Bump in the road or ominous sign: Has Luis Gil hit a wall after his red-hot start?
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Jorge Castillo, ESPN Staff Writer
NEW YORK — Luis Gil‘s former coach remembers the first time he realized his player was different. It was at a tournament in Baní in early 2013. Gil was a skinny 14-year-old shortstop turned pitcher because hitting clearly wasn’t his thing. He was scheduled to pitch the next game, but he had been dealing with command issues, so his coach informed him he wasn’t going to start. Gil lost it.
“He said, ‘Damn! It’s my turn!'” the coach, who goes by Francisco Díaz, said in Spanish with a laugh. “And I said, ‘Relax, you’re going to pitch a lot.’ He always had fire to throw hard all that time. That spirit, that desire. Like, ‘It’s me, it’s me, it’s me.’ Very competitive.”
Díaz is a buscón — a part-agent, part-trainer for Dominican teenagers seeking to sign with major-league organizations. He spoke over the phone last week from the Dominican Republic as players practiced in the background. Players he hopes will one day reach Gil’s heights thousands of miles away.
Over a decade since that tournament in Baní, Gil is on pace to pitch more than he ever has in a season as a 26-year-old rookie for the New York Yankees. For six weeks, from his start May 1 through June 14, Gil was arguably the best pitcher in the American League, on a surefire path to the All-Star Game with a 1.14 ERA and 61 strikeouts over nine starts after an April hindered by command trouble.
In two outings since, he’s resembled the inexperienced hurler not far removed from Tommy John surgery that he is. The right-hander has given up 12 runs across 5 ⅔ innings over those two games, a regression that corresponds with an unfamiliar workload amid a rotation-wide nosedive.
Gil has never thrown more than 108 ⅔ innings in a season as a professional. He logged just four innings in 2023 — all in the Florida State League — in his first game action since undergoing Tommy John surgery in May 2021. This season, he’s already logged 85 ⅔ innings after his 4 ⅓-inning performance in a loss to the Mets on Wednesday.
So, is he tired?
“Of course, that’s the question,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said Wednesday night. “We’ll see. He seems to be in a really good physical place.”
Gil provided a straightforward answer.
“No, I really don’t [feel tired],” said Gil, whose ERA ballooned from 2.03 to 3.15 in one week. “I’m healthy, thank God, and I feel very strong, really.”
GIL’S WORKLOAD WASN’T supposed to be a storyline for a Yankees club suddenly reeling in early July after a blistering opening stanza to the season. It’s become important only because Yankees ace Gerrit Cole got hurt.
The Yankees had their starting rotation set heading into spring training — and Gil was slated to begin the season in the minors. That was until March 16, when the Yankees announced Cole would be shut down for at least three weeks with elbow discomfort.
Replacing the reigning American League Cy Young winner would be impossible, but Gil had already made an impression on the Yankees.
Five days before Cole was shut down, Gil faced the Philadelphia Phillies‘ A-lineup in Clearwater, Florida — a group that featured Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, J.T. Realmuto and Trea Turner. He tossed 3 ⅔ scoreless innings in relief, allowing one run, one walk and striking out eight. He emerged confident that he belonged at the highest level.
“That was one that we said, ‘Oh, we got to pay attention here,'” Yankees pitching coach Matt Blake said.
Gil’s stuff has never been in doubt. He’s always boasted a sharp slider with a fastball that flirts with triple digits — and looks even more explosive with his above-average extension. The arm talent prompted the Yankees in March 2018 to ask for a gangly 19-year-old Gil from the Minnesota Twins in a trade for outfielder Jake Cave.
Three years later, Gil began his major-league career with 15 ⅔ scoreless innings over three starts in August 2021, but his shortcomings became apparent in his final three outings. To become a long-term big-league starter, Gil needed to improve his command and develop a reliable third pitch.
For Gil, the challenge was mastering his changeup, a pitch he threw just 44 times in his 33 ⅓ major league innings between 2021 and 2022. The breakthrough finally happened during Gil’s lowest professional point, while rehabbing from his elbow surgery last year and into the offseason in the Dominican Republic, where he traveled 140 kilometers roundtrip every day from his home in Azua to San Juan to work with a trainer.
“He attacked the rehab with, ‘I’m not just going to get healthy, I’m going to improve myself and the changeup is a major focus here,'” Blake said.
Gil has thrown the pitch 29.3% of the time at an average of 91.6 mph. Opponents are batting .188 with a .300 slugging percentage against it. Baseball Savant’s Run Value metric grades it as a well above-average pitch and his second-best offering this season.
Cole, whom Gil credits for aiding him during and between starts, explained Gil uses the changeup to rediscover the strike zone or when looking for a strikeout. Cole said the offering helps Gil keep hitters off his fastball, darting in the opposite direction of his slider.
“That’s when you see a game like what he had against the White Sox where now we’ve got three pitches,” Cole said, “a nice three-pitch blend.”
Gil was a force in that game at Yankee Stadium in mid-May, striking out a career-high 14 batters across six innings. But Cole was more impressed by his previous outing, when Gil held the Tampa Bay Rays scoreless over six innings despite finishing with just three strikeouts.
“He made an adjustment in the middle of the game on the rubber,” Cole said. “He made a cognizant adjustment with the fastball to improve his location through the game. And he manifested the same run prevention that he did the following week with his A-plus stuff.”
That, Cole said, was an example of Gil’s high aptitude. For over a month, as Cole spectated from the injured list, Gil made it look easy. Then the Baltimore Orioles chased him from a 17-5 beating after 1 ⅓ innings on June 20 by taking away his fastball and feasting on missed locations. The New York Mets followed, knocking him from the game with one out in the fifth inning last week.
He surrendered 12 runs between the two duds — five more than he allowed in his previous nine outings combined — as his innings count approaches uncharted territory. His velocity has largely held around his average, but command has been the snag. A lack of consistency with his fastball, in particular, was a problem against the Mets.
“The shape of his fastball, the release point of it, some were good where he popped and he had the carry in the zone, others he was kind of cutting or pulling a little bit,” Boone said after Gil’s start against the Mets. “Just having a hard time just owning his delivery.”
Boone insisted this two-start snag is “part of it” — part of the grind of a season, and nothing more.
“There are moments like this in baseball,” Gil said. “For me, pitch execution is really important. It’s something that I’ve been working on. I definitely want that to be better, but, at the same time, it’s all a learning experience, too, going through moments like that.”
THOSE AROUND GIL say he reported to spring training this season more mature and focused than ever. Gil attributed the growth to gaining new perspective from his injury and his daughter, Samantha, born shortly after he underwent Tommy John surgery.
“When I got hurt, I was sad because it’s an injury that takes a long time to recover from,” Gil said in Spanish. “When she was born, that gave me a push to keep working hard and put more dedication to the job.”
It’s been a job for Gil since he was 16, when the Twins signed him for $90,000 in 2015 after three years under Díaz’s tutelage. The price tag meant Gil wasn’t considered a top-tier prospect. His fastball touched 91 mph. He was scrawny. The measurables didn’t scream star.
But Díaz, who is still in touch regularly with Gil, has always suspected there was potential to unearth. He’s overseen several future major leaguers. Luis Castillo, a Seattle Mariners starter in his eighth season, is the most accomplished. But, in Díaz’s opinion, the three-time All-Star is not the most talented.
“If Gil is healthy and he can control his pitches, nobody is better than Luis Gil,” Díaz said. “I told somebody I worked with that Gil is better than Castillo. He’s better.”
But stuff alone doesn’t equal success at the highest level. Success requires constant tinkering and adjustments. It requires peppering the strike zone and the durability to withstand a 162-game schedule. Gil is absorbing that on the brightest stage for an organization with championship-or-bust expectations.
“He’s a young pitcher that hasn’t pitched for a couple of years,” Boone said. “There’s bumps along the way.”
The Yankees have not indicated whether they plan on curtailing Gil’s workload. For now, they don’t have another obvious option to cover innings, with Clarke Schmidt on the injured list until late this month.
“I think it’s something we’re aware of and trying to be on top of as much as we can,” Blake said before Gil’s start Wednesday. “It’s just taking as many data points as you can about where he’s at, whether it’s just the pitch count itself. Whether it’s the release point in the pitch metrics. Whether it’s the work inside the weight room and the training room, what that looks like.
“I think all those things kind of inform you a little bit of where he’s at and where he’s trending and try to make a little more informed decision, even though it’s not perfect.”
For six weeks, Gil provided the club an unforeseen jolt every fifth day. He was, for that stretch, a luxury fill-in for a club gliding through series victory after series victory. Now the Yankees, desperate for wins, need him to bounce back to help reverse their freefall.
“No one expected it to be easy,” Boone said.
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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