PEORIA, Ariz. — With great anticipation, and greater ambition, the Seattle Mariners open the 2024 Major League Baseball season against the Boston Red Sox on Thursday at T-Mobile Park.
A crowd of some 48,000 will fill the ballpark for what is the most glorious day of the year for baseball fans: the end of a dark winter and the day imagination takes hold.
There is a growing sentiment, a simmering assurance within the team, that this could be the year the Mariners win the American League West for the first time since 2001, when they won an AL-record 116 games and turned Seattle into a baseball-mad city.
The Mariners’ misfortunes have been well chronicled since then. They went 21 years between playoff appearances and are the only MLB franchise to never play in a World Series.
Is this year the Mariners finally — finally — reach baseball’s pinnacle?
If they do, if they are able to capture the hearts of a hardened fan base, it will surely be because of a pitching staff that has the talent to be one of the best in the game, and that is as good a transition as any to reintroduce Logan Gilbert, one of those pitchers in whom the Mariners have staked so much.
Gilbert’s imagination began to take hold a decade ago as a young pitcher trying to figure why his right elbow was hurting so much. Since then, his insatiable need for information, his ability to absorb data, his want to experiment, his instinct to push for more — it’s all shaped him to be a sort of archetype of a modern pitcher, and it got him here, to the brink of big-league stardom.
And maybe it’ll help nudge the Mariners to the brink of something special, too.
The Mariners’ 2024 season begins 7:10 p.m. Thursday, March 28, at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Luis Castillo takes the mound to open the four-game series against the Boston Red Sox, and Logan Gilbert will pitch Saturday.
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Gilbert, 26, is endlessly curious.
“Logan is constantly learning,” Mariners pitching coach Pete Woodworth said. “He always says, ‘I just don’t want to leave any stone unturned.’”
Gilbert was the Mariners’ first-round draft pick in 2018 out of tiny Stetson University in Florida. When he arrived on the scene with the Mariners as a rookie three years later, it was his teammates who were curious — curious about what the heck this gawky 6-foot-6 rookie was doing.
Now entering his third full season in the big leagues, Gilbert has entrenched himself as one of the game’s premier starting pitchers. Last year among AL pitchers, Gilbert ranked seventh in wins (13), eighth in strikeouts (189), seventh in innings pitched (190.2) and 11th in wins above replacement (3.2).
Just about everywhere he goes, Gilbert lugs with him a gym bag packed with an unorthodox collection of pitching gadgets, the kind of toys you’d maybe expect to find in an old McDonald’s playhouse ball pit, not in a major league clubhouse.
Teammates teased him often, and on occasion they were known to hide some of his gadgets from him. Gilbert, as affable as anyone on the team, took the playful ribbing in stride. He knows his workouts aren’t typical. “It’s weird,” as he put it.
During a recent demonstration at the Mariners’ spring-training complex in Arizona, Gilbert went through his bag, pulled out each item and showed how it’s used.
Some of them were the sort of thing you’d expect to find from a pitcher: resistance bands for stretching and weighted balls for throwing.
A few others were, yeah, weird:
— a water ball;
— a partially deflated “connection ball” that he squeezes between his right bicep and abdomen before making workout throws, to lock in his proper form;
— a “floppy thing” (his description) that looks like a folded rubber belt that he clenches in his hand and shakes to warm up his arm muscles;
— and a throwing sock that makes him look more puppeteer than pitcher. (He Velcros the sock around his right hand and forearm and throws a 7-ounce ball inside the sock, and because the ball stays contained in the sock, it creates less tension and is less stress on his arm.)
The water ball is well worn.
It’s a little larger than a basketball, with a black rubber shell, fabric handles on each side and 5 pounds of water inside. It’s a favorite toy in Gilbert’s collection.
Here’s the catch: The water ball, much to Gilbert’s chagrin, has also become a favorite toy of his French bulldog puppy, Winnie. And Winnie doesn’t always like to share.
Imagine the tug of war: This tiny 20-pound bulldog and this 6-foot-6 pitcher each pulling one side of the water ball’s frayed handles, all snarls and snaps and clenched fists. There’s potential for a buddy comedy script there, yeah?
But Gilbert is serious about this stuff — serious about his craft, about his rigid schedule, and about beating the odds as a professional pitcher.
In an era when pitchers are throwing harder than ever, and pitching injuries are escalating more than ever, Gilbert stands out as another extreme: He’s gone to great lengths to understand his arm, and he’s willing to try just about anything to keep it healthy.
“Whether you agree with it or not,” he said, “I’m just gonna keep doing it because it works for me. It’s what’s kept me healthy, and I don’t ever want to mess around with that.”
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There’s precision in each of Gilbert’s drills. With the water ball, there are three movement patterns in his routine, each designed to train a specific muscle or throwing motion.
The goal: efficient movements.
And as he learned about the mechanics of throwing a baseball — how the connection of force from his lower half powers the lightning bolt that is his right arm — he became perhaps as knowledgeable about his body’s kinetics as any athlete you’ll meet.
“He’s very intelligent,” Woodworth said. “There aren’t many people on the planet who can explain (pitching mechanics) like he does.”
Gilbert can go into great detail about the reasons why he’s doing each water ball drill. The first one simulates the “hinge” of his linear movement down the pitching mound; the second helps his hip lock into proper position; and the third helps close the front side of his pelvis.
“It basically initiates co-contraction in the muscles and takes the slack out of the muscles,” he said. “That’s a lot of why I do this.”
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Growing up in Winter Park, Fla., Gilbert mostly played catcher and first base. He didn’t start pitching fully until he was 17, in the summer before his senior year of high school in 2014.
His fastball was already touching 88 mph then, but he was experiencing persistent pain in his elbow, even after throwing only or two innings. That’s when his dad, Keith, discovered Randy Sullivan’s Florida Baseball ARMory.
The ARMory has since grown into one of Florida’s most popular pitching labs, where dozens of professional pitchers train — Mariners manager Scott Servais visited Gilbert at the facility this winter and raved about it — but in 2014, the science behind all the pitching work was still relatively new. There was a general air of skepticism about it all.
Sullivan, with a background in physical therapy, had a mission to help pitchers throw more safely. According to Baseball Prospectus, elbow and shoulder injuries increased 44% last year, with 31 pitchers requiring Tommy John surgery to repair torn ligaments.
Keith Gilbert made an appointment for his son to visit Sullivan, paid a $100 consultation fee and made the hour drive with Logan to the facility.
Sullivan, in a recent interview, laughed remembering his initial impression of Logan, this “gangly, skinny” teenager with some of the worst pitching mechanics he’d ever seen.
But Sullivan said he also quickly recognized the potential, and he gave the young pitcher several drills (especially using the connection ball) to better align his body’s movements.
“Logan was pretty relentless with those drills,” Keith Gilbert remembered. “And after about six weeks, his arm pain was gone.”
Logan would start training regularly with Sullivan, usually a couple times a week. Many of Sullivan’s initial methods and drills were unorthodox.
“It was almost like voodoo,” Keith Gilbert said with a chuckle.
But they started to work. And soon, Logan’s velocity ticked up from 88 mph to 93 mph as a high-school senior. College scholarship offers soon followed, and pro scouts began buzzing too. A year later, at Stetson, his velocity was up to 96 mph … and he was on his way.
Gilbert has become the ARMory’s greatest success story, and a few of the gadgets in his bag today originated a decade ago from Sullivan, who remains a close ally.
A couple of years ago, Sullivan was in the stands a handful of rows back from where Gilbert was signing autographs for kids before a Mariners-Rays game in St. Petersburg, Fla. Gilbert looked up, saw Sullivan and waved.
“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” Gilbert said to him.
“Watching him there, that almost brought me to tears,” Sullivan said. “Logan is the most authentic person from the most authentic family you’ll ever meet. …
“It’s been pretty surreal watching this little kid who grew up with us,” he added. “With a guy like him, you just can’t help but root for him.”
Gilbert still returns to the ARMory a couple times a week each winter. The facility, much like the popular Driveline Baseball facility in Kent that has become a hot spot for many in the sport, is armed with all of the top software technology, able to track athletes’ every move.
Gilbert will throw a handful of times off a mound, then turn to a monitor to watch slow-motion images of his pitches. He’ll figure out X-Y-Z coordinates and detect whether, say, his arm angle might be tilted by a half-degree. It’s incredibly nuanced information, and Gilbert wants to soak up every ounce of it.
How will all that translate on the mound in his first start of the season for the Mariners, set for Saturday night, and deep into a season full of such promise?
Woodworth, the Mariners’ pitching coach, points out that confidence comes from preparation, and no one, he said, goes into a game more prepared than Gilbert.
“Logan can trust that he’s done all the research and he has checked all the boxes,” Woodworth said. “So when game time comes, he knows he did everything he needed to do and he can just go out and compete and focus on his job. And that, to me, is really what makes Logan special.”
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