Since the beginning of the 2017 season, Joey Gallo's first full-time season in the major leagues, he and Juan Soto have hit exactly the same number of home runs. I think we all know where the story goes from here.
Well, mostly we know. Gallo is in some ways the prototypical no-average/high-power lug of his era, and for a while was a player who could convince teams to take the 40-homer seasons and defensive benefits (he’s a two-time Gold Glover) alongside the 200 strikeouts and sub-.200 averages that came with them. It might be that the more apt tense on that verb in fact is now "was." Gallo put up a .161/.277/.336 slash line in 76 games with the Nationals last year, and was released by the talent-destitute Chicago White Sox last Friday after going 2-for-21 with 11 strikeouts in spring training.
That, though, is the mundane part. Gallo had been working in White Sox camp to reinvent himself as a pitcher when he wasn't not-hitting—and, well, why not? More radically, he went to social media for the first time in three years to make it official.
Known with at least a bit of snark attached as an avatar of baseball’s three true outcomes—for good reason: 58 percent of his 3,403 plate appearances produced either homers, walks, or strikeouts—Gallo is now going hopefully if not necessarily confidently into the other half of the game. This is rare enough—according to the Sorbonne of baseball nerds, baseballreference.com, there are at least 401 players who have made this transition, ranging from Hall of Famer Bob Lemon and longtime Red Sox knuckleballer Tim Wakefield to the freshly retired reliever Sean Doolittle, who was drafted as a hitter, made the transition to Major League pitching in two months, lasted a mere 11 seasons, and is now the Washington Nationals' pitching strategist.
In other words, Gallo's story is not quite as unusual as it seems, if only because basically nothing in baseball is actually unprecedented. It’s not even unprecedented within the last month, as Cleveland's Tyler Naquin is trying to make a similar conversion after eight years as an outfielder. It seems almost like a natural fit for Gallo to find his future with the Nats and Doolittle, even though Washington had him as a hitter last year and declined his $8 million option at the end of the season. We will await developments in this vein; at the moment, all anyone knows is that Gallo had a very good outfield arm and has a unique perspective on how hard all this is.
Nobody wants stories like this to have an unhappy denouement. Dreams are hard enough to come by, and even when they are fulfilled they often have a much shorter shelf life than the dreamer intends. Gallo's intention to reinvent himself will require a willing corporate partner, which means he'll have to create enough curiosity among Major League teams while workshopping his new career. At the moment, this isn't exactly the stuff of Shohei Ohtani, or even Brooks Kieschnick. But if marketing imitates art, there have been worse ideas, for Gallo and for any future employers. He began as a pitcher, like so many big youth baseball talents; he even took Greg Maddux's daughter to their high school prom on the same day he threw a no-hitter, so there is clear commitment here.
But then there is this, from the same ESPN story that announced Gallo's intent to switch to pitching:
The White Sox also said Mason Adams, one of their top pitching prospects, has a flexor strain in his right elbow.
The 25-year-old right-hander, a 13th-round pick in the 2022 amateur draft, pitched 1⅓ innings against Cincinnati on Friday before leaving because of elbow discomfort.
In other words, as is typically the case in baseball, every bold idea and moonstruck dream comes with an optional finger in the eye. Whatever his future as a pitcher, Joey Gallo already understands that last bit better than most.
