First of all, Lance Lynn’s wife has a podcast. It’s called Dymin in the Rough. Good for Lance, falling in love with someone who appreciates a pun in the headline. (I, personally, would’ve gone with Shine On You Crazy Dymin, but they didn’t ask me.)
Second, I’m going to have to come up with a new answer to the question: “Who’s your favorite active ballplayer?” Because as of Tuesday morning, our guy is retired.
“Baseball season is upon us and I’m right here on the couch,” Lynn said. “And that is where I’m going to stay. So there’s the update: I’m officially retiring from baseball, right here, right now.”
As an ardent Lance Lynn superfan, the fact that this news was not shocking does little to lessen its devastating impact. Lynn turns 38 in May; he’s thrown 2,006 1/3 innings, plus 60 2/3 more in the postseason, over 13 seasons in the majors. He was solid in 2024: a 3.84 ERA — the same as Sonny Gray — in 117 1/3 innings across 23 starts with the Cardinals, the team that drafted him in the first round way back in 2008, and with whom he won a World Series in 2011.
But having won that World Series title, made two All-Star teams, struck out more than 2,000 batters, and finished third in the Cy Young voting in 2021, there’s not much more Lynn can accomplish in the majors. It’s been a moderate downhill slide for the big right-hander over his final three season in the majors, and he’s accomplished enough that it’s not worth sticking around for the sake of it.
The way Mrs. Lynn teed him up to talk about hanging up his spikes was amusing: “Walk us through your mindset,” she said. I’ve posed some version of that sentence to probably hundreds of baseball players over the past decade, and never said anything of the sort to my wife. I guess when you’re in a room with two microphones and a pitcher, there’s only one way to talk.
And to be fair, the stock question got a good answer. Lynn got major league offers, but never for the kind of money and role necessary to get him to leave home. And the longer he waited by the phone, the more comfortable he got with the idea of giving it all up.
“The season’s started, and I’ve really enjoyed not being there,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m always going to miss teammates, competing, stuff like that. But I have not missed being there every day, being gone from home and stuff like that.”
And he liked the way he went out: Not as the comically homer-prone innings-eater he was in 2023, but pitching well, for the Cardinals, and finishing strong. Lynn posted a 1.67 ERA over his final five major league starts, and won his last start of the season, at Busch Stadium. Why risk going out on a sour note after all that?
I envy him. Surely if he were still the pitcher he was five years ago Lynn would still be on the grind, mowing down hitters with a trio of well-placed fastballs, sweating and fidgeting his way to 200 more innings on a 10-figure salary. But this is as close as most people, even most athletes, come to going out on their own terms.
My affinity for Lynn, as I’ve said before, started out mostly as a gag. In a sports culture that values the sleek, the flashy, the new, Lynn was husky and hirsute and as reliable as a KitchenAid stand mixer. As he hit free agency after the 2017 season, I thought he was one of the most underrated pitchers in baseball, and said so to anyone who was unfortunate enough to be in earshot.
Within 18 months, Lynn had gone from one of the most underrated pitchers in baseball to one of the best, full stop. I crowed, as one does when a hot take works out, and eventually had the chance to explain the Lance Lynn Bit, as I’d begun calling it, to the man himself.
“In my St. Louis days I was very undervalued,” he said. “I think that comes with some of the staffs I pitched on, and the way that I was maybe not pushed to the front of things in the St. Louis media. That comes with being a younger kid, and you pitch with guys like Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright.”
I’ve interviewed Lynn a few times over the years. In fact, he was the last ballplayer I talked to before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. (Upon arriving back at my hotel from Rangers camp, I received a message from my boss’ boss saying the NBA had just shut down and asking what the hell I was still doing in Arizona.) I remember being overawed by Lynn’s bigness. Lynn is listed at 6-foot-5, 280 pounds, and at different stages of his career he’s been more or less dad bod-y and more or less yeti-like. I’m by no means a small person, but I felt like I was talking up to a friendly monster in a Pixar movie.
Anyway, every time I talked to Lynn he was like this: polite, even softspoken, but implacably matter-of-fact. A direct question gets a direct answer, because obfuscating isn’t worth the effort.
I’ve gotten out over my skis on more ballplayers than I can count, and it’s happened enough that I end up being right about said player fairly frequently. But none of those players resonated with me quite like Lynn did, and I think that no-bullshit attitude is why.
A lot of people think of Lynn as nothing but a fat old guy with a rubber arm. In fact, he’s a terrific athlete, with the world-class strength, balance, and stamina required to pitch both the quality and quantity of innings he threw over 13 seasons in the majors. He didn’t talk about biomechanics or tweet about going to Driveline or give amateur physics lectures, the way some fashionable pitchers do. But he spent his offseasons at a high-tech private facility, reinventing himself every few winters. He chased one innovation after another: He was a Dave Duncan sinker acolyte, then became a four-seamer-sinker-cutter barrel-misser once that ability got quantified and became more mainstream. He was always adding or subtracting or reshaping pitches, changing his arm angle, moving from one side of the rubber to the other and back.
It’s an irony that 20 years into post-Moneyball baseball, we’re as obsessed as ever with selling jeans. We still want pitchers to look a certain way in a tank top, and train with certain machines, and say “sweeper” instead of “slurve.”
Lynn did all that throughout his career, but the difference between him and the guys who go on podcasts other than their wives’ is that he went through his career paying exacting attention to whether what he was doing worked, and little, if any, attention to what it looked like.
I appreciate the lack of pretension.
This is going to sound a bit weird coming from a guy who writes about fancy stats on the internet, but my default position on new things is skepticism. In most cases I prefer buttons and knobs to touchscreens, tried and true to new and shiny, physical over digital. Is this innovation really going to improve my life, or is just complicated and expensive?
How many breathless words did we spill about Noah Syndergaard when he came up, only for Lynn to basically match his career rate stats (3.74 ERA and 23.7% K% for Lynn, 3.71 and 23.8% for Syndergaard) in more than twice as many career innings? How many pretenders have flashed an 80 slider and imploded in seconds while this ursine Indianan, with a messy salt-and-pepper beard and a belly hanging over his belt, mowed down major league hitters by the hundred?
This didn’t have to be the end. The ability to pitch high volume was undervalued in Lynn’s youth; now it’s a scarce commodity when 97-with-a-slider grows on trees. He could’ve Andrew Heaney’d into his 40s if he’d wanted to, I’m sure. I have no idea how or if that mooted transition to relief would’ve worked, but a part of me is disappointed we didn’t get to see him try.
But enough is enough, Lynn said. The rewards of pitching in the majors are no longer worth the physical and personal demands that come with the job. Sitting on his sofa talking to his wife, he seemed entirely at peace with putting it all behind him. He’s going out the way he wants, and to hell with all the rest.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com