In the stands and on television, they hooted and hollered.
They were the assembled loved ones of Diamondbacks rookie Tyler Gilbert, at Chase Field to watch him make his first big-league start after a long minor-league journey. As each pitch parted with the tips of his fingers — not a single one of them resulting in a hit — they increased the pitch of their support. They yelled and cried and cheered and chewed fingernails. Gilbert’s father, Greg, seemed to do them all at once.
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But on the mound, the left-hander was as placid as his family was raucous. He couldn’t find them in the stands and didn’t care to look. He was business-minded, even as improbable hitless inning followed improbable hitless inning. Big catches didn’t faze him, nor did a missile launched at his head. Even a three-pitch eighth, an inning so brief that it removed any doubt about whether Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo would allow Gilbert to finish out the game, didn’t damage his calm.
By no-hitting the Padres in a 7-0 win on Saturday, Gilbert became just the fourth pitcher in big-league history — and the first in nearly 70 years — to toss a no-hitter in his first big-league start. Perhaps he was bigger than the moment, but it’s just as possible that it was the other way around, the magnitude of his achievement too big to fully grasp in the rush of its immediate aftermath. Even after the game, his adrenaline was running too high to be able to gain much perspective.
“To be honest, it hasn’t hit me too much yet,” he said. “But it’s really cool. I can’t really describe it, I’m sorry.”
To fully comprehend the unlikelihood of what happened Saturday in Phoenix requires an understanding of Gilbert’s journey. It’s that he’s not just any rookie — or, conversely, that he could be just any rookie. He is not and has never been considered a top prospect. At this time a year ago, he was apprenticing under his electrician father. A Dodgers farmhand at the time, Gilbert had not been invited to the alternate site. “I was trying to make ends meet,” he said.
As he was making ends meet, it seemed entirely possible that his career could soon be meeting its end. The Dodgers didn’t protect him in the Rule 5 draft — not just the major-league portion, but the minor-league phase that only required him to be placed on their Triple-A roster. He was 26, had never reached the majors and seemed to have stalled out.
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But the Diamondbacks had been following him. They plucked him away from their divisional foe in that Rule 5 draft and turned the longtime reliever into a starter. It was a flyer — the stakes are not high in the minor-league portion of the Rule 5 — but Saturday it paid off in ways that almost no one would have predicted. A no-hitter in the big leagues? Many wondered if he’d even make it to the majors at all.
But not Gilbert.
“I knew there was never anything that was going to prevent me from getting to the big leagues,” he said Saturday night, a half-hour after he bequeathed his glove to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “That’s something I really bought into, especially this year. No matter what. I was just so confident in myself. I know my stuff can play up here. There was never a doubt.”
Matt Hahn knew he’d watch the final few innings.
Hahn is one of the Diamondbacks’ pro scouts, and though he’s never once spoken to Tyler Gilbert, he knows the pitcher as well as anyone can know someone from a distance. Hahn lives in Tampa, half an hour from the spring training facility of the Phillies, the team that originally selected Gilbert out of the University of Southern California in the sixth round of the 2016 draft. That means Hahn has watched Gilbert pitch a lot. “Every year since he signed,” Hahn said.
This year would be no exception. Though he was scouting a minor-league game on the East Coast on Saturday, he checked the box score periodically for updates once Gilbert took the mound in Arizona. When his workday ended, he hustled to his hotel room and turned on the broadcast. “I got to the fourth and I was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s probably going to get one or two more,’” Hahn said. “Then we just kept running him out there.”
Though the acquisition of any player is a huge team effort, as Hahn is quick to point out, Gilbert is a Diamondback now because of a seed the scout planted. Diamondbacks pro scouting director Jason Parks credits Hahn, the organization’s scout of the year two seasons ago, with pounding the table for Gilbert in the Rule 5 draft this past December. And Hahn pounded the table because, perhaps unlike most evaluators, he’d been watching Gilbert closely for years.
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“I watched Tyler improve every single season,” Hahn said. He looked on as Gilbert pitched to a 3.63 ERA at Triple-A Lehigh Valley in 2018 and then watched him post a 2.83 mark at the same level a year later. He watched him in the Dominican Winter League in between. He saw Gilbert add a cutter — a pitch the lefty threw 47 percent of the time Saturday — and then continuously improve upon it. “I watched a guy who was always challenging hitters,” Hahn recalled, “who always knew what he was doing.”
There is a caveat to Hahn’s track record with Gilbert, and it’s 2020. Traded in a small deal to the Dodgers right before spring training started, Gilbert never threw a regular-season pitch last year. The Dodgers were deep with left-handed talent and didn’t have room for him at their alternate site. To the extent Gilbert did any pitching, it was to his old high school coach in his hometown of Felton, Calif. He spent the summer learning a trade, and that trade wasn’t baseball. It was electrical work alongside his father.
“It really just made me realize how much I miss baseball,” Gilbert said.
He’d pitched the last two seasons at Triple A — successfully, it’s worth noting — but the Dodgers didn’t keep him on their Triple-A roster entering this offseason. That made him eligible to be selected in the Rule 5 draft by any team that could find a spot for Gilbert at their top minor-league affiliate. When Hahn saw that Gilbert was eligible, he felt a palpable excitement. The past year was a gap on Gilbert’s resume, but Hahn had followed him long enough to plot the rest of his trajectory.
He alerted Parks that he had a guy he believed in. “It became a no-brainer recommendation at that point,” Hahn said. He made calls with contacts to find out what Gilbert had been up to, and others in the scouting department ran down information of their own. The analytics team worked up a report on Gilbert that was very positive. But there’s a reason Parks says Hahn’s voice was the most influential. Though the scout demurs when offered the credit, he does remember saying one thing that seemed to get some traction.
“What may have sealed it,” said the 15-year scout, “is saying, ‘I haven’t seen a guy this major-league-ready available in the minor-league phase of the Rule 5 draft.’”
The idea that Gilbert would be in the big leagues by now wouldn’t have surprised Gilbert or Hahn six months ago. The notion that he’d be starting would.
The 27-year-old entered spring training as one of several relatively anonymous left-handers in big-league camp, and it would have been hard to pick him out from the crowd. There was Ryan Buchter and Joe Mantiply and Miguel Aguilar and even another lefty with the same initials — Taylor Guilbeau, as if one put a Cajun spin on “Tyler Gilbert.” None of them made, or ever were considered that likely to make, the big-league roster out of camp.
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But when camp broke, the Diamondbacks approached Gilbert about a change. They wanted to try him as a starter, something Gilbert hadn’t done since 2016 when he was a 22-year-old in the South Atlantic League. “Even I was a little skeptical of what the results would be,” Hahn admitted. According to Diamondbacks farm director Josh Barfield, so was Gilbert.
“When we first approached him about it, he was a little leery,” Barfield said. “Like, ‘Eh, I haven’t done this in a while.’”
But Barfield and Arizona’s player development staff laid out their case. Gilbert “had the ability to shape four distinct pitches,” Barfield said. (In addition to his fastball and cutter, he throws a knuckle-curve and a split, the last two of which he barely needed against the Padres.) He had command of the strike zone. Moreover, the ability to start would help him reach the majors. Even if it wasn’t to start a big-league game, teams always find themselves in need of someone who can pitch in long relief.
Indeed, that’s exactly how Gilbert found his way to Chase Field. In 52 1/3 innings with Triple-A Reno, Gilbert recorded a 3.44 ERA. In a league that isn’t so much hitter-friendly as hitter-adoring, he was the only Reno starter with an ERA below 4.00. He allowed fewer than one home run per nine innings, nearly half the mark of his next-closest rotation mate. But, with Arizona’s rotation momentarily stable and the big-league bullpen in constant churn, Gilbert was called up earlier this month to do the familiar — pitch in relief.
His first outing was against the Giants, the team with the best record in baseball. He was tasked with protecting a two-run lead in the eighth, and he had to face lefty-killers Austin Slater, Kris Bryant and Darin Ruf to do it. He retired them with two strikeouts and a flyball. He made two more relief appearances before Saturday, allowing only one unearned run in the process. With fellow southpaw Caleb Smith struggling as a starter and right-handed starter Luke Weaver nearing a return from injury, the Diamondbacks turned to Gilbert and catcher Daulton Varsho for a spot start in Saturday’s game.
Instead, they got a spotless one. Gilbert issued three walks, all to Tommy Pham, and gave up 10 balls hit 95 mph or harder. Every single one of them found the leather of a glove rather than the green of the outfield turf or the plastic of the bleacher seats. But as Gilbert’s pitch count climbed, Lovullo was a ball of nerves in the dugout, fretting over the possibility of having to pull the rookie or put his health at risk. Bullpen coach Mike Fetters reminded the manager that nobody gets to make their first big-league start a second time. The manager didn’t relax until Gilbert’s three-pitch eighth — balls hit at 98, 98 and 100 mph — put him at 91 pitches with three outs left to secure.
But there was no sweating on the mound, something that Gilbert marveled at even in the moment. “It was weird,” he said. “I wasn’t nervous at all. I felt like I should have been. I don’t know why.” He froze Trent Grisham for strike three and out No. 25. Ha-Seong Kim met the same fate for out No. 26. Then Pham, the only man to reach base against him, smacked a first-pitch cutter that was over the middle. It shot into center on a line at 91.5 mph, threatening to fall in but hanging up just long enough to find the glove of Ketel Marte.
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Gilbert’s teammates mobbed him. In the stands, his family wept joyously. Several minutes later, on a teleconference call with reporters, Gilbert tried to put it all in context.
“I’m happy to be here. I’d rather be doing this than pulling wires,” said the owner of just the third no-hitter in Diamondbacks history. “No offense, Dad.”
(Top photo of Gilbert and Varsho: Ralph Freso / Getty Images)