 50-yard line, his entrance accompanied by the most distressingly overproduced and poppy version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song ever heard. But over the din, loud thwaps could be heard from a nearby building.

There, in a narrow caged patio that nobody noticed lodged underneath a staircase, Cincinnati Reds great Barry Larkin was being repeatedly punched. Reds prospect Shed Long was doing the punching, working combinations on Larkin’s padded hands. Long’s first right jab at the Hall of Famer caused Larkin to cringe and shake the appendage loose as if he’d just caught his fingers in a car door.

It’s here that Larkin spends his winters, training pro ballplayers who don’t understand the meaning of “off” in “offseason.” They box, an activity Larkin felt helped him in his playing days. They lift weights. They shag fly balls and take batting practice, and then run through infield drills on the same fields used by the Atlanta Braves during spring training.

Seattle Mariners center fielder Dee Gordon, Larkin’s original pupil, calls it B-Lark University. He even had T-shirts made. The camp is technically an offshoot of the Tom Shaw Performance camp, which mostly serves professional football players. But over the years, more and more baseball players have flocked to Orlando to work with the former Reds shortstop.

Gordon was the first, taken under Larkin’s wing at the request of Gordon’s father five or six years ago. Then came Cleveland Indians shortstop Francisco Lindor. Other pupils include Long and Gordon’s younger brother Nick, a top prospect with the Minnesota Twins, as well as outfielder Carlos Gonzalez and Reds outfielder Jesse Winker. On this particular day in December, Larkin also worked with Los Angeles Dodgers prospect Edwin Rios.

Larkin does just about everything the players do, his physical fitness belying his 53 years of age. He prides himself on being able to keep up. It’s the kind of hands-on work he enjoys, and the same kind of instruction he offers to Reds minor-leaguers during the season as a roving coach with the organization. Except here, there are fewer pupils and more one-on-one coaching to go around.

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For the present, the Reds legend wouldn’t spend his time any other way. But he has thought about his future in the game. And now, more than any time before, he feels the desire to manage.

But only for the Reds.

Larkin used to spend his winters golfing. He’d work out to stay in shape, but didn’t have any other responsibilities. Then he got a call from former big-leaguer Tom Gordon, one of his contemporaries in the game. At the time, Gordon’s son Dee was trying to establish himself in the majors as an infielder with the Dodgers. Would Larkin mind working with him?

“I was like, ‘Yeah, but if Dee wants to work with me, Dee’s got to call me. Not his daddy,’” Larkin remembered. “So Dee called me.”

Initially, the pair worked out at a local high school. A few years later they were joined by Lindor, then a top prospect for the Indians. When home run balls started breaking classroom windows, it was clear that new digs were required.

Larkin approached Shaw about adding a baseball component to his performance camp, and the last three years B-Lark University has called the ESPN complex its home. Players pay for the physical training portion offered by Shaw, but Larkin charges nothing for his baseball tutelage. If you come willing to work, he’ll coach you up.

The younger Gordon has been working with Larkin almost as long as his brother. Long has been coming here since 2015, when the Reds moved him off catcher to second base. The previous spring, he was told to forget hitting and just follow Larkin around to work on fielding. Now he follows him in the winters as well.

“You’re getting the best teaching in the game, in my opinion,” Long said.

A typical day begins early in the morning with weight lifting. Larkin’s pupils mix with other major leaguers like Martin Prado, Ender Inciarte and Luis Valbuena, all of who train at the Tom Shaw camp in the mornings but handle their own baseball duties in the afternoons. Then, they box.

Larkin picked up boxing and other martial arts during his playing days, training in the offseasons with a man who worked as a security guard at Riverfront Stadium. He found it helped him keep an aggressive mindset at the plate and in the field, and trained him to be more directional rather than rotational with his swing.

While Rios, Long and the younger Gordon took turns working on a heavy bag, Larkin translated boxing into baseball. He reminded Long that the proper hip and torso rotation on a certain combination of punches should feel like turning a double play. (At one point, Long knocked the heavy bag out of its mooring in a steel rafter above. When he turns double plays, incoming baserunners would be wise to duck.)

In any given session, Larkin will throw plenty of punches in demonstration.

“It’s important that I can talk it but also physically do it,” he said. “I think the guys appreciate that and they respect that.”

After boxing, Larkin’s charges take fly balls while the Hall of Famer takes laps around a track. Then it’s on to the true baseball stuff. First comes infield drills. This day, Larkin hit grounder after grounder to Rios, Long and Nick Gordon as they turned double plays. All of them wore only a flat glove, basically a leather oven mitt that allows a player to stop an incoming ball without breaking a finger, but not actually catch it.

Then came cage work, with Larkin throwing flips to Rios in the batting cage, helping the Dodgers prospect better reach the inside pitch with his beautiful left-hand swing.

Finally, at about 2 p.m., they call it a day. They’ll work this way five days a week from December up until the eve of spring training.

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“We don’t play games with our work,” Nick Gordon said. “We come in and get it done and do it the right way. Things go smoothly. We don’t really have too many rough days, because we all pretty much get it.”

B-Lark University isn't done growing. Larkin said he gets calls from agents and minor-league coaches all the time about sending players to work with him, and his response is to come on down.

He’s worked with top Atlanta Braves prospect Dansby Swanson in the past and is working currently with Toronto Blue Jays prospect Bo Bichette. Tampa Bay Rays prospect Willy Adames will come through later this winter, and Reds center fielder Billy Hamilton also has stopped by. Larkin also is hoping to get his hands on Reds prospects Nick Senzel and Jeter Downs at some point before spring training.

More: How the Andrew McCutchen trade affects Billy Hamilton

One other Reds prospect is already there. Mauro Conde spent last season in rookie ball, and was planning on doing his offseason training back home in Puerto Rico. Hurricane Maria changed all that.

Instead of playing baseball, he was working to stop water from entering his parents’ house. They lost all electricity, so he waited in line from seven in the morning to five in the evening to get diesel to for his home’s generator. They had one working cell phone, and they were able to get a call out about once every half hour.

One of those calls was to Larkin. Conde needed a place to train, and the Reds great said he had a spot for him. So Conde sailed to the mainland on a cruise ship – there were no flights – and began his offseason program in Orlando.

“I found myself here and I’m lucky enough to be here,” Conde said.

Conde also joins a brotherhood that keeps in constant touch throughout the regular season. Every student at B-Lark University ends up on a group text message chain with each other and with Larkin himself. They cheered Winker when he was called up for the first time this past season, and gave Gonzalez some good-natured prodding as he muddled through a tough year.

They half-joke that they’ll all have a party at the All-Star Game a few years down the road because they all will have been voted onto the roster.

“We’re all really close and we all care about each other,” Larkin said. “At the end of the day, it’s all about everyone pulling for each other to be as successful as they can.”

When Larkin's minor-league pupils reach the majors, they’ve told him he better come along. He protests, invoking his value to the next crop of major-league hopefuls who might seek his guidance, but Long, Gordon and others are insistent.

That’s not to say Larkin hasn’t thought about it. He’s been on the radar for managerial jobs before. In 2013, he turned down an interview for a job managing the Detroit Tigers, saying that he wasn’t interested in the associated time commitment. But a year later, he accepted a chance to interview to be manager of the Rays.

He’s a fan of his current workload – he travels two-and-a-half weeks out of every month during the season to work with players at the Reds’ various minor-league affiliates – but he admits his interest in managing is greater than it’s ever been. Still, he has eyes only for the Reds.

“I only want to be in Cincinnati,” Larkin said.

He’s not ready for that jump yet. In fact, he’d like to help the organization in other ways first. Specifically, he wants to help bridge what he feels to be a lack of communication between the major- and minor-league sides of the operation.

It’s a divide he said didn’t exist with the Washington Nationals when he worked in their front office from 2007-09, although he doesn’t know if it’s more common across baseball. He said he’s spoken to owner Bob Castellini and general manager Dick Williams about helping to improve it.

When asked what specifically needs to be fixed, Larkin declined to get too detailed. He did say he feels the Reds have all the right people in place in the minors to shepherd prospects to the majors. But then they get there and Larkin feels like there’s a disconnect.

He used himself and Reds great Eric Davis – also a roving instructor for the club – to make an example.

“Eric Davis is a Gold Glove, 40-home run, 120-run-producing, 80-stolen base guy. He doesn’t work with Billy Hamilton,” Larkin said. “I’m a Gold Glove, 30-home run Hall of Famer. I don’t work with the big-league shortstops, nor any other player at the big-league level.”

Then he shrugged his shoulders as if to say, See what I mean?

Once things become more cohesive, in his estimation, Larkin will be more ready to give managing a go. He’s tried his hand at it before with the Brazilian squad in the World Baseball Classic, and feels there’s little that could surprise him strategically. He also knows that managing the personalities in the clubhouse and dealing with the media is an important part of the job.

“And now major-league managers have to have no on-field experience at least as far as a coaching or managerial position,” he added, sarcastically alluding to a string of recent green hires across the sport.

At one point, Larkin caught himself putting the cart before the horse. Phrases like if there’s an opportunity and I don’t want to assume began inserting themselves into his sentences. Plus, he stressed, he’s not there yet.

At any rate, the Reds currently have a manager in Bryan Price, whose name did not come up during Larkin’s 30-minute interview. Larkin may hope to be the Reds’ manager of the future, but he’s aware he’s in the present.

“There’s more work to be done. That’s why I’m not ready for it now,” Larkin said. “There’s more work to be done, in my opinion, and hopefully I can be part of helping that work get done.”

Then Larkin stood up and headed toward the field to hit some groundballs.