There was no winning in T-ball, which is why Zac Gallen wanted nothing to do with it.
Gallen was only 5 and was itching to get on a baseball field. As long as he could remember, he’d watched his older brother play, from Little League to middle school to high school ball, dreaming all the while of following in his footsteps. The sport was his obsession. While other kids watched cartoons, Gallen watched ESPN. And he didn’t watch ESPN as much as he studied it, preparing for the time he’d finally be old enough to play.
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But 5 was T-ball age in his hometown of Somerdale, N.J. For other kids, T-ball is a gentle gateway into competitive sports, the land of participation trophies and postgame juice boxes. “More babysitting than anything,” Gallen’s older brother, Jay, says. T-ball wasn’t low-stakes as much as it was no-stakes — every kid got to score and every game ended in a tie.
That was a problem for 5-year-old Zac Gallen. He instinctively already knew what Herm Edwards wouldn’t famously elucidate for another year — that you play to win the game. If you can’t win, what is the point of playing? To have wholesome fun? Please. Gallen wanted to strike guys out on the mound, throw them out on the bases and clobber balls over their heads at the plate. He wanted to win, and you couldn’t do that in T-ball. So, even though all his friends were signed up, he refused to play.
“I would have been counting the runs,” Gallen says, thinking back on his stubbornness 20 years later. “One hundred percent, there would have been games where not everyone scored and I would have been like, ‘Well, we still won 18-17.’ It was probably better off that I didn’t want to play. I wanted the games to count.”
A lot has happened to Gallen in the last two decades. Instead of T-ball at age 5, he embarked on a Little League career that pitted him against kids who were two to four years older than he was. By age 9, he was a Little League legend, literally deemed too good to play against kids his own age. From there, he went from undersized high schooler to budding college talent to third-round pick in the 2016 draft. Along the way, he grew into his body, added miles-per-hour to his fastball and picked up a few wicked secondary pitches.
Now the 25-year-old is a big leaguer and an ace at that. The Diamondbacks right-hander enters Friday with a 3.00 ERA in 11 starts this year and a 2.90 mark for his 26-start big-league career. He has the stuff, the command and the simple and repeatable delivery, each element acquired and developed at various points over the last 20 years. All of it makes him the pitcher he is today.
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Well, almost. There is something that predates all of it, something that was evident before he ever played in a single game. It was there when he was 5 and refused to play a watered-down baseball substitute that he wasn’t allowed to win. It’s there now when the bases are loaded with no outs and he needs three straight strikeouts. More than anything else, and maybe more than anyone else, Zac Gallen wants to win — the game, the inning, the at-bat, the pitch.
If his stuff is the wheels, then his competitive fire is the engine. You don’t see the pistons pumping, but they’re chugging away underneath the surface. Whenever it’s assumed he shouldn’t succeed — because he was too small or too young, because he’s behind in the count or has a runner on third — he revs it. He relishes the hum.
“There’s always been someone who’s been like, ‘He’s good, but he doesn’t do this and he doesn’t do that.’ Or, ‘So-and-so is better,'” Gallen says. “And I’m like, ‘OK, we’ll see. Let’s strap ’em on and see what we got.'”
(Bob Levey / Getty Images)The origin story goes like this: Gallen was drafted in the third round, a distinction that in hindsight looks almost like an insult. Within four years of his selection, he finally began to earn the respect he felt he deserved as one of the league’s best pitchers. Yes, this accurately describes Gallen’s ascent through pro ball, but we’re actually talking about Little League.
When his son turned his back on T-ball, Jim Gallen found himself with a baseball-mad 5-year-old in a town where Little League starts at age 7. Jim had coached one of the local Little League squads since his older son was 8 — Jay and Zac are separated by nearly nine years — so he figured he’d drape Gallen in a jersey and sit him on the end of the bench to let him feel included. But the muckety-mucks of the Somerdale Little League weren’t having that. Gallen would have to be drafted.
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Little League in Somerdale sounds like serious business. Like in the pros, the draft was a mechanism to promote competitive balance, and Jim Gallen entered it prepared. He attended tryouts with a scout’s eye, rating potential picks from 1 to 5 in various skills. But if a father wanted to coach his kid, or if a boy wanted to play on the same team as his older brother (kids ages 7-9 all played in the same league), then that team had to draft him. Rival coaches had seen how Jay Gallen had torched the league almost a decade earlier. They weren’t going to let the younger brother sneak onto the roster for free. He was only 5, but it was decided that Gallen would cost his father a third-round pick.
Jim initially balked. Weren’t they talking about a 5-year-old? But then chimed in Jay, a budding general manager at 14 years old. This was a good development, Jay said. If they’d waited to start Gallen in the league at 6, he’d easily have required Jim’s first-round pick. A third-round pick was practically giving him away. “To this day, my son Jay will say it’s the greatest third-round pick I ever had,” Jim says. “He’s right.” (“Maybe I’m destined for the third round,” Gallen says.)
The dawn of Gallen’s Little League career formally started a development process that had really already begun. The Gallens lived across the street from the Little League fields in Somerdale, and father and son would practice together until the field lights shut off and the streetlights came on. “I would be like, ‘Zachary, you’ve got to go home and take a bath and finish up your homework and then you’ve got to go to bed,'” Jim says. “He’d be like, ‘One more, one more.'”
That preternatural focus was perhaps the earliest ingredient of the player who became one of the best young pitchers in baseball. Jim remembers a game when an 8-year-old Gallen was playing catcher. A couple of runs scored on a base hit, but Gallen noticed the second runner didn’t touch the plate, the type of situational awareness many big leaguers never develop. After informing his dad, Gallen ran to the opposing dugout and tagged the runner out. Even when he was distracted, he was thinking about baseball. When Gallen was 5, his dad stuck him in right field. Every few pitches, Jim would have to yell at his son to stop practicing his pitching motion and focus on the game.
“I still do that to this day,” Gallen says with a laugh. “I’ll be in the weight room and guys will be like, ‘Would you stop?'”
Gallen’s pitching career began at age 7, the year most kids started Little League but Gallen’s third season playing. Jim schooled him on a simple delivery that Gallen’s eventual high school coach — Sam Tropiano, who saw plenty of young Gallen while coaching Jay at Bishop Eustace Prep — described as “picture-perfect.” (Tropiano still uses a photo of 6-year-old Gallen in his program’s brochure.) Jim also began honing his son’s steely mindset.
A 6-year-old Zac Gallen displays the “picture-perfect” mechanics his father taught him. (Courtesy of Sam Tropiano)They played what they called the 3-0 game. Every at-bat started with three balls in the count, and Gallen had to come back with three consecutive strikes or do five pushups. The older Gallen got, the less he missed. Jim also schooled his son on the importance of self-reliance. Nobody can take the mound with him, Jim told him. If he gets in a tough spot, it was on him to get out of it. Later in Gallen’s youth, once Jim had ceased to be his coach, Jim would always watch his son pitch from whatever vantage point that precluded Gallen from glancing over to him for a lifeline.
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Buoyed by those lessons, Gallen held his own as a 7-year-old. At age 8, he dominated. Then he turned 9, the last year before moving up to the league for kids between 10 and 12, and the league president decided Gallen was too good to keep playing. Other coaches said their kids were scared to hit off him and scared to pitch to him. Gallen would have to move up, once again joining a league for which he was supposedly too young.
It may have been the last time Gallen felt he got the respect his baseball talents deserved. The notion hadn’t occurred to him until now. “I never even really thought about it like that,” Gallen says. “I guess that was probably the last time.” And when you get no respect, you can mope and complain. Or you can decide to be so good they have no choice but to give it to you.
Like many others stuck at home during the sports shutdown, Gallen got sucked into “The Last Dance,” the 10-part ESPN and Netflix documentary about the final year of the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Gallen is a big Michael Jordan fan — that he wears No. 23 is no coincidence — and he’s already itching to binge it again. But it requires patience. “I’m waiting for it to simmer so I can watch it again and have a very similar experience,” he says.
Fittingly, Jordan is Gallen’s mindset model. Roughly every 10 minutes throughout “The Last Dance,” the Bulls great explains how some perceived (and sometimes invented) slight drove him to work harder, to push his teammates, to grind his signature shoes into the neck of his opponents. Gallen isn’t that extreme. “I would never get to the point of making up a story about an opponent to fire me up,” he says. But he does keep a mental database of criticism.
To be clear, it’s not as if his path to the big leagues was lined with naysayers. Gallen had plenty of success. To breeze through his last 16 years of baseball: At 9, he flummoxed a team of 12-year-olds to pitch his team to a Little League championship. At 12, he stymied a juggernaut of a team coached by baseball media polymath Tom Verducci, earning Verducci’s praise in the local paper. In high school, he pitched Bishop Eustace to a title in a prominent South Jersey tournament. He played travel ball for the same team that had previously nurtured Mike Trout, and he pitched so well for them at a Perfect Game tournament in Georgia that a crowd of 12 college coaches behind the backstop ballooned to roughly 60 over the span of a few innings. When he graduated, he had his choice of major college programs, eventually choosing North Carolina over Oklahoma State and LSU.
Yet, Gallen couldn’t help but notice skeptics along the way. He was big at birth — “9 pounds, 6 ounces with no hair; his father called him Uncle Fester,” says his mother, Stacey — but he was small as a child and short and thin through most of high school. He relied on command of a fastball that he threw almost exclusively. Perhaps because he was physically a late bloomer, he wasn’t drafted out of high school. Perfect Game ranked him the 341st-best player in the 2013 high school class. He was the last pick of the third round and he never landed on any list of the game’s top 100 prospects before hitting the majors. He was a high-floor, low-ceiling prospect, a label Gallen seems to find almost offensive. “It’s like, how do you know it’s not a glass ceiling?” he says.
That may give the impression that Gallen is a boiling volcano of resentment primed to erupt, but he says that’s not at all the case. He is not seething. He’s resourceful. He stores each morsel of skepticism for future use. It’s all bulletin board material, although Gallen takes the metaphor more seriously than most. “It’s a bulletin board,” he says. “You don’t check it all the time, but it’s in your office, it’s in your locker, wherever it is, and those things are up there. It’s not going to consume you in everything you do.” He’s a mental pro, not a maniac.
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He even acknowledges he didn’t really know he’d be a big leaguer until 2019, when things began to click in spring training with the Marlins. Even his parents, despite Gallen’s Little League dominance and despite their generally unwavering support of him, were realistic with their expectations. Jim thought his son had a shot out of high school, but just the 1 percent chance most talented players face. Stacey once dropped Gallen off for a prep tournament at UNC’s baseball field and told her son to enjoy it because who knows if he’d pitch there again. Only Jay called his younger brother’s career early, pegging him for a big leaguer when Gallen was just 14.
But deep down, Gallen always felt he had it in him. And instead of proclaiming it, he’d let his play speak for him.
About a month ago, Diamondbacks shortstop Nick Ahmed and then-Arizona reliever Archie Bradley posed a question to Gallen. “What’s the deal with you and the no emotion?” they asked.
It was always pretty rare for Gallen to let the fire out. Once when he was 8, he threw his glove in anger after a loss and his dad made him apologize to the team. “My dad pulled me over and said, ‘That’s not it. Don’t show your teammates up. Control your emotions,'” Gallen says. From that point on, he never had to put his money where his mouth was because he never let his mouth get involved.
Except for once, that is. Gallen started as a freshman at UNC but pitched to a 4.64 ERA and was moved to the bullpen to start his sophomore season. It was a common strategy for the Tar Heels at the time — have an experienced arm close, let a hotshot freshman start rather than adapt to the pen — but Gallen was “pissed off,” his dad says. He was untouchable in relief and, right before ACC play was set to begin, Gallen was promoted to the prestigious role of weekend starter. Still miffed that he wasn’t given the job from the get-go, he let his pitching coach know the role change would be permanent. He wasn’t giving it back. He didn’t, posting a 2.73 ERA across his sophomore and junior seasons.
“It was definitely uncharacteristic of me and the coach probably didn’t even remember, but I felt like I needed to get it off my chest,” Gallen says. “I felt like, ‘This is my job, I feel like I deserve it, and I’m going to keep it.'”
Since then, Gallen has let the pitching do the talking. He wants to communicate in no other fashion. What’s the deal with the no emotion? Showing any is advertising weakness, Gallen believes. Sag your shoulders, drop an F-bomb and the other team might think you’re rattled. Even if you aren’t, you’ve given them confidence they haven’t earned. Better to be a cipher, as unreadable as the Sphinx. Gallen learned that early. Once in a youth game, a coach complimented his remarkable poise to his mother. “An airplane could crash behind him,” the coach said, “and he’d look at it, say, ‘Yeah, OK,’ and turn back around and pitch.”
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Gallen likes to keep his pot at a steady boil while never letting it froth over. His prestart playlist is mellow, not adrenalized. While Jay once threw a pitch into the opposing dugout during a high school game, Gallen would never display such frustration. “A guy pimps a home run off you, whatever it is, guys would be like, ‘Well, I would just stick him with one in the ribs,'” Gallen says. “And I’d be like, ‘But then he’s on base, and you’ve got to worry about whether he comes around to score. I’d rather just strike him out.'”
All of that mental prep work comes to a head whenever Gallen finds himself in a tough spot on the mound. That Gallen began his career with a record-breaking 24 straight starts while allowing three or fewer runs speaks to his unhittable stuff, yes, but also to his uncrackable mentality. At one point, he was stranding 95 percent of his base runners — it’s down to a more mortal 80 percent now — and though he’s issued his share of walks, batters are hitting .139 against him in three-ball counts.
Jim can’t be there in person to watch this season, but as he sits in front of his television, he talks to his son. When Gallen fell behind 3-0 to a batter in a recent start, Jim was transported back to those twilight sessions when his son was just a tyke with hands too small to fit around the baseball. “All right,” Jim said to the screen, “you know what you got to do now on the Somerdale field. You’ve got to come back.”
Strike one, strike two, strike three. Jay then chimed in.
“I guess he can come home and eat now.”
(Top photo: Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)
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