Gammons: The trades that put Zac Gallen, Pablo Lpez and Jazz Chisholm Jr. right where they belong

It wasn’t exactly a nationally televised showcase game, this Monday night contest in Miami between the 10-13 Diamondbacks and the 12-9 Marlins, played before a mere 6,224 fans on May 2. It was, however, a fascinating starting pitcher matchup that had its origins back in December 2017, when the Marlins were months into their ownership change and had to pare down payroll to allow new owners Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter to reconstruct the franchise from the bottom up and build a viable fan base in South Florida.

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The Marlins’ starter that night, Pablo López, came into the game with an earned run average of 0.39. In the bottom of the first inning, Diamondbacks starter Zac Gallen took the mound sporting an E.R.A. of 0.60. The pitchers delivered those sterling numbers for a pair of teams that were a combined 119-205 last season.

Early on in the Sherman-Jeter ownership, pro scouting director Jim Cuthbert worked a deal with the Seattle Mariners to trade pitcher David Phelps for a group that included the 21-year-old López, who at the time was 21-15 in parts of four Low-A seasons. The deal was not greeted with enthusiasm by the young, naturally ambitious, analytically-focused front office members whom vice president of player development and scouting Gary Denbo had brought down from the Yankees organization. López was a sinker-changeup guy with average velocity, not the power four-seam, high fastball-curveball model that the Astros were in the midst of riding to that year’s world championship.

The Diamondbacks’ starter that night was Gallen, who was a significant piece in perhaps the best trade of this current Marlins era. In December 2017, they traded Marcell Ozuna to the Cardinals for Gallen, the Cardinals’ third-round pick out of the University of North Carolina, Sandy Alcántara and two other minor leaguers. Again, Cuthbert’s deal was not greeted enthusiastically. Gallen was a pitcher, not a velo guy. Alcántara’s strength was his heavy sinker. Eventually, Miami dealt Gallen to Arizona for middle infielder Jazz Chisholm Jr.

“Look back and think about that deal and the needs of both teams,” says Don Mattingly. “It was a good trade for both teams, a really good trade.”

That Monday night, Gallen allowed two runs and won a 5-4 game, one that set the Diamondbacks off on a four-game winning streak. Beforehand, Chisholm had boasted he would take Gallen deep, which did not happen. He went 0-for-3, but, in the end, that mattered little. At the end of the road trip Miami began the next night, Chisholm was in the top 10 in position player WAR, and while some in the game wonder about his lust for attention, he has made his manager a believer.

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“He likes the attention, but Jazz has grown up and wants the pressure and the responsibility that goes with it,” says Mattingly. “He has fun, but he wants to be there when games are on the line. He’s a really good player.”

At the end of that game, the Diamondbacks, who had the worst record in the National League last season, had won five of Gallen’s last six starts dating back to last season. His ERA was 1.27, trailing only López (1.00), teammate Merrill Kelly (1.22) and the Cubs’ Keegan Thompson. Since the trade, he had made 37 starts for Arizona, 19 of them quality starts. And now he may have reached another level under renowned pitching coach Brent Strom, who after leaving the Astros at the end of the 2021 season chose to work with general manager Mike Hazen and the Diamondbacks as he lives in Tuscon. It’s fair to say one of the attractions of the job was working with Gallen.

“In all seriousness, Zac Gallen is the best pitcher with whom I’ve ever worked,” says Strom. “Yes, even Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole. He can really pitch, manipulate the ball. This season, he’s had a number of 98+ mph pitches, averages 96.7 with his four-seamer.”

He allows a .130 average on that fastball, the second-best number on four-seamers. And Strom is not hesitant to let his charge know how deep his belief in that arsenal goes.

“The first time he worked with me this spring,” says Gallen, “he told me, ‘I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but should win a Cy Young Award.’”

When Gallen arrived in spring training, the Diamondbacks didn’t fully know what to expect. Elbow issues had limited Gallen in 2021, when he was held to 23 starts and went 4-10 with a 4.30 ERA, but still maintained a 139-49 strikeout-walk ratio in 121 innings. When the owners locked out the players, he was unable to fly to Phoenix and consult with the club medical staff, so he visited professional training centers in New Jersey and worked his throwing program cautiously. “The Boras (Corp.) people worked really hard to get me an MRI and find out what was going on,” Gallen says. “The results eventually were that it was bursitis, and that it wasn’t a significant issue.”

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He got to spring training, continued the caution, and now, like López, Kelly and Alcantara, is on the early radar to pitch In the All-Star Game in Los Angeles.

Manager Torey Lovullo has been careful to make certain that — coming off an abbreviated spring training — Gallen isn’t overworked too early. So he had five days rest before his next outing against the Rockies on May 8. He pitched into the seventh, scattered five hits, allowed no runs and no walks, delivered four three-ball outs, and recorded an average opposing exit velocity of 82.2 mph. When interviewed by Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic, Gallen called his fastball “just OK,” as a perfectionist would.

That left him with three starts in which he had allowed no runs, four total walks and an 0.95 ERA in 28 1/3 innings. Most importantly, the Diamondbacks had won nine of 12 games and were over .500.

The Gallen-Kelly-Madison Bumgarner-Zach Davies–Humberto Castellanos rotation finished last weekend with a 2.21 ERA, second only to the Dodgers. Their defense has been much improved. As the season progresses, the lineup will get younger and more talented as prospects graduate to the majors — eagerly-awaited outfielder Alek Thomas made his debut this week.

Likewise, the Marlins are more than respectable. “I really feel our pitching makes us competitive,” says Mattingly. “We need some of the guys we have to hit a little more, but I think we will. We’ll see how some of the kids out of our system progress.” Their 2019 first-round pick, outfielder JJ Bleday, got off to a slow start but has started to heat up, notably working with hitting coach Phil Plantier, who has developed a bond with Bleday.

At this point in the Marlins’ history, they are well past a difficult transition, and they have Alcántara, López and Chisholm. The trade of Ozuna proved to be a huge building block for the franchise. Considering the salary dealt, they couldn’t have expected much more than the mediocre return the Yankees offered for Giancarlo Stanton. Yes, the Christian Yelich trade was a lesson in learning that tools don’t guarantee someone can play, as Miami found out getting Monte Harrison, Lewis Brinson and Isan Díaz for a developing MVP. The J.T. Realmuto deal will probably receive its final judgment when it’s clear if Sixto Sanchez can be an impact closer; with Mel Stottlemyre, anything is possible.

These two clubs play in divisions with the Dodgers, Mets, Giants and Braves, and they know what they face. But upward mobility begins with starting pitching, and when you’re playing on a Monday night in front of 6,224 fans and the guys pitching in the first inning have 0.39 and 0.60 ERAs next to their names, you can start dreaming that the future’s bright enough that you have to wear shades.

Six weeks before his 30th birthday, Michael Lorenzen decided to take the other fork in the road. He’d started 21 games as a rookie in 2015, but the following six seasons with the Reds had been spent primarily in relief, with only five starts on the mound — plus six in center field for the onetime collegiate All-American center fielder. But this past offseason, he made a decision.

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“I want to be a starting pitcher,” he said he recognized. “When I was at Cal-State Fullerton, I just wanted to be an outfielder. Never pitch. But now? A starting pitcher.”

In many ways, Lorenzen is a baseball freak, capable of the kind of multi-positional fluidity that seemed outlandish, or at least novel, in the days before Shohei Ohtani. Now, at 30, he’s in the Angels rotation and part of a major franchise shift to the point where their starting pitching is among the top five staffs in the game. Five starts in, Lorenzen had three wins, a 4.11 E.R.A., three quality starts and “is having fun the way I did as a kid. This isn’t a criticism of anything or anyone in Cincinnati, but as I started to think about being a starter, if I were pitching well, they’d say, ‘We can’t afford to take you out of the bullpen,’ and if I were pitching poorly, they’d say, ‘What makes you think you should start?’”

He knew in his mind that his athleticism allowed him the balance and coordination to be able to repeat his delivery. He knew he threw in the mid-90s with sliders and cutters he could run to either side of the plate to right-handed or left-handed batters. “I always felt my stuff played up when I threw more innings because of the feel,” he says. And the four-seamer has that flat plane at the top of the zone where hitters swing over it. Presto. The Angels can now boast Ohtani, Jared Walsh and Lorenzen as players who have legitimately both pitched and played a position in the major leagues.

Lorenzen’s command has proven to be a significant part of his success. His strikeout rate is 18.3 percent, his walk rate 8.7 percent. He pitches deep into games in a way rarely seen of late, with two six-inning starts and one of 8 1/3 innings. He is a self-described lover of “fun,” and in another full year of Joe Maddon and Perry Minasian the atmosphere in Anaheim is different, while still built around two of the game’s great stars, Ohtani and Mike Trout. When Lorenzen reached the open market, he preferred the West Coast, but he was open-minded. The only teams sincerely interested in the experiment were the Angels, Dodgers and Giants, which should be no surprise. Minasian has communicative and collaborative senses that, unlike some of the data-manic executives, allow him to know, understand and gain the trust of the players in the clubhouse. A month into the season, the Angels are firmly in the upper echelon of the league. After the weekend ending on May 8, they led the majors in runs scored and were fourth in Defensive Runs Saved, to go with the improved pitching.

It’s OK to have fun, allow pitchers to individually work out their stuff, and laugh, and allow Lorenzen to skateboard to the ballpark. In a game in Boston, Maddon was looking to put Lorenzen in as a position player. He forgot that he’d allowed Lorenzen to fly home that afternoon ahead of his next start.

A year ago this May, Tommy Seidl was weeks from receiving his economics degree at Harvard. He and baseball friends from Harvard, Dartmouth and some other colleges that had canceled their baseball seasons because of COVID-19 did their studying, sometimes by Zoom, and they found games, just as they had in 2020 when the season was abandoned in March. With the help of scouts Ray Fagnant of the Red Sox and Matt Hyde of the Yankees, they found makeshift teams and played games at the NABC complex in Northboro, in the middle of Massachusetts. They found fields in Duxbury, Danvers, Cohasset (home of catcher Ben Rice, whose Dartmouth season was canceled; he knew the field keepers) and Manchester by the Sea. (Casey Affleck did not play with them.)

“We just wanted to play as much as we could and see where it took us,” says Seidl. “My goal was to get a chance to sign and play professional baseball, as well as get my degree and find a (parallel) career.”

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In late January 2021, Seidl and several Harvard teammates went to Athens, Ga., to stay with the family of one of the Harvard players and work out. Then when it turned spring in Massachusetts they began their barnstorming tour. Their hitting coach was former major leaguer Chris Colabello, who lives in Worcester. “He helped so many players, he is truly a wonderful person,” says Seidl. “I learned a lot from him.”

Seidl had been talking with the Harvard coaches, realized there might not be a 2021 season and explored the transfer portal. He earned and received his economics degree in June, and with baseball eligibility remaining, he signed on to play for the University of Alabama for two years as a player while working towards his master’s degree in business administration at the Alabama business school. After playing the summer for Cotuit on the Cape (as did Rice, who was drafted in the 12th round by the Yankees and signed), he headed off to Tuscaloosa at the end of the summer.

“It’s a very different culture, but it’s been a great experience,” Seidl says. Grad school. Baseball. After last weekend’s series against LSU., Seidl was hitting .301 with a .390 on-base percentage and .401 slugging percentage. He hopes that he gets picked in the July draft, but with MLB narrowing the draft and paring down the minor leagues, owners have cut costs and lessened pro baseball opportunities, so he’ll go back to Cotuit in June and prepare for either a pro career or another year working toward his master’s, and playing in the Southeastern Conference. “I love to play, and my dream is a chance at pro ball,” he says.

As it’s always been. He grew up in Wellesley, the Boston suburb that was home to former (1962) Cy Young Award runner-up Jack Sanford and longtime pitching coach Ace Adams, who at Michigan once struck out Dave Winfield four times in a game. The field at St. Sebastian’s School in nearby Needham is named for Seidl’s grandfather.

MLB’s cost-cutting has made it harder, but others have found a way. Darren Baker saw the draft limited to five rounds in his junior year at the University of California in 2020, so he pulled out of the draft, went back to Berkeley to earn his degree in American Studies, was drafted in the 10th round in 2021 by the Nationals and in 45 pro games through May 9 was hitting .309.

The late, great Jim Fregosi used to tell young scouts, “if you don’t love the game, if you don’t love players, go find another business.” Seidl could have done that, but he loves baseball, earned his economics degree from Harvard and is now hitting .300 in the SEC. Baker could have taken his degree from one of the best academic institutions in the country and gotten a prime job. But they, like Gallen and López, Lorenzen and someone like Carlos Correa — who never got a grade below an A in school — steered their lives across varied paths and greatly varied financial rewards for one predominant reason: love of the game.

(Top photo of Gallen: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA TODAY) 

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