A very big deal: How Tyler Glasnow marries strength and agility
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Tim Kurkjian, ESPN Senior Writer
DODGERS PITCHER Tyler Glasnow, who stands 6-foot-8, 225 pounds, can do a standing backflip.
“It’s no big deal, really,” he said. (Yes, it is. There aren’t many people that big and tall who can do a backflip.)
“Oh, I’m sure there are a lot of people bigger than me that can,” he said. (No, there aren’t.)
Glasnow, 30, is a new member of the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ rotation, acquired from the Tampa Bay Rays in a trade in December and immediately signed to a five-year, $136 million extension. His stuff is as overpowering and violent as anyone’s in the game, in part because of his remarkable athleticism: a breathtaking combination of size, speed, strength, agility, mobility and balance, all of which has drawn comparisons to Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps — and a giraffe.
“He is the most physically gifted athlete I have ever seen in my life,” said Rays closer Pete Fairbanks, an ex-teammate. “He is more flexible than anyone I’ve ever seen. His movements are cleaner than anyone I’ve ever seen. He is unbelievable. I don’t think there is athletic activity that he can’t do.”
Besides a backflip, Glasnow can walk on his hands. He won a silver medal in the Junior Olympics in the high jump. He was an excellent basketball player (“I’m tall,” he said). He loved roller hockey and was a wizard on a skateboard. He ran track, did the shot put and played football for one year in high school. He lifted a huge amount of weight, and says, “if I’m on the side of a squat rack, I can go parallel to the ground, but I don’t know if that is unusual.”
It is.
“We call that a flagpole,” said Dodgers pitcher J.P. Feyereisen. “He was doing that in the weight room today. I’m not sure how many guys could do that. He’s 6-8, and he can do it.”
Yet with this amazing array of skills and athleticism, Glasnow hasn’t been able to stay healthy. He has never completed a game in his major league career; he has never pitched enough innings in a season (162) to qualify for the ERA title. He had Tommy John surgery in 2021, an injury he said had affected him for even longer.
But he has averaged 11.5 strikeouts per nine innings and only 7.3 hits. His stuff is hellacious. His curveball is one of the best in the game; it’s unhittable when paired with his 98 mph fastball. Beginning Wednesday, when Glasnow takes the mound in Seoul, South Korea, for the Dodgers’ Opening Day game against the San Diego Padres, the Dodgers are hoping to harness that athletic ability and spectacular stuff.
“I feel amazing now,” he said. “I figured out the elbow thing. I’ve had that since 2019. Now that that’s ironed out. I feel the healthiest I’ve ever felt. Now after meeting all the coaches and the training staff [with the Dodgers], I’m really excited about the future. Everything is so buttoned-up here, I will be able to put my body in the best position to succeed.”
“When it comes to ability, no one is better than Tyler,” former teammate Brad Miller said. “I think his relationship with the Dodgers is a match made in heaven. That $130 million extension is going to be like pennies on the dollar for what he will do for the Dodgers.”
THE ART OF pitching has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, as athletic trainers and performance experts have found new ways to improve body function with all-new exercises — and yet it all feels familiar to Glasnow.
“I look at videos doing gymnastics when I was 5, and the fundamentals and warmups I was doing then are what baseball players are being taught today,” Glasnow said. “It’s crazy. Walking on your hands, the high jump, backbends. I already have a baseline for all this.”
“Whatever he did as a kid from ages 5 to 12, I need to write it down and have my son do it, because that’s how you build an athlete,” Fairbanks said. “He’s the perfect blend of genetics.”
Glasnow’s mom, Donna, is 5-9, a retired gymnast who now coaches gymnastics at Cal State Northridge; his dad, Greg, 6-2, is a swimmer and a water polo player.
“She chose to be a gymnast, but if she had chosen another sport, she probably would have been great at it,” Glasnow said of his mom. “She’s almost 70 years old. But she’s in insanely good shape. I remember growing up, she was always doing handstands and cartwheels around the house, all this crazy stuff. She put us [Glasnow and his brother, Ted] in gymnastics when we were little. She was always trying to get us to do as many athletic things as possible. I look at the gymnastics things we did as kids. It was insane. It was like, ‘Whoa, we were 5!'”
Ted was a decathlete at Notre Dame.
“He is 6-1, 6-2, he is ginormously strong,” Glasnow said. “He is the most shredded human in our family. When he was competing, it was insane how big he was. I got the height. He got the strength. I could lift a lot of weight, I was obsessed by it, but he was stronger.”
Said Yarbrough: “I asked Tyler once what he would have done if he hadn’t been a baseball player. He said nonchalantly, ‘Well, my brother does the decathlon. I guess I’d do that.'”
As a kid, Glasnow loved being on the trampoline, doing flips, which taught him the sensation of being in space while still maintaining control of his body. That led to his first backflip.
“I was 19 years old, I was at the ocean in Mexico,” he said. “I had never thought about doing a backflip in gymnastics. But I was there, on the sand, and I thought, ‘I think I can do this.’ So I did it in the sand. I just thought to myself, ‘Well, I guess I can do a backflip.'”
Dodgers pitcher Ryan Yarbrough has seen it.
“He just said to me, ‘Do you want to see it?'” Yarbrough said. “And he just did it on a dime.”
“I call him the Giraffe,” said Texas Rangers first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, a former teammate in Tampa. “Giraffes have long limbs, long levers, but can really move. People think giraffes are bumbling animals, but they can run. When I was with the Rays, Tyler used to beg to pinch run if we were in a long game. He’d say, ‘Please let me run. I promise I can score from first on a double. My sprint speed would measure really high on Statcast!'”
“Everyone talks about how [5-10 Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu] Yamamoto can contort his body and bend his back all the way,” said Andrew Friedman, the Dodgers president of baseball operations. “But Tyler can do that even better.”
Glasnow knows his body well, what it can do.
“The biggest difference with the athleticism is [considering] my height, how I’m able to get down the mound differently than most,” Glasnow said. “And because I do a lot of the mobility stuff, I think I can stay stable in places where some people would find it harder to balance. I think I have good single-leg stability. I am pretty explosive. I can push off hard, and … I can get the ball out a lot harder than most people. It’s all about stability, where you are in space, finding yourself, kind of like eyes-closed balance. When pitching, I get so extended in my back, like the high jump. My mom would always have us doing handstand walks, single-arm stability stuff. Doing all that at such young age, it has helped my body and my brain on the mound.”
GLASNOW’S HEIGHT CAME from his mother’s side; she has a brother who is 6-9. In Glasnow’s case, it happened suddenly. He was 5-8 as a high school freshman in Santa Clarita, California.
“Then my junior year, over a winter break, in like five weeks, I grew like four inches,” he said. “When I got back to school at winter break, people were like, ‘What the hell happened to you?’ Crazy. I remember leaving and coming back and people were like ‘What!?'”
Glasnow graduated high school at 6-6, meaning he grew almost a foot in only four years. Normally, when someone grows that quickly, it is difficult for the body to catch up, to remain coordinated. Not Glasnow. The increased size only added to his pitching acumen.
“I’ve always been really athletic,” he said. “I was always comfortable picking up any new sport. As far as baseball specifics go, having athletic parents, growing up in the place that I grew up, it’s such a great baseball culture there. Santa Clarita was all about baseball. I played all year round, And I had some really good coaches. Baseball was always my best sport.”
His idol was Randy Johnson, who was 6-10, “and he had trouble throwing strikes, too,” said Glasnow, who struggled with his own command. “But I never really nerded out on baseball too much when I was a kid. I was such a rambunctious human, I couldn’t just sit and watch a baseball game.”
Even then, though, his stuff was elite. He was drafted in 2011 by the Pittsburgh Pirates and spent several years after his 2016 debut yo-yoing between the majors and Triple-A and the bullpen and the rotation. After being traded to the Rays midseason in 2018, he became a full-time starter until he had Tommy John surgery in August 2021.
“The first time I saw him throw in person [in 2018], he was in an empty stadium, in the bullpen just getting some work in, no one in the box, and he was casually throwing 97-98 mph, the ball was just exploding, and the look on his face was, ‘I can’t help it,'” said Adam Kolarek, an ex-teammate in Tampa. “It looked like Michael Jordan shrugging his shoulders [after making another 3-pointer] as if to say, ‘I don’t know how I do it.’ It’s not cocky. Tyler just can’t help it.”
“I faced him last spring in a simulated game,” said former Rays teammate Brandon Lowe. “I swung at a curveball that bounced before the plate. I thought it was a fastball. That has never happened to me before. It is almost impossible to mistake a fastball for a curveball.”
“He is a beast,” Miller said. “He is so long, but he is not lanky. [Jacob] deGrom has these amazing levers in his body. Tyler has the same ones, and he’s 40 pounds bigger. The dude just hands the ball to the catcher.”
So, is there anything Glasnow can’t do?
“I suck at golf,” he said. “Awful. Terrible. I chunk it. I have the all-or-nothing mentality. I hit it really far, but it slices farther than it goes straight. I’ll lose like 15 balls in a round. I suck.”
Finally, we found the one thing Tyler Glasnow can’t do.
Virginia Tech hired James Franklin to be its next head football coach, the school announced Monday.
He will be formally introduced at a news conference Wednesday morning.
“I’m honored and humbled to join the Hokie family,” Franklin said in a statement. “My vision is simple: to restore unmatched excellence, to build something that lasts, and to serve this University, the Commonwealth of Virginia and our amazing fan base with honor, integrity, and passion. I look forward to getting to work with our players, our staff, and the entire Virginia Tech community.”
Franklin was originally owed a $49 million buyout after being fired by Penn State on Oct. 12, but part of his deal with the Hokies, sources confirmed to ESPN, includes a $9 million settlement from the Nittany Lions.
Franklin went 128-60 over 12 seasons at Penn State and three at Vanderbilt. He brings a résumé that includes winning more than 68% of his games, an appearance in the 2024 College Football Playoff semifinals and a Big Ten championship in 2016.
He’ll replace his former defensive coordinator Brent Pry, who was fired in September after an 0-3 start and a 16-24 record with the Hokies through four seasons.
Franklin’s arrival in Blacksburg will give the Hokies their most accomplished coach since Hall of Famer Frank Beamer, who retired in 2015 after 29 seasons at the school. Since that time, Tech has endured the underwhelming tenures of Justin Fuente and Pry as the school struggled to assimilate to modern college football.
After firing Pry, Tech’s board of visitors passed a plan to add $229 million to the athletics budget over the next four years. The move was to help make Tech a more attractive job and attract a candidate who could revive the school’s lagging football fortunes.
“James Franklin embodies the spirit, vision, and relentless pursuit of excellence that will elevate Virginia Tech Football back on the national stage where it belongs,” athletic director Whit Babcock said in a statement. “This is a landmark moment for our program. … James is a dynamic leader, a relentless recruiter, and a coach who has proven he can build and sustain elite, championship-caliber programs. We are thrilled to welcome him and his family to Blacksburg and to entrust him with the future of VT Football.”
In Franklin, the Hokies get an established coach whose availability wasn’t considered a possibility at the start of the 2025 season. Penn State began the season ranked No. 2 in the country and started 3-0 before enduring three straight losses, including a double-overtime loss to No. 6 Oregon when the Nittany Lions were ranked No. 3 in September.
After losses to UCLA and Northwestern, Penn State fired Franklin.
Franklin came to Penn State in 2014 in the throes of NCAA sanctions from the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal. Franklin led the Nittany Lions to the Rose Bowl and Big Ten title in 2016.
Franklin’s tenure was ultimately defined by general success that never manifested at the very highest levels of winning, as he finished 4-21 at Penn State against AP top-10 opponents. Over his 12 seasons there, he led Penn State to six seasons of double-digit victories, including three straight from 2022 to 2024.
The Centre Daily Times was first to report about Penn State’s settlement with Franklin.
Virginia Tech hasn’t won double-digit games since Fuente’s first season in 2016. From 2004 to 2011, Tech won double-digit games each season under Beamer.
Franklin brings strong ties to the I-95 corridor, including the talent-rich DMV area. Along with recruiting that area heavily at Penn State, Franklin coached two stints at Maryland as an assistant and one year at James Madison.
Ohio State and Indiana both won big to keep their undefeated seasons alive, but the rest of the top 5 made things exciting. Texas A&M, after trailing South Carolina 30-3 at the half, stormed back to win by a point. Alabama lost its first conference game of the season to Oklahoma. And Georgia, after battling Texas for three quarters, scored three touchdowns in the final period to win 35-10.
What does it all mean for the AP Top 25? Let’s break down the rankings.
Stats courtesy of ESPN Research.
All times Eastern.
Previous ranking: 1
2025 record: 10-0
Week 12 result: Defeated UCLA 48-10
Stat to know: This is Ohio State’s fourth 10-0 start under Ryan Day.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Rutgers
Previous ranking: 2
2025 record: 11-0
Week 12 result: Defeated Wisconsin 31-7
Stat to know: This is Indiana’s first-ever 11-game win streak.
What’s next: Nov. 28 at Purdue, 7:30 p.m., NBC
Previous ranking: 3
2025 record: 10-0
Week 12 result: Defeated South Carolina 31-30
Stat to know: Texas A&M’s 27-point comeback against South Carolina is the largest in school history.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Samford, noon, SEC Network+
Previous ranking: 5
2025 record: 9-1
Week 12 result: Defeated Texas 35-10
Stat to know: Georgia has won 12 straight home games against AP top 10 teams.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Charlotte, 12:45 p.m., SEC Network
Previous ranking: 6
2025 record: 10-1
Week 12 result: Defeated Florida 34-24
Stat to know: Ole Miss is 2-0 when trailing entering the fourth quarter this season.
What’s next: Nov. 28 at Mississippi State, noon
Previous ranking: 8
2025 record: 10-1
Week 12 result: Defeated UCF 48-9
Stat to know: All of Texas Tech’s wins this season have been decided by 20 or more points.
What’s next: Nov. 29 at West Virginia
Previous ranking: 7
2025 record: 9-1
Week 12 result: Defeated Minnesota 42-13
Stat to know: Oregon has won 38 straight games against unranked opponents. That’s the second-longest streak in FBS behind Georgia.
What’s next: Saturday vs. USC, 3:30 p.m., CBS
Previous ranking: 11
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Alabama 23-21
Stat to know: Oklahoma had 212 yards of total offense, its fewest in a win since 2001.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Missouri, noon, ABC
Previous ranking: 9
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Pittsburgh 37-15
Stat to know: This is Notre Dame’s eighth straight win following its 0-2 start.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Syracuse, 3:30 p.m., NBC
Previous ranking: 4
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Lost to Oklahoma 23-21
Stat to know: The loss to Oklahoma snapped Alabama’s eight-game win streak.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Eastern Illinois, 2 p.m., SEC Network+
Previous ranking: 12
2025 record: 8-1
Week 12 result: Defeated TCU 44-13
Stat to know: BYU scored on each of its first seven drives against TCU.
What’s next: Saturday at Cincinnati, 8:00 p.m., Fox
Previous ranking: 13
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Idle
What’s next: Saturday vs. Kentucky, 3:30 p.m., ESPN
Previous ranking: 15
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Baylor 55-28
Stat to know: Utah has scored 45 points or more in its past three games.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Kansas State, 4:00 p.m., ESPN2
Previous ranking: 16
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated NC State 41-7
Stat to know: Miami’s 581 yards against NC State were its most in a conference game since 2020.
What’s next: Saturday at Virginia Tech, noon, ESPN
Previous ranking: 14
2025 record: 9-1
Week 12 result: Defeated Boston College 36-34
Stat to know: Georgia Tech would secure a spot in the ACC title game with a win next week against Pitt.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Pittsburgh, 7:00 p.m., ESPN
Previous ranking: 17
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Iowa 26-21
Stat to know: USC has lost six straight games against top 10 opponents, a streak going back to 2019.
What’s next: Saturday at Oregon, 3:30 p.m., CBS
Previous ranking: 10
2025 record: 7-3
Week 12 result: Lost to Georgia 35-10
Stat to know: The loss to Georgia was the fifth consecutive loss against an AP top-five team for Texas.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Arkansas, 3:30 p.m., ABC
Previous ranking: 18
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Northwestern 24-22
Stat to know: Michigan has won nine consecutive games against Northwestern.
What’s next: Saturday at Maryland, 4:00 p.m., Big Ten Network
Previous ranking: 20
2025 record: 9-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Duke 34-17
Stat to know: Virginia is 9-1 in its past 10 games against Duke.
What’s next: Nov. 29 vs. Virginia Tech
Previous ranking: 21
2025 record: 7-3
Week 12 result: Defeated New Mexico State 42-9
Stat to know: Tennessee has 434 points this season, its second-most through ten games in school history.
What’s next: Saturday at Florida, 7:30 p.m., ABC
Previous ranking: 24
2025 record: 9-1
Week 12 result: Defeated App State 58-10
Stat to know: JMU has won eight straight since losing to Louisville in Week 2.
What’s next: Saturday vs. Washington State, 1:00 p.m., ESPN+
Previous ranking: NR
2025 record: 9-1
Week 12 result: Defeated UAB 53-24
Stat to know: This is the first time North Texas has been ranked in the AP poll.
What’s next: Saturday at Rice, 7:30 p.m., ESPNU
Previous ranking: NR
2025 record: 7-3
Week 12 result: Defeated Mississippi State 49-27
Stat to know: Missouri’s 49 points against Mississippi State was its sixth-best mark against an SEC opponent since joining the conference in 2012.
What’s next: Saturday at Oklahoma, noon, ABC
Previous ranking: NR
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Defeated Florida Atlantic 35-24
Stat to know: Tulane is now 2-1 all time against FAU.
What’s next: Saturday at Temple, 3:45 p.m., ESPNU
Previous ranking: NR
2025 record: 8-2
Week 12 result: Idle
What’s next: Saturday vs. TCU, 4:00 p.m., Fox
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