For someone who’d only made pitching his main focus in recent years, Grayson Thurman had a pretty good gig lined up by the time this past April rolled around.
During the spring and summer, Thurman would get paid to play baseball. To come to the ballpark — a stadium that stands within a few miles of the beach in Dunedin, Florida, the place he called home for most of the last several months — and work out each day, hone his skills and mow down batters when he climbed the mound during the late innings of games.
It was an unconventional job to say the least, an improbable opportunity to be sure, especially given Thurman’s resume. He had just a handful of years of experience as a hurler at the time, at a Division III school, University of Lynchburg. He’d come from a small public school, Altavista Combined School, where he was the one catching rather than throwing pitches, and from Lynch Station, home to about 2,000 people.
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Thurman isn’t blind to the significance of his ascension in the baseball world, which recently took him to the ranks of Minor League Baseball.
“It’s not that it’s not a big deal,” he said this week, a few days after arriving back in Virginia, where he’ll spend some of the offseason. Then came the phrase that proves Thurman isn’t living in the clouds. “But it’s not something where you’re like, ‘I’ve made it.’
“I still haven’t done it.”
Still hasn’t reached the level he wants to reach. Still hasn’t become exactly what he what’s to be, though a season spent among other professionals chasing their baseball dreams, under the direction of those with years of work in the minors and majors, has resulted in serious strides.
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Thurman spent just one game in the bullpen before being called into action in the Game 2 of the season for the Dunedin Blue Jays, a Single-A affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays he was assigned to after signing as a free agent. He gave up one run on two hits in an inning of relief, testing his arsenal against other prospects, many of whom were much younger than the 24-year-old Thurman.
In that outing and the few that followed, coaches watched closely what their unproven players had to offer. Cory Riordan, the Dunedin pitching coach, focused in on Thurman and his delivery, which features an incredibly high release point over 6½ feet, and ability to locate. Quickly, Thurman’s curveball stood out — for less-than-desirable reasons.
The pitch that served as Thurman’s bread-and-butter in college, the one that helped him post one of the highest strikeouts-per-nine-innings rate in Division III during his senior year in 2022, wasn’t playing.
“After I threw it in the first three games maybe, [Riordan] was like, ‘You’re not throwing it for a strike. I don’t care that it’s your pitch. I don’t care that you used to throw it for strikes, you’re not right now,’” Thurman remembered his new mentor telling him. “[Hitters are] laying off of it, and it’s a ball a majority of the time.’”
Riordan’s solution: the 12-6 curve would be taken out of Thurman’s bag. He’d have to turn elsewhere.
“It’s just like, ‘All right, now what do I do?”
Thurman was at a loss, though only temporarily. With the help of “unreal” equipment and direction from coaches, he modified one of his more seldom-used weapons at the time, a splitter he almost never employed in college and only really started throwing in summer ball in 2022.
Thurman changed his grip on the splitter, which led to an impressive amount of late break that routinely fooled batters as the season continued.
“Splitter, hands-down, that’s the one that they’re like, ‘This is what will get you there,’” Thurman said of what he’s heard from the organization.
Adjustments Thurman needed to make weren’t limited to technique, however. Being paid to play also meant adapting his style to that of the minors.
The player who’d pile up hours of extra time in the weight room or perfecting his craft on his own while at UL suddenly had many of his moves monitored. A Catapult Baseball Analytics device he was required to wear measured his output, with reports given to coaches who could assess his workload in an effort to optimize performance and decrease the risk of injury.
“You have to have the balance of just going and getting it but also not doing something stupid and kind of going in over your head a little bit,” said Thurman, who’s also had to navigate balancing his approach of “going off of feel” as he pitches with the trend in professional baseball toward being driven by analytics.
The season also saw Thurman work through the challenges of constantly pitching to new catchers, while facing the constraints of a pitch clock. The time limit between innings, especially in the event he entered a game featuring a catcher he didn’t know well, proved particularly demanding.
“Oh [crap], I’ve gotta tell them what I throw. And then you haven’t even warmed up yet and the clock’s still ticking. And you didn’t even talk about the signs,” Thurman said, remembering some of his experiences during the season. “… And you throw three pitches and [the umpire] is like, ‘All right, you’ve got one more,’ And I’m [thinking], ‘I didn’t even throw him a splitter yet.’ You’re like, ‘Do I screw him over and throw him a splitter even though he hasn’t seen it?’ There’s a lot to figuring things out.”
Intangibles — like overcoming a language barrier with some teammates who mostly spoke Spanish, for example, and figuring out how to live out of a suitcase in a hotel room for six-game (or longer) road swings — played a role in his acclimation process, too.
But while flexibility defined much of Thurman’s season, a significant piece of him remained impervious to change. That the season included 130-plus contests didn’t matter — Thurman the competitor wanted his team to come out on top in all of them.
“It eats me alive. I think that I’ve learned how to lose a little bit more, but … even if I’m not playing, it pisses me off,” he said. “… I get it; you play [over 130] games and it is what it is, but that’s more [of the thought] after the fact. Before, it’s like, ‘Dude, why don’t we just win every [freaking] game.’”
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Evidence for Thurman’s competitive nature hasn’t ever been hard to find.
In Florida, one clear-cut example showed up toward the end of the season.
On Sept. 2, Thurman watched from the bullpen as a teammate started racking up scoreless innings. The opposing Daytona Tortugas hadn’t earned a hit in the first six frames, either. Then Thurman was called in to close out the shortened game.
He struck out the first batter he faced, then the next, before the third of the frame made contact. The ball rolled on the right side of the diamond toward second as Thurman booked it over to first before laying out for a slightly off-target throw while maintaining contact with the base.
He completed the combined no-hitter thanks to his extra effort.
“I think guys just know that’s me,” Thurman said. “I’m gonna do literally anything possible.”
Anything possible to win or improve.
From his first days in Dunedin, Thurman was resolved to “buy in” to the organization’s plan for his development.
“I told [coaches] kind of when I got there, … ‘This is a big deal to me, and I want you to be brutally honest. I want you to tell me stuff like that.’ Because it’s not like I’m gonna go back and cry about it,” Thurman said. “… I’m like, ‘I want you guys to hold me accountable. And if there’s something I need to do better that’s gonna get me to the next level, tell me. I want to know it.’”
It’s why he was good with his curveball being stripped from him. Why he’d talk to Dunedin’s hitting coach, in addition to the pitching coach, in an effort to understand batters’ mindset.
“Half the time he’d get annoyed with me,” Thurman said, “but I would pull up a video and be like, ‘What’s wrong with this sequence? What am I doing here? Why are they not swinging at this pitch?’”
He analyzed his outings in his head, too, and said a stint at the end of the 2023 season he spent with Toronto’s Double-A affiliate, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats — with whom he earned a save in his second of three outings — specifically opened his eyes to ways he still can improve.
That stretch also served as motivation.
“I have no clue whether I’m [starting] at [a certain level], but if I come back, I’m like, ‘I’m going for people’s jobs.’ And it’s not like, ‘Hey, you, I want your job. Hey, you, I’m gonna beat you,’” Thurman said. “It’s like, I’m gonna make it happen and figure out a way that gets me there.”
For now, before spring training starts, that will take the form of his attendance at a second Toronto offseason camp, where he said he will focus on sharpening a slider and maybe revisiting his curveball in an effort to continue finding ways to throw strikes (and perhaps tweaking where he holds his glove as he comes set). And his highest priority, at the moment, is finding ways to up his velocity above the 92 to 95 mph range in which his fastball currently sits.
Thurman knows there’s no denying his background or his older-than-normal age at the lower levels of the minors, or the truth that organizations across professional baseball all are run with money in mind. So he knows there is no absolute timeline and there are no guarantees.
But Thurman believes the Blue Jays “see value in him” and his potential. And for now, that’s motivation enough.
“I’ve got the time I’m given,” he said. “I don’t know how much time it is, but I’m gonna use every day to get better and do something [to] get me to where I want to be.”