{"id":253943,"date":"2026-04-17T08:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T08:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/253943\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T08:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T08:18:11","slug":"texas-rangers-gavin-collyer-impresses-in-mlb-debut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/253943\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Rangers’ Gavin Collyer impresses in MLB debut"},"content":{"rendered":"

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif.\u00a0\u2014 The lifers talk about the difference between the major leagues and the minors as \u201cadding that third deck,\u201d which can speed things up, ramp up anxiety and generally play havoc with a rookie making his debut.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Good news, then, for Gavin Collyer<\/a> that the Nomadic Athletics play in a minor league stadium.<\/p>\n

And no problem for Collyer, who traveled all day Wednesday on the way to the big leagues<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI always tell myself pressure is a privilege, and it kind of slows my heart rate down,\u201d Collyer said Thursday morning. \u201cIt\u2019s like I\u2019m meant to be here. God put me here. This is my moment. You don\u2019t want to come up short of what I\u2019m supposed to do out there. I just feel like I\u2019m confident in myself. I know my stuff\u2019s good. I just go out there and be myself. And do my thing, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of which is great to tell one\u2019s self, except for, you know, it\u2019s the major leagues. It\u2019s the dream every player dreams. And so, in that minute, was he actually able to do that?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, when Skip [Schumaker]<\/a> gave me the ball, I think I kind of blacked out,\u201d Collyer said. \u201cI just kind of said \u2018let\u2019s go.\u2019 \u00a0It was a crazy moment. My heart was definitely beating. But it was everything I\u2019ve always dreamed of.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was made better by the fact that Collyer\u2019s parents and his brother, who live in suburban Atlanta, were able to hop a nonstop Delta flight (it\u2019s good to live near a hub) and arrived at Sutter Health Park around 8 p.m. PT, just in time to catch Collyer\u2019s debut in person. His girlfriend made it, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All the more impressive for Schumaker is Collyer\u2019s ability to generate swing-and-miss inside the strike zone with his fastball. While in the minors last year, Schumaker said Collyer\u2019s swing-and-miss rate on fastballs in the zone was an almost unheard of \u201cbetter than 40%.\u201d 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\u2019s 34.9%. Schumaker doesn\u2019t necessarily expect Collyer to maintain that kind of swing-and-miss rate in the majors but believes he can have elite MLB metrics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe numbers really jumped out,\u201d Schumaker said. \u201cYou just don\u2019t see that too often. Then watching it, you understand why. When his stuff is inside the zone, it\u2019s really, really good, better than most. Where he throws the ball from, it feels like it\u2019s coming from shortstop. There is really good deception to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cObviously, his walk rate was high, but he made it a point this\u00a0offseason to work on filling up the zone. And when I saw that, I knew that [he could get to the majors] really fast.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, he\u2019s arrived. As long as you don\u2019t go by the number of decks in the stadium.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif.\u00a0\u2014 The lifers talk about the difference between the major leagues and the minors as \u201cadding…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253944,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[732,27,29,28,89744,89898],"class_list":{"0":"post-253943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-article","9":"tag-texas","10":"tag-texas-headlines","11":"tag-texas-news","12":"tag-tp-texas-rangers","13":"tag-tp-skip-schumaker"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}