WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The lifers talk about the difference between the major leagues and the minors as “adding that third deck,” which can speed things up, ramp up anxiety and generally play havoc with a rookie making his debut. 

Good news, then, for Gavin Collyer that the Nomadic Athletics play in a minor league stadium.

And no problem for Collyer, who traveled all day Wednesday on the way to the big leagues for the first time and then calmly, at least it seemed, whiffed fellow Georgia native Lawrence Butler on three pitches. It was the only batter he faced in the game. According to Baseball-Reference, he was just the seventh pitcher in the pitch-tracking era (since 1988) to have a three-pitch strikeout as his full line for an MLB debut. 

“I always tell myself pressure is a privilege, and it kind of slows my heart rate down,” Collyer said Thursday morning. “It’s like I’m meant to be here. God put me here. This is my moment. You don’t want to come up short of what I’m supposed to do out there. I just feel like I’m confident in myself. I know my stuff’s good. I just go out there and be myself. And do my thing, you know.”

All of which is great to tell one’s self, except for, you know, it’s the major leagues. It’s the dream every player dreams. And so, in that minute, was he actually able to do that?

“Well, when Skip [Schumaker] gave me the ball, I think I kind of blacked out,” Collyer said. “I just kind of said ‘let’s go.’  It was a crazy moment. My heart was definitely beating. But it was everything I’ve always dreamed of.” 

It was made better by the fact that Collyer’s parents and his brother, who live in suburban Atlanta, were able to hop a nonstop Delta flight (it’s good to live near a hub) and arrived at Sutter Health Park around 8 p.m. PT, just in time to catch Collyer’s debut in person. His girlfriend made it, too. 

For Schumaker, though, it was made all the more special by the quality of his pitches. He got ahead of Butler, a tough left-handed hitter, on a swing at a cutter that rode right in on his fists. Followed it up with a back-foot sweeper that broke into the zone late and then put him away with a 97 mph fastball on the inside corner. Impressive stuff. 

All the more impressive for Schumaker is Collyer’s ability to generate swing-and-miss inside the strike zone with his fastball. While in the minors last year, Schumaker said Collyer’s swing-and-miss rate on fastballs in the zone was an almost unheard of “better than 40%.” Consider that among MLB pitchers last year that threw at least 200 fastballs in the zone, the highest swing-and-miss rate was Edwin Uceta’s 34.9%. Schumaker doesn’t necessarily expect Collyer to maintain that kind of swing-and-miss rate in the majors but believes he can have elite MLB metrics.

“The numbers really jumped out,” Schumaker said. “You just don’t see that too often. Then watching it, you understand why. When his stuff is inside the zone, it’s really, really good, better than most. Where he throws the ball from, it feels like it’s coming from shortstop. There is really good deception to it. 

“Obviously, his walk rate was high, but he made it a point this offseason to work on filling up the zone. And when I saw that, I knew that [he could get to the majors] really fast.”

Well, he’s arrived. As long as you don’t go by the number of decks in the stadium.