It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when Lance Lynn became a pitching ace.
But as good a place as any to start is a muggy night in New York last year. It wasn’t his best start of the season. Wasn’t even a win. But it did contain the best line of the season by a pitcher, even if it wasn’t his actual pitching line: “We don’t got all night, we’ve got a plane to catch.”
There had been a delay. Umpire Will Little was asking for more and more baseballs to be removed from play. The Rangers didn’t get it. Manager Chris Woodward wanted to know why. The young umpire stepped away to explain.
Lynn, who works quickly, had no time for such foolishness. He yelled the line at Little, punctuating it with an expletive.
As Little struggled to understand it from behind the plate, Lynn repeated it twice more for him. The umpire still mistook it and yelled back he was aware they were “playing together.” To which Lynn got more annoyed. He shot back: “This is our game.”
Within days, the entire pitching staff had shirts emblazoned with “We’ve got a plane to catch.”
A little baseball wisdom: If guys are printing up shirts with your quotes on them, they are more than willing to follow your lead. Lynn, now 33, can be sarcastic, but is sage. And he’s hungry, which is not a joke about the fact that he’s 6-5 and listed at 250 pounds. As a rookie in St. Louis in 2011, he won a World Series. He has been searching for a way back ever since.
He knew this much: You don’t become a leader by pronouncing yourself one, you become a leader when others follow. He learned it in St. Louis around the likes of Chris Carpenter, Jake Westbrook and Adam Wainwright.
Up to that moment, Lynn had been in the middle of a career rebirth, having accepted some philosophical changes the Rangers wanted to make in his fastball usage. It resulted in Lynn essentially turning one pitch into four. With performance also comes responsibility. After a vagabond 2018 season split between Minnesota and the Yankees, Lynn realized his surroundings.
It was underscored all the more this season when Woodward, early in the initial spring training camp in March, told Lynn he would be the opening day starter. Lynn has taken the responsibility that comes with the honor and run with it.
“I’ve been thoroughly impressed,” Woodward said. “We had many, many conversations, just the two of use, and I just watch what he does on the field. It’s been pretty spectacular.”
“You grow into being a better [teammate],” Lynn said after winning the 100th game of his career on Sunday. “I had the luxury early on in my career having been in St. Louis with those guys. That taught me a lot. But every team I’ve ever been on I’ve kind of had that attitude where I show up every day. I try to win the game, no matter what the situation is, and do the best I can, no matter what’s going on anywhere else.”
When the Rangers signed him after 2018, they weren’t exactly sure what they had either as a pitcher or a teammate. After missing 2016 because of Tommy John surgery, he’d started using his sinking fastball more, which took away from his four-seamer that can explode up in the zone. The Rangers carefully approached the idea of flipping things again, along with upping his cut fastball usage.
Though Lynn comes across as an “old-school” player, what he really loves is discussing baseball. That pitching coach Julio Rangel and Woodward simply wanted to have dialogue on pitching philosophy led to an engaging conversation.
“It was a little awkward at times early on, just because I was trying to figure him out,” Rangel said. “He’s always got that look like he’s not in a good mood. He’s so competitive. He wants to be good. He wants to win. He’s actually one of our easiest guys to talk to. He wants information.”
Lynn hasn’t discarded much of it. According to Brooksbaseball.net, his four-seam usage has hovered around 55% since the start of last year and he’s using it to go above the zone for strikeouts. He threw the cutter about 10% of the time before coming to the Rangers. He ended up at 15% last year. It’s 22% through his first four starts this season. He’s even started using a slider occasionally.
All Lynn has asked in return is to be able to go until he can’t. That’s meant at least 100 pitches every time out. He’s thrown at least 100 in all but two of his 37 starts for the Rangers, including the last 27 in a row. He enters his start against Colorado on Friday with a 1.16 ERA, second in the AL. His 3.42 ERA since joining the Rangers is fifth in the league.
“I think the pitching conversation goes both ways,” Lynn said. “I think I’ve shown that they can trust me to to tell them the truth. We have a good relationship here, and I enjoy it. I enjoy the pitching forum they let me have. I enjoy that they let me do my thing.”
His thing has been to grow into an ace.
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