I don’t know everything about baseball, but I know this: When a player’s name is in a headline that ends with the phrase “Stares Down Oblivion,” that’s not a good sign. That happened to Joey Gallo four weeks ago, as Michael Rosen wrote a lovely tribute to a popular player whose career seemed to be nearing its end. If the headline weren’t ominous enough, little of what followed augured good things: A table that showed Gallo posting the two highest single-season whiff rates of the decade; a comparison to Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones, but only during their time with the White Sox; a metaphor about hanging off a cliff by one’s fingertips.
Gallo went 2-for-20 for the White Sox in Cactus League play, and while a minute batting average is nothing new, Gallo’s secondary skills — the talents that made him an impactful big leaguer — were not in evidence. Both of his hits were singles, and he drew just one walk.
The man might swing from his heels, but he’s smart enough to read the signs. So on Sunday, he posted a video of old defensive highlights to X with the caption, “It’s been fun outfield,” with a peace sign emoji. A retirement announcement, perhaps? It seems Gallo also realized he’d been ambiguous, so 11 minutes later he sent a follow-up post: “Just to be clear, I will be pitching.”
Hahaha, that’d be so cool if it happened, but Gallo’s got more of a sense of humor than most ballplayers. Surely he’s doing a bit.
(touches radio earpiece)
My God, it’s not a bit. He’s actually doing it.
Gallo is one of few athletes from modern times who could be accurately described as “unique.” He was, by any measure, horrendous at the most basic function of his profession — putting bat on ball — but was so good at all other aspects of the game that in his prime he was a good major league player. For two half-seasons with the Rangers, in 2019 and 2021, he was able to float his batting average out of reach of the Mendoza line, and was arguably a great player.
My former colleague Jon Tayler (We miss you, Jon!) posted some fun Gallo facts to Bluesky Monday morning: Gallo has the most plate appearances in MLB history by a player who finished with a career batting average under .200. He’s the only player with at least 2,000 career plate appearances who posted a career batting average under .200 and a career OBP over .300. He’s also the only player in major league history with more than 200 career home runs and fewer than 250 career singles.
I’ll add a couple fun facts of my own: Among players with at least 1,500 career plate appearances, Gallo’s career strikeout rate of 38.0% is the highest of all time. No. 2 on the list is Lefty Grove, who you might remember being a pitcher. Gallo batted — or has batted, in the interest of not burying him prematurely — 3,403 times. Only seven other players with that many career plate appearances have a strikeout rate of 29.0% or higher.
For anyone else, this would’ve been a fatal handicap. Gallo got around it in three ways. First, he walked a lot. Along with his record-setting strikeout rate, Gallo has walked in 14.6% of his career plate appearances, 62nd-most all time. Second: Why would anyone throw him strikes, knowing what he could do to pitches in the zone? Gallo’s career .262 ISO is 22nd all time, one spot ahead of Kyle Schwarber, two ahead of Sammy Sosa, three ahead of Mike Schmidt, and four ahead of Mickey Mantle. If you limited the list to AL and NL players only, Gallo would be in the top 20.
Third, and most relevant to his transition to the mound, Gallo is a shockingly good athlete for a player who looks like him. Gallo is a gigantic human, listed at 6-foot-5, with 250 pounds of muscle hanging from a broad frame that looks like it could handle more. There are great home run hitters for whom the source of their power is a mystery. Gallo is not among them. Lots of ballplayers played football growing up, and it’s easy to imagine them as quarterbacks, safeties, edge rushers. Schwarber was a standout linebacker in high school, which makes immediate sense upon looking him.
Gallo is a couple months of big breakfasts from looking right at home at left tackle. And like a modern left tackle, he’s quick on his feet and powerful from any position. Gallo has not only put up good defensive numbers in corner outfield spots over the course of his career, he’s played more than 700 major league innings at third base and more than 400 in center field, and held his own at both positions.
As much as Gallo pulled off the dancing-bear routine all over the diamond, his greatest defensive attribute, particularly as an outfielder, was his arm. In 2020, Gallo was credited with 100th-percentile arm strength. The hardest-tracked throw from the outfield of his career came in at 99.3 mph.
So we already know Gallo can throw the ball hard, and the muscles that are used to hit 450-foot home runs (arms, core, legs) are also useful for pitching. How hard can the transition be?
If you remember Gallo as a draft prospect, you probably have some hazy memory of him playing both ways in high school, where he touched 95 mph off the mound and flashed a nasty breaking ball. Indeed, there was some buzz about him as a pitcher. To be honest, most two-way amateur prospects who can be described as “a hoss” persuade at least a couple scouts to take up a heterodox opinion of the player’s eventual position.
As I recall, Gallo Should Pitch was a more common position than Paul Skenes Should Catch, but less common than Hunter Greene Should Play Shortstop. If that’s helpful at all. You could get a scout to say on background that Gallo should pitch in the pros, but that was less of a real discussion than a bit of color to stick at the end of a mock draft blurb.
I have no doubt that Gallo continues to possess the physical tools to pitch in the majors, but refining them is far from a certainty. (Not least because the White Sox don’t have an awesome player development track record at the moment.)
The sizzle reel Gallo posted included a shot of him throwing exactly one pitch, from the front, under a heavy strobe effect. So there’s not much we can learn about his future as a pitcher from that. The low arm slot looks like an extension of his outfield throwing mechanics, and he finishes by stepping hard to the glove side. Not only is a max-effort technique appropriate for a guy who’s converting to the mound in his 30s, it’s in keeping with Gallo’s whole vibe as a player.
I’ve had to take care not to characterize the end of Gallo’s career as a hitter as the end of his career in total, but the recent track record of hitter-to-pitcher conversion projects like this makes me worry that there will be little practical difference.
When a player converts from playing a position to pitching in college, or in the low minors, the results can be positive: Jacob deGrom, Sean Doolittle, and Kenley Jansen are just three examples. For a position player as experienced as Gallo, the success rate is lower.
Gallo’s average outfield throw speed was actually second in the league in 2020. The one outfielder who threw harder than him was Brett Phillips. Which puts Gallo in the amusing position of being the second-hardest-throwing left-handed-hitting, right-handed-throwing outfielder with a cult following who’s transitioned to pitching in the past year or so.
The Yankees, impressed by his performance in the National Baseball Congress World Series, signed Phillips to a minor league deal last summer. He made it into one professional game as a pitcher for Single-A Tampa, and it went rather poorly. He faced five batters. Two reached on hits, two walked, and Phillips hit the remaining one with a pitch. All five batters scored. That leaves Phillips, who also threw two wild pitches in his sole outing, with an infinite minor league ERA for his career.
Anthony Gose probably counts as a success story here; he played 369 games in the outfield from 2012 to 2016, which is more or less comparable to Phillips’ career, if well short of Gallo’s. Gose was a serious outfield prospect in his youth — he got traded for Roy Oswalt once upon a time — but only managed one year as a regular starter for the Tigers before he decided to try his hand at pitching.
Gose was enough of a curiosity that he got a lot of press, and he’s now been a pitcher almost as long as he was a position player. He even won an Olympic silver medal in 2021 while pitching out of Team USA’s bullpen. Despite all that, Gose’s major league experience as a pitcher is limited: just 32 innings over 31 games, with an ERA of 4.78.
Other conversion projects of the past 25 years have mostly involved experiments to develop two-way players: Michael Lorenzen, Brendan McKay, Jake Cronenworth, or Brooks Kieschnick. And all of those guys were two-way college players, while Gallo last threw off a mound regularly all the way back in 2012.
(There’s also Rick Ankiel, whose experience is not especially comparable to Gallo’s for several reasons.)
I’m rooting for Gallo to succeed. Count me among the multitude of baseball writers who have been fascinated by his unusual career for more than a decade now. That’s how long Gallo’s been living his own weird career; maybe he’s got one more great defiance of the odds left in him.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com