A New Mexico kid's unimaginable journey from high school coach to butcher to a step away from the big leagues

In 2004, Isotopes Park was the end game for Robert Riggins.

There was nothing more the Clovis High School pitcher wanted than to hoist a Class 5A state baseball championship trophy after the last game of his senior season.

Now, as the 40-year-old small town high school coach turned butcher, turned assistant hitting coach of the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats, he views that same stadium as just another stop on the unimaginable journey toward the big leagues for a New Mexico kid whose dad told him he was, “just too stupid to know when to quit.”

His perseverance was never as much about a choice, as it was about a deep-rooted credence — some might argue an inherent stubbornness — that he’d get to where he wanted to be.

“I’ve just always had this belief,” Riggins says, “and it kind of comes from my high school coaches, and my dad, and I played for Coach (Shane) Shallenberger — he’s over at Cleveland (High School) right now — that if I just worked hard enough, eventually things would work out.”

Born in Raton in 1985, the son of a school teacher and a police officer, Riggins bounced around the state as a child before settling in for his high school days in Clovis.

On May 16, 2004, Riggins took the mound as the starting pitcher in the Wildcats’ first trip to the 5A state championship game. All that stood in the way of his goal for a Clovis state title that day was the 27-0, nationally-ranked La Cueva Bears led by starting pitcher, Jordan Pacheco, and arguably as good a high school baseball roster as the state has ever seen.

“Filthy curveball. I mean, it was disgusting,” Riggins recalls of Pacheco the pitcher — high praise for the future big league hitter who is now the hitting coach of the Colorado Rockies after having served as hitting coach for the Isotopes the past two-and-a-half seasons.

”That whole (La Cueva) team ... they were the best team in the nation. Yeah, they were really good, really good hitters. I remember him and (future big leaguer) James Parr and (Matt) Quillen, Zach Arnett. That whole group was a was an amazing group.”

But on that day in May, 2004, that scrappy team from Clovis ...

OK, well, La Cueva was really good.That lineup rocked Riggins and completed a perfect 28-0 season with an 11-0 title game win.

Riggins refocused. He moved on to pitch at Eastern New Mexico University. That is until the next bump in the road.

“Bicuspid aortic valve and Wolff Parkinson white syndrome,” he said of the doctor’s diagnosis of a heart condition discovered that freshman year.

His playing days were over, but the baseball journey was not.

Riggins, who earned a bachelors degree from ENMU in 2008, began coaching. Starting as a junior varsity pitching coach at Clovis High School in 2005, Riggins coached at five New Mexico high schools — both as a head coach (Los Lunas, Pojoaque Valley and Lovington high schools) and an assistant (Clovis and Atrisco Heritage Academy).

“My end goal was, if I became a good enough high school coach, I could become a Division I (college) head coach,” Riggins said.

But the next road block in that plan was a tough one to overcome.

“If you look it up, I wasn’t a very successful high school baseball coach,” Riggins says with a chuckle.

But each coaching stop, he said, gave him new perspective, and new appreciation for the approach to his craft.Along the way, he was pursuing a Master’s Degree in Athletic Administration from ENMU and began working on a variety of research projects about teaching, and hitting.

“I put that research on Twitter, and then the (Milwaukee) Brewers read it and hired me, and that’s how I got into professional baseball,” he said.

Wait, what?

“Yeah, I have a website. It’s called Baseballtheory.com and my master’s thesis was on hitting physics, baseball bat attack angles and their in-game correlations.”

In 2020, the pitcher turned small town high school baseball coach quietly became a bit of a savant in his ability to articulate the concepts and theories of hitting. And one day, the Brewers took a chance, offering him a job as an assistant hitting coach at the team’s spring training facility.

”It was an amazing opportunity,” said Riggins.And, because nothing on his journey has been easy, Riggins and his wife were in Arizona about 10 days before COVID-19 led to that opportunity being taken away.

“I got the same feelings,” Riggins said, referring to when his playing dream fell apart in college. “You kind of almost pout a little bit, like, this isn’t fair.”

He and his wife moved in with her parents in Amarillo, Texas. He did some individual hitting instructions, cleaned out U-Haul trucks for cash and eventually got a job as a super market butcher.

“That first year in COVID was pretty tough because it was hard to see a chance of going back,” he recalled.

Then, another phone call.

This time, it was an offer to go help coach in the San Francisco Giants organization in the Dominican Summer League.

It didn’t take him long to decide to give up the career as a butcher, though in some ways it sticks with him today.

“The whole organization calls me Butch or Butcher,” Riggins said. “... In the Dominican, they called me Carnicero, and then they were all afraid of me and nobody really talked to me for two weeks.”

The journey since then has been more steady. More, dare one say, normal for a guy trying to make it to the big leagues. But there’s no doubt there’s still work to be done.

“You can’t stop too early,” Riggins said. “Even when you can’t see your next step, you have to just keep pushing.

“My father told me that he thought I was just too stupid to know when to quit. I think it’s just resiliency — coming from this state and playing against a lot of the coaches, the high school coaches that are in this state, they never took it easy on me. Just learning how to grind.”