By Rob Rains
JUPITER, Fla. – It’s been almost exactly a year since Andrew Dutkanych IV was drafted by the Cardinals, and on Thursday, he finally will get to pitch in his first professional game.
It’s been a year filled with physical treatment, lifting weights and rehabbing from Tommy John surgery on his right elbow in March of 2024. At the same time Dutkanych also been rehabbing a hamstring injury that occurred a year earlier, ending his freshman season at Vanderbilt.
“I will be really excited to throw and have an umpire, a stat sheet and compete to get three outs in an inning,” Dutkanych said. “I’ve missed the game more than anything.”
Dutkanych is scheduled to start for the Florida Complex League Cardinals against the rookie team from the Mets.
It will be his first game since March 12 of last year, when he injured his elbow during a 1 2/3 inning relief appearance against Indiana. Because of the injury to his hamstring, and then his elbow, Dutkanych only pitched a combined 17 innings in his two seasons at Vanderbilt, appearing in a total of nine games.
“It almost feels not like I’ve been rehabbing for 16 months but that I’ve been gone for three years,” Dutkanych said. “I pitched a little bit the last two years, but I didn’t have a real season.
“My senior year of high school (in 2022) was the last time on the mound for a full season. It’s been a while since I’ve put together a body of starts.”
Despite knowing he would miss all of last season and a good part of this year following the surgery, the Cardinals used their pick in the seventh round of last year’s draft on Dutkanych, who was a draft-eligible sophomore.
Dutkanych was projected by most scouts to be a first-round selection when he was a high school senior in Indiana but he pulled his name out of the draft to honor his commitment to Vanderbilt.
“For us to get a talent like that in the seventh round was the steal of the draft,” said Cardinals’ area scout T.C. Calhoun. “I was shocked and excited for him. Between J.J. (Wetherholt, the top selection) falling to us in the first round at pick seven and Andrew getting to us in the seventh round, I felt like we hit the lottery with those two. I’m excited to watch him come back.”
“The best I’ve ever been”
Dutkanych, who will turn 22 on July 31, has realistic expectations for his return to the mound. He knows that pitching in the bullpen, and throwing live batting practice sessions, is not the same as pitching in an actual game.
It’s the moment he has been building for, however.
“I didn’t feel any pressure to come back super quickly because they want to make sure this process goes well and you come out at the other end as good as you can,” Dutkanych said. “Next year will be the biggest year when it comes to performance. This year the goal is to build up, get in some games and throw some strikes.
“I feel like you kind of assume you are going to be a little rusty on the way back. I think I’m the best I’ve ever been but I don’t think it’s going to show right away. I think it’s slowly coming, but I think in this time there are things I’ve gotten so much better at. … I’m excited to just throw. I’m pretty done with all this rehab stuff. It’s great to walk on the beach but I’d rather be sweating my rear end off at a game somewhere.”
The reality of a pitcher going through the long rehab process is that it can be tedious, lonely and boring. Even though all of the pitchers are at different stages of the process, they can rely on each other for advice and feedback.
One person who has been helpful to Dutkanych is Jacob Odle, who underwent the surgery about the same time. The two also have been roommates since January. Odle has been back pitching in games since May.
“I’m more of a reassurance factor that he’s going to be OK, that he doesn’t really have to worry about his arm not being there,” Odle said. “I’m able to tell him how it went, what to expect … When you haven’t pitched in a long time, it’s hard.
“Duke is one of the hardest workers I’ve ever been around. I’ve never been around somebody who pays such great attention to detail and wants to be good at everything he does. Seeing the way he functions and the way his brain fires, it’s really cool to me because he is so crazy smart and sees the game a lot differently than I do.”
Dutkanych paused for a moment when he was asked about what had been the hardest part of the long rehab process, during which he’s been at the Cardinals’ complex from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. six days a week going through his daily workout.
“You sort of have a new arm in a way and the way you got sore before is not the same way you get sore now,” he said. “You are sore in different places. There’s a different intensity feeling new stuff. It’s a challenge to consistently deal with ‘this is fine’ and keep reassuring yourself that this is normal and part of the process.
“You are going to get sore. You’re going to feel weird sometimes. You have to ride it out and continue on a slow ascension.”
When doubts started to creep into his head, Dutkanych tried to push them aside.
“You have to be confident in the surgery and preparation that you’ve had,” he said. “My arm is stronger than it’s ever been. When you have this detailed of a throwing program and process you should have confidence in it. You have to rely on that.”
As much as Odle has been able to help Dutkaych anticipate how he is going to feel during different stages of the rehab process, he said Dutkanych actually is helping him become a better pitcher at the same time.
“He’s been pitching for a long time,” Odle said. “He’s been a top guy for a long time. I was a nobody in high school, went to UC-Irvine and didn’t pitch, went to a Juco and got lucky in the Draft League. He’s helped teach me how to throw, giving me new ideas of how to attack hitters. We talk about stuff like metrics all the time, especially when watching big-league guys throw. We try to understand how they get outs and why they are so good.”
Part of the rehab process for Dutkanych also included addressing the hamstring injury which ended his freshman season.
“I never felt like my mechanics recovered from that and I think that was one of the most important things we needed to tackle during rehab,” he said. “The hamstring needs to be a non-issue. The goal was to have a strong front leg, because it affects everything.”
The knowledge that Dutkanych has gained about his body during the rehab process wasn’t something he planned to learn.
“I’m very confident that my body is prepared to handle the stress,” he said. “I can look back at moments and kind of see why that happened. You learn from it and move forward. All the things I’ve learned about protecting my elbow during Tommy John rehab, nobody told me that before. Now I know.”
The many months of rehab also has given Dutkanych time to think about the non-baseball side of his life. There have been a lot of empty hours, time he spent by himself.
Dutkanych said he actually enjoyed that part of the process, and believes he is better off now having gone through it.
“You play baseball every day for so long and it can become part of our identity, and I think it’s good to have time to yourself, kind of to separate,” he said. “‘OK, who am I without baseball.’ You can kind of focus on basically what is your personality, how do you treat people? How do you do things? Who are you without baseball?
“The other thing that has been good is that I have been rehabbing at the same time I am financially independent for the first time in my life. So I’ve had all this down time to think about how I want to do things now, how do I want to live now that I have money and time. It’s been good; I get to be intentional about the way I want to do things.”
“Four jaw-dropping pitches”
Before he made the decision to pull his name out of the 2022 draft and head to Vanderbilt, Dutkanych made a start that spring that scouts in Indiana still talk about.
Jason Bryans, an area scout for the Cardinals whose territory includes Indiana, was one of several scouts there on April 12 when Dutkanych pitched for Brebeuf Jesuit against RonCalli.
“He pitched the single greatest game I’ve ever seen a high school kid throw,” Bryans said. “If you asked a lot of the area guys who were there that day they would say the same thing. We still talk about it, literally. Honest to God truth, we laugh about it.”
Bryans remembers in detail how the game began.
“Four different pitches,” he said. “The first one, ‘wow that was good. Then holy cow.’ All in a row, four jaw-dropping pitches to start the game. It was fun to watch.”
So how did the rest of the game go? Dutkanych threw an eight-inning no-hitter and his team got a 2-1 walkoff win. Dutkanych struck out 17 and walked two. One hitter reached on an error.
“It was incredible, the best I’ve seen,” Bryans said. “He was a first-round talent.”
Despite the allure of a high signing bonus if he went directly to the pros out of high school, Dutkanych decided he wanted to go to Vanderbilt, where he majored in economics with a business minor.
Even though his college career did not go the way he intended back then, Dutkanych has no regrets. But he also has changed his thinking now, since he has started his professional career, even before he steps on the mound for his first game.
Dutkanych kept taking classes through last fall, and he is one semester away from earning his degree. The catch is, he doesn’t want to get it.
And he does have a reason which makes sense.
“This is the first time I’ve ever gotten to focus my mind on baseball,” Dutkanych said. “I think the most successful period of my career was the summer after my junior year in high school, on the summer circuit. That was the only other time when I didn’t have school.
“I’m feeling a lot of similarities with what my process is and the way my mind is centered. All of my mental energy is toward baseball.”
Dutkanych’s goal is to get in as many games as possible over the final two months of the minor-league season, first with the rookie league team and then for the Class A Palm Beach Cardinals, and then spend the off-season preparing for a big 2026 season.
“(School) is a bigger deal than you’d expect,” he sad. “I didn’t realize how much time and energy I was putting towards school. The reality is going to a school like Vanderbilt includes challenging classes that took up a good amount of my time. Now little things like my sleep is the best it’s ever been. My nutrition is unbelievable. I’ve been researching my diet instead of researching economics. I watch YouTube videos about training, stuff I used to do when I was really good and really locked in.”
In that summer of 2021, Dutkanych also impressed a lot of scouts with his performance. Bryans was there the day he pitched at the Perfect Game National showcase.
Dutkanych faced six batters. He struck out all six.
That’s the focus that Dutkanych wants to devote now to baseball, knowing he always can go back and finish his degree if the time comes that he needs to do that. It’s a backup plan he hopes never to need.
Knowing he can come back from the two season-ending injuries, and knowing how he has felt in his recent practices, is why he is so excited about getting started on Thursday.
“It’s just cool to overcome things that are difficult in general,” Dutkanych said. “I watched the video of a recent bullpen of my mechanics and had the feeling, ‘That looks good. That looks like the guy I know.’
“In my mind everything is pointing toward success. I’m excited to have a season and a real body of work to show what I can do.”
Follow Rob Rains on X @RobRains
Photos courtesy of Andrew Dutkanych
