Most high school students don’t go on to play sports in college.
Most baseball players who set up behind the plate for the majority of their youth, never really putting in any significant time on the mound, don’t become highly successful relievers.
Most of the Altavista Combined School products don’t go on to compete as professional athletes.
That never stopped Grayson Thurman.
“Everything is hard to do until somebody does it. Everything is a stat until somebody does it,” said Thurman, a University of Lynchburg alumnus who graduated with an accounting degree in 2022. “Stats, numbers, those are a past thing. They have nothing to do with what you’re capable of.”
As his career at ACS drew to a close in 2018, Thurman understood his situation. He wasn’t known as a pitcher, wasn’t recruited and certainly didn’t have an athletic future mapped out for him. He’d have to prove he deserved a chance to keep playing.
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With the Hornets, he worked to make good on the opportunity coach Lucas Jones and the Lynchburg staff handed him. Now, an organization 600 miles from Lynch Station, the place he grew up, has offered Thurman another shot at continuing to play the sport he loves.
This time, a paycheck — and a little extra clout — comes attached.
Thurman, the catcher-turned-pitcher, has checked off the goal he’s held for years. Late last month, Thurman signed a minor league contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. This week, he’ll appear as a pitcher on the roster of the MLB team’s Single-A affiliate, the Florida-based Dunedin Blue Jays.
“It still hasn’t really settled in,” Thurman said Tuesday, two days before Opening Day with his new team, which expects to use him as a reliever. “I don’t even know how to explain the feelings. Still doesn’t feel like it’s the whole thing you were chasing.”
The Blue Jays added Thurman as a pitcher in their farm system late in spring training, after multiple members of the organization traded messages with him over the last several months.
First, Thurman explained, he received a message on Twitter from Dunedin Blue Jays pitching coach Cory Riordan about two months ago. The organization likely took notice, Thurman said, of his most recent official outing that drew plenty of attention on social media.
In that game, Thurman entered in relief as a member of the West Virginia Black Bears, of the MLB Draft League. After the team’s offense awoke and came back from a deficit, Thurman got called out of the bullpen earlier than he had all summer — during which he moved into a traditional closer role — and preserved the lead to pick up the win and hand his team the league title. He threw 3 1/3 innings, and struck out every batter he faced.
Upon receiving the message from Riordan, Thurman sent along requested analytics from that game and others he played with West Virginia. Still, Thurman kept intact plans to head to Nebraska to play with the Lincoln Saltdogs, a member of the independent American Association of Professional Baseball league.
After receiving a call from Toronto Blue Jays assistant general manager Joe Sheehan — a promising conversation that passed along the news that the organization had Thurman on its radar, and was interested in him potentially joining, but that there wasn’t room for him within the system at that time — the plan remained the same.
Days later, Riordan reached out again. As did Sheehan a few days after that.
That call, in mid-March, ended differently.
“Hey, we want to offer you a contract,” Thurman remembered hearing Sheehan say.
By the next night, Thurman had arrived in Florida, where he participated in spring training and initially was assigned to the rookie-level affiliate before earning a spot with his current Single-A squad.
Back in Lynchburg, news started to spread. Thurman’s former University of Lynchburg teammates were among the first to know.
“The Blue Jays got a bunch of fans once they decided to sign him,” Jones said, describing the excitement he said he saw in his players as they realized that “finally … the baseball world is waking up to this guy and all of his results and everything he’s done.”
At UL, they knew Thurman had the stuff on the mound to compete at the professional level.
Thurman’s ability to locate his fastball — which sits in the 90 to 92 mph range now — produces swings and misses aplenty, and the break on his curveball keeps batters off balance.
Late in his UL career, Thurman incorporated a splitter that’s added more dimension to his game, and he’s “really open to whatever it is [the Blue Jays organization says] is gonna be successful for me” when it comes to his arsenal in the future, he said.
Thurman’s over-the-top motion — his release point is somewhere above 6½ feet, he said he’s been told — also helps with deception.
But more than any of those specifics, those who know Thurman say it’s his work ethic, belief and competitiveness that paved the path he’s currently walking.
“I knew I was good enough,” Thurman said, explaining the mindset he held in the months between his last game and his signing last month.
He can say that, his former coach said Tuesday, because “he did the work.”
“He made the decision to be great,” Jones added.
At UL, that meant learning as much as he could from coaches, and putting in extra time after games and in the offseason.
Since graduating and finishing his season with the Black Bears, he put together his own offseason regimen of lifting weights and baseball workouts, based largely on the throwing program at Lynchburg, he said.
His time at UL afforded him the opportunity to improve mechanically and in his understanding of the game. And seeing his team go from the bottom of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference to the top, and record back-to-back NCAA Division III tournament appearances, as the result of his coaches’ commitment, opened Thurman’s eyes to the possibility of dreams becoming reality.
“It’s one thing to think a certain way, but to know it’s possible and to have done it before with a group of coaches who want to win and see you be successful, it also builds confidence,” Thurman said.
Thurman’s competitive nature is the other intangible that’s been his “edge” on his journey to the professional ranks, Jones explained.
“I hate losing. That [crap] drives me crazy,” said Thurman, the guy who recently played 20 straight games of ping pong against another player in the Blue Jays organization because he knew he’d get better each time and knew his losing head-to-head record could be reversed.
You can bet that’s the same energy he’ll bring to the mound in this next phase of his career.
The self-proclaimed “adrenaline, stress junkie” is excited to face batters who’ve earned similar and better contracts than him, excited to “work harder” to reach the level of other pitchers at this level and excited to keep moving up the ranks.
“As much as you [feel like you’ve] made it, this isn’t my end game,” Thurman said. “I’m obviously reaching for much higher standards. … This still isn’t it. I have much more to do, much more to prove.
“I don’t care how long it takes.”