Major League Baseball

Zac Gallen on becoming the D-Backs' ace (and his beef with Ben Verlander)

Published Aug. 16, 2023 7:07 p.m. ET

Zac Gallen has come a long way since we were both prospects in the Florida State League.

Gallen is now the ace of the Arizona Diamondbacks and was named the starter in his first career All-Star Game last month. But he still has a bone to pick with me, thanks to something I did back in rookie ball — something I had forgotten about until he brought it up during his recent appearance on "Flippin' Bats."

Gallen, like a lot of pitchers at that level do when not taking their turn in the rotation, was charting a game between his Cardinals and my Tigers in the Florida Complex League — essentially tracking pitcher and hitter data for every pitch thrown. It's a tedious task, but this game was going along at a great pace and was on course to finish in less than two hours.

And then …

"Someone who may or may not be named dropped a fly ball in right field," Gallen recalled, laughing.

That someone was me.

"The game lasted four hours," Gallen recalled. "I was charting that day in the May heat of Florida."

Let me add some context here. We were leading that game 1-0, in heat that felt like a million degrees, when a young hitter named Randy Arozarena — yes, that Randy Arozarena — hit a pop-up to the shallow outfield. I ran in and looked to make sure everyone else was getting out of my way. When I looked back up, the ball was nowhere to be found — and I was too late. A run scored and tied the game, and from what Gallen and I remember, the Cardinals won in extra innings.

"I think we went on to come back and win that game," Gallen said. "But when it's May or April, and it's 90 degrees, and you're charting, you don't care who wins the game as long as it's over in, like, two hours. … [That one] was brutal."

That was the one pop-up I remember just clamping up on in the outfield, and having the chance to apologize to Gallen and laugh about it was honestly a little therapeutic.

Fast-forward to last month when Gallen and I were both in Seattle for the All-Star Game — albeit for very different reasons. After missing out on an All-Star nod over his first few MLB seasons despite All-Star-worthy numbers, Gallen made it a goal to be selected this season. It was only a few days before the game when Diamondbacks manager Torey Luvollo pulled Gallen aside and told him that he would not only participate in the game but might be the starter.

Later, Luvollo called Gallen with the official news — if he wanted it, the starting pitcher job for the National League in the 2023 MLB All-Star game was his. Gallen accepted immediately and called his family.

"I would never have dreamed of that," Gallen said. "I was just happy to be there. … It was a no-brainer. My rest schedule kind of lined up anyway, so I thought, ‘You never know how many All-Star Game appearances you're going to get. You don't know if this is going to be your only one.'"

Gallen pitched a scoreless first inning, working around a single from his old rookie ball teammate Arozarena.

"I wouldn't say there's a lot of nerves," Gallen said. "I was just super amped up. I had never been a part of something on that grand of a scale. You get the flyover … the player announcements, all that stuff. So it was a good test, and good preparation for what I've heard the playoffs and the World Series look like."

Gallen is also getting some valuable experience along with the rest of the young Diamondbacks' core this season as Arizona is in the thick of the NL playoff race despite stumbling out of the gate to begin the second half of the season. Yes, Arizona has pretty much ceded the division race to the usual suspects in Los Angeles, but they are still just 2.5 games out of the third wild-card spot entering Wednesday's action.

"Not that every game isn't meaningful in the big leagues, but having those games where it's like live or die every night is definitely something that you can't teach," Gallen said. "You just have to experience it and I think the experience for us is huge."

The Diamondbacks are not only having success this year but seem poised to keep doing so in the near future behind Gallen and star rookie Corbin Carroll, whom Gallen sees as a vindication of the reassurance he got from the team's front office over the past few seasons, when the right-hander was one of the few bright spots on a struggling team.

"Over my first couple of years, guys like Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodriguez were playing really well and having unbelievable seasons as rookies," Gallen said. "I’m like, ‘OK, where’s that guy for us?' And [the Diamondbacks] were like, ‘Don’t worry, he's coming.'"

"That guy" arrived in September of last year when Carroll got his first taste of the big leagues.

"You could see that [star quality in him]," Gallen said. "It was there … and then this year, you saw who Corbin Carroll is. And I'm like, ‘OK, they’re on to something here.'"

"I mean, the organization is in great hands. [General manager Mike Hazen] and those guys, they've done a great job of putting the pieces in place and understand there needs to be depth here and depth there. It's been fun to see it take shape."

Gallen took an unconventional route to becoming one of the faces of his organization. Originally selected by the Cardinals in the third round of the 2016 MLB Draft, he was traded to the Miami Marlins in December 2017 for Marcell Ozuna while on a flight home to New Jersey from a winter workout session in the Cardinals' spring training facility in Palm Beach, Fla. Gallen saw the news of the trade break while he was waiting for his flight, and saw that his teammate Sandy Alcantara would be heading to Miami, but the rest of the prospects in the deal had not yet been reported.

"I remember looking at one of the guys that was there in the airport like, ‘Man, everybody’s getting traded. Sucks for them,'" Gallen recalled, laughing.

He did not find out he was also in the trade until his flight landed hours later. Then after making his MLB debut with the Marlins in 2019, Gallen was traded again to the Diamondbacks for Jazz Chisholm. While Chisholm has vowed to hit a home run off Gallen (but is 0-for-9 in his career to this point against his trade counterpart), Gallen says he cannot afford to let any thoughts of a personal rivalry disrupt his mental approach to pitching.

"I'm not somebody that pitches with a lot of emotion," Gallen explained. "And that first start against Miami, I definitely was pitching with a lot of emotion. You could see my velocity was up extra-high in the first three innings. I've just kind of learned that it's exhausting. I'm just gonna go do my job. I'm trying to help my team win."

"[Chisholm] is a good player and the 0-for-9 thing isn't going to last. So to build this thing up and make it just nuts is just like, is way too much on the mental game. I need to have all my wits about me."

By the way, that dropped fly ball I had is only the second-most embarrassing thing I did that season in rookie ball. The first is when I was pitching during the later innings of a game where we were getting blown out by the Braves' rookie-league team. I struck a player out on three pitches and even hit 92 mph on the radar gun, which is a lot for me since the other Verlander got all the high-velocity ability. I got two more fastballs past the next batter for strikes, then shook off my catcher — as a position player, mind you, in a 17-0 ballgame — and threw the nastiest curveball of my life.

It was promptly hit off the center-field wall by that batter — a guy named Ronald Acuña Jr.

At least he also turned out to be pretty good at baseball.

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