From 'digging holes and playing golf' to the Orioles bullpen in just over a year, Logan Gillaspie's path is as unique as his arm prep
The Orioles' pitching staff is full of improbable stories. The Orioles' newest reliever's is as unique as the way he prepares his arm to pitch.
“It’s the craziest story,” Kyle Moore said outside the Bowie clubhouse, and he wasn’t kidding.
Eleven months ago, Moore was managing at Aberdeen and heard a new pitcher named Logan Gillaspie had just signed and was joining his bullpen. Naturally, he looked him up.
“I’ve got the wrong guy,” he thought. “The wrong Gillaspie. Truly, they’re not sending me this guy I’m looking at on Baseball Reference. Surely enough, he was the guy that had caught, been all over the place in independent ball, signed with Milwaukee.”
Then he saw him pitch.
“The first thought is, how did he slip through the cracks?” Moore said. “How did that stuff on the mound, 97 mph, how did we get him?”
To hear Gillaspie tell it, it was more jumping from rock to rock trying to avoid those cracks, but him ending up with the Orioles made him a big leaguer just over a year after he signed a minor league free agent contract.
However it’s explained, a year on from digging out pools in the San Joaquin Valley, Gillaspie is a big leaguer, having made his debut with the Orioles this week. He packed the kind of baseball sojourn that usually marks the end of careers into the beginning of his, and made it where he wanted to be all along.
Considering how many stops it took, making the big leagues a month after turning 25 with a year outside organized baseball factored in is impressive.
Allow him to explain: “I was committed to Seattle U out of high school and I was taking online classes to get my GPA up to get in, then that didn’t happen. Well, I got my GPA up but something happened with the university. I went to JuCo [at Oxnard College], caught my first year, pitched my second year, didn’t get drafted. Didn’t want to go to a four-year because I just wanted to play baseball.
“I went to the Pecos League [with Monterey], American Association [with Salina] – got released for being too young, I was playing with 25- 35- year-olds. Then the Pecos League coach got me a tryout with the Pacific Association [for Sonoma]. That worked out.
“Finished there, that pitching coach got me a workout with the Cubs in Chicago. Went there, was throwing 92-94 [mph], wasn’t throwing hard enough, went to the California Winter League in Palm Springs, California. From there, got picked up by the USPBL [for the Eastside Diamond Hoppers in Michigan], went there for a couple months, made the All-Star Game, pitched in the All-Star Game, signed with the Brewers after the All-Star Game.”
That’s probably a good place to stop. Somehow, Gillaspie’s path through the independent leagues brought him to a station in baseball that was age-appropriate; in 2018, he was a 21-year-old in rookie ball.
Mike Snyder, the Orioles’ pro scouting director, said they noticed him the following summer while preparing trade targets with the Brewers, with both scouting analyst Hendrik Herz and assistant general manager Sig Mejdal flagging him on the Low-A Wisconsin roster.
“He had signed the year before and had a perfectly good, brief debut, and really put himself on the map with working his way into a starting role in 2019, showing a full assortment of pitches and touching 97 [mph] at the end of the year,” Snyder said.
So when Gillaspie was surprisingly released at the end of that season, Snyder said he was one of the Orioles’ first calls – at which point they found out why he was a free agent.
During the last week of the season, he caught a cleat walking down stairs from the clubhouse to the field and tore his ACL, requiring surgery. One team called to inquire about signing him, Gillaspie remembered, and hurriedly ended their call when he told him he was released after a surgery.
Snyder told him to keep in touch during his rehab, and checked in periodically to see how he was doing. Gillaspie was throwing to hitters back home when the pandemic hit, and his avenue back into pro ball seemed shut.
“I talked to him again that fall,” Snyder said. “At that point he’d been out of baseball for a year, hadn’t really been throwing with regularity that pro ball normally affords. He told me, digging holes and playing golf, essentially.”
Gillaspie was doing, as Snyder put it, “real manual labor.”
“Scott and I talked, and he’s rolling out of bed sitting 93 [mph] without being fully built up, working a day job, there might just be a couple more clicks on the fastball and we had liked the offspeed coming in,” Snyder said. “I can’t say we expected him to be blowing 98 like he did last year after building up, but it’s pretty encouraging. We made some calls to learn more about the history, his makeup, and we’d been talking to him for a year and a half at that point. But in the end, decided he was well worth a risk.”
Gillaspie wasn’t going to be picky about an opportunity, but liked how the Orioles stuck with him through his injury and a pandemic.
“At least once a month, he’d text me – how you doing, how you feeling?” Gillaspie said. “I noticed from then the Orioles were like a family. They care about how you feel.”
Gillaspie signed and spent a month in Sarasota at extended spring training, where two things became clear. One was that he had a special arm. Joe Haumacher was the Florida Complex League pitching coach last year, and said Gillaspie “came in throwing in extended like a big leaguer.”
“Guys like him… I don’t understand why they’re diamonds in the rough,” he said. “They should be on Fifth Avenue.”
The other immediate revelation was that, before Gillaspie gets on the mound and starts throwing fire, he has a weird way of getting himself ready.
“I do some funky stretches,” Gillaspie said with a sheepish grin.
He puts his hand flat and upside down against a wall and contorts his body in all sorts of directions, twisting under his arm both ways without breaking that contact. He lays down with his arm at a 90-degree angle behind his back and moves it all around beneath his body weight.
“That’s the weirdest one,” he said. “When I was in the Fall League I would do it and the trainer, just the look on his face, was like ‘What the F are you doing?’ I was like, ‘I’m stretching, man!’ He was probably 50, and said, ‘I’ve never seen that before in my life.’ It makes me feel better.”
And then there are the pre-catch rituals.
Moore said: “You watch him warm up for a game, the first ball he throws looks like he’s trying to imitate someone from the ‘40s, and he’s going to throw it about 60 feet in the air and it’s going to drop out of the sky to his throwing partner. It’s like, ‘Can you stop messing around?’ He said, ‘No, it’s part of my throwing program.’ He does this take-back, fingers dragging the ball on the ground, and he does this sidearm thing and throws it like 50 feet up in the air before he throws a ball. I tell him to keep doing it if you come into a game ready to go.”
Bowie pitching coach Josh Conway, who worked with Gillaspie at Aberdeen last year, also believes the ends justify the means.
“Obviously, it stands out a little bit with what he’s doing and some of the positions he puts his body in to get some of his early throws in,” he said. “But again, if it makes him feel like it gets him where he needs to be, that’s great. I think the placebo effect is real, and I think it’s one of those things where guys all have these superstitions and whatnot, but it’s what makes him feel comfortable and what makes him feel ready to go. That’s the main, most important thing.”
So, too, were the results. Gillaspie got to Aberdeen in early June and didn’t spend much time there, striking out 16 in 14 ⅓ innings with a 1.05 WHIP. He was stretched to multi-inning stints at Bowie, and struck out 36 in 27 ⅓ innings, albeit with a 1.46 WHIP. The Orioles got him some extra work in the Arizona Fall League, then made him a surprise addition to the 40-man roster ahead of the protection date for the Rule 5 draft.
“Any time you see someone go out and have good stuff and have success, you can always take that rocket ship up real fast,” Conway said.
That’s what happened this spring. Gillaspie began back at Bowie, striking out 11 in eight innings with a 1.38 WHIP before getting bumped to Norfolk. He pitched three times there before getting added to the Orioles’ roster Tuesday and debuting with two scoreless innings against the streaking Yankees.
Now, Gillaspie is another in a long line of intriguing newcomers in the Orioles’ bullpen, and a success story for their pro scouting department and pitching program just by virtue of making it to the big leagues.
“It’s nice to remember that just over a year ago, he didn’t have a contract,” Snyder said. “He was working a blue collar job – a real blue collar job. … As a department, it’s nice when it works out. We have our successes, we have our failures. But he’s one of those players that we find ourselves circling around for a few years before the stars align for us to bring him into the organization. Really, it’s nice for us, but he really deserves the credit for sticking with it.”