Major League Baseball

How Arizona's Zac Gallen emerged as one of NL's best pitchers

Updated May. 8, 2022 7:23 p.m. ET

By Jordan Shusterman
FOX Sports MLB Writer

On Monday, the Diamondbacks faced the Marlins in Miami in front of an announced crowd of 6,224. In the grand scope of the 2022 MLB season, this was not a matchup that particularly jumped off the page.

For two players in particular, however, there was every reason to have this game circled on the calendar.

At the 2019 trade deadline, Arizona and Miami agreed on an ultra-rare, one-for-one trade that sent shortstop prospect Jazz Chisholm Jr. to the Marlins in exchange for right-hander Zac Gallen.

Last season, Chisholm — never afraid to speak his mind — expressed his excitement to face the guy he was traded for and said he wanted to homer off of him.

Gallen, hardly the talker that Jazz is — not that anyone in baseball is, really — sat on those comments until this year, when they finally faced off. In their first meeting, Chisholm went 0-for-3 against Gallen, with a couple of flyouts and a groundout.

It wasn’t just the individual matchup with Chisholm, either; Gallen was clearly amped to face his former team in general. His fastball, known more for its elite spin than its velo, touched 96.7 mph in the first inning, tied for a career high.

After the game, Gallen was asked what it was like to face a guy openly eager to take him deep:

It was some truly delightful baseball smack talk; a natural rivalry borne strictly out of circumstance, nothing personal or nasty. Round 1 might have gone Gallen’s way, but there will surely be more battles in the future.

And just as Chisholm has begun to break out in a big way for the Marlins, Gallen appears to be on the verge of establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League.

The first hint toward understanding Gallen’s ascent to this point is not found in what he says but rather in how he says it. Anyone with a semblance of accent recognition can detect the South Jersey inflection in the 26-year-old’s voice.

Born and raised a short drive from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, Gallen played at Bishop Eustace Prep in Pennsauken, New Jersey, and is proud of the level of baseball he grew up around.

"If I could describe New Jersey high school baseball in one word," Gallen told FOX Sports, "it would be ‘underrated.’"

Gallen is one of 13 players currently on MLB rosters born in New Jersey, nine of whom also played their high school ball in the state. When he arrived on campus at the University of North Carolina in 2013, his teammates, many of them from southern states, asked what kind of competition he faced growing up in New Jersey.

"I think we’ve got some pretty decent baseball," he told his teammates then and still boasts now. "You know, Mike Trout — ever heard of him?"

It goes beyond Trout, though Trout remains a huge part of New Jersey’s rising reputation as a legitimate baseball powerhouse. Although Gallen has never met Trout, they grew up playing in the same travel-ball organization, which has produced numerous big-leaguers and recent high draft picks.

Of course, that trademark Camden County confidence can take you only so far. Of the thousands of ultra-competitive athletes who grew up in the Garden State with major-league aspirations, only one currently has a 1.27 ERA in The Show.

So how did Gallen get to this point?

Today, he boasts an impressive four-pitch mix led by a four-seam fastball that he throws about 56% of the time, averaging a career-high 94.4 mph. However, the development of his repertoire has been a slow burn dating to his amateur days.

At Bishop Eustace, Gallen was the rare prep pitcher who had significantly better feel for a changeup, a pitch he learned in Little League, than any other type of breaking ball. Still, his plus command of an 89-to-92 mph fastball that was up to 95 was more than enough to overwhelm the competition, so he rarely needed to lean on any sort of secondary pitch

In college, Gallen got something of a reality check. "I learned how hard it was to pitch in the ACC with about one and a half pitches," he said.

He vividly remembers leaving an outing during his freshman year against Georgia Tech in which he got knocked around hard and thinking, "I need something" besides the fastball.

Gallen spent the summer after his freshman year with the Chatham Anglers of the prestigious Cape Cod League working on finding a usable secondary pitch. He credits Chatham teammate Paul Covelle, then a pitcher at Division II Franklin Pierce University, with showing him the grip for a cutter while playing catch.

"I’m like, ‘Oh, OK, let me mess around with that,’" Gallen recalled. "I started throwing it two weeks later, and I thought, ‘I got this pitch down. I can use this in a game.'"

Gallen took that cutter back to school, where he improved markedly as a sophomore and even more so as a junior en route to being selected in the third round of the 2016 draft by the St. Louis Cardinals. He moved rapidly through St. Louis’ minor-league system the next year, reaching Triple-A Memphis by June.

And it was in Double-A that Gallen started to get a feel for a third pitch, a curveball — again, while playing catch with a teammate.

"I remember working a lot with my catch partner, Tyler Bray, man. I would beat him up. We were in Springfield, and I’d just be trying to throw curveballs and trying to understand how to spin the baseball."

With his arsenal rounding into form, Gallen posted a 2.93 ERA in 26 starts across three levels in 2017. Just three years removed from his one-and-a-half-pitches getting crushed in college, Gallen was feeling comfortable with three pitches and on the precipice of the majors.

Then Gallen’s career took an unexpected turn when he was traded to the Marlins as part of the package for Marcell Ozuna on Dec. 14, 2017. It was in Miami that Gallen made the bold decision to try to reconnect with the pitch he had learned more than a decade ago.

He told the pitching coordinator in their first meeting that even though he hadn’t thrown it regularly since he was a young teenager, he still felt like his changeup could be his best pitch. The Marlins challenged him to start throwing the pitch at least a few times in every inning, forcing him to fast-track the rediscovery of what would soon become a fourth reliable offering for the ascendant righty.

Gallen spent all of 2018 in Triple-A honing his newly deep array of pitches. The numbers (3.65 ERA in 133.1 IP) were still stellar, especially in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, as the Marlins also decided to move Gallen to the third-base side of the mound, which took him a while to get used to.

"It was a little bit of a struggle," he said. "I’m all about sites, like where I’m starting stuff and where I’m throwing it."

But once his new position on the rubber started to feel more normal, he took off. Everything was coming together.

He dominated the PCL in the first half of 2019 before earning the call-up for his MLB debut on June 20. After 43 starts in Triple-A, Gallen had finally arrived, and it didn’t take long for him to feel like he belonged.

"When we went to Chicago [in late July]," Gallen said. "That’s when it really started to click."

The D-backs clearly agreed, as Gallen made only one more start with the Marlins before being dealt to Arizona the next week at the deadline. He was on his third team in two years, but that didn’t stop his momentum. He finished strong down the stretch and carried that into the shortened 2020 season, in which he finished ninth in NL Cy Young voting.

Nagging elbow and hamstring injuries limited his effectiveness in 2021, but he still managed to be a roughly league-average pitcher with more than a strikeout per inning in 23 starts.

As Gallen entered 2022 fully healthy, there was a new ingredient added to the mix that had a lot of people excited about him as a breakout candidate even beyond what we saw in 2020. No, this time it wasn’t another new pitch — rather, a new pitching coach. Arizona had hired the legendary Brent Strom after Strom decided to leave his position in Houston following eight seasons with the Astros.

It didn’t take long for Gallen to realize the value of learning from someone who has worked with everyone from Sandy Koufax to Gerrit Cole and Justin Verlander.

"It’s kind of this perfect mix of old school, learning how to pitch, learning how to manipulate the baseball and then also this new school of the information that you get from analytics and whatnot," Gallen said. "It's been cool just trying to pick his brain."

Plus, they share a passion for preparing for a game and figuring out how to best deploy all four pitches Gallen has developed over the years.

"He's a big pitch sequencer, which for me is awesome. I like the cat and mouse, the chess match of it," Gallen said. "This is my pitch that is gonna get player X out; how can I get to that pitch? For me, that's fun. Just trying to figure out new ways to use different pitches in different situations is the game within the game for me."

Gallen doesn’t seem to be the only one reaping the benefits of Strom’s presence, either. Through Wednesday’s games, D-backs starters’ 2.54 ERA ranked second in baseball behind only the Dodgers' — who could have seen that coming?

With all due respect to Merrill Kelly, Zach Davies, Madison Bumgarner and Humberto Castellanos, Gallen is clearly the headliner in the Snakes’ rotation.

If Arizona has any hope of returning to contention soon, Gallen’s continued ascent into the upper echelon of right-handed pitchers in the game will be a crucial part of that effort.

Jordan Shusterman is half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He lives in D.C. but is a huge Seattle Mariners fan and loves watching the KBO, which means he doesn't get a lot of sleep. You can follow him on Twitter @j_shusterman_.