Mike Leake, the Cincinnati Reds starter and recent graduate, allegedly, of the Winona Ryder Academy, is most famous on the baseball field for having skipped the in-season minor leagues and made the Reds' rotation right out of Spring Training in 2010. Now he's—in the minor leagues, where he'll finally get a chance to tour the great cities of the AAA International League, so named because all of its teams are located within the continental United States.
↵This is one of those unfortunate things that happens to most minor-league-skippers who are not all-time greats. Pete Incaviglia, for instance, skipped the minor leagues and hit 30 home runs in a 185-strikeout rookie season—all this deep within the pre-Mark-Reynolds age of hitting. But in 1998, at 34, he finally spent extended time in the minor leagues, which he appeared to find to his liking—he hit .324/.411/.612 with 23 home runs in 76 PCL games, and would later spend significant time in the unaffiliated minor leagues.
↵Leake, who's just 23, is unlikely to spend the next several years in the International League—and definitely not the Atlantic League. But for league-average players a brief minor league stint is never all that far away, which is what makes his achievement so lastingly impressive.
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