'He's always had the stuff': Ryan Pressly's path to becoming a relief ace for the Astros

The borderline information overload presented to Ryan Pressly a few hours earlier was still fresh in his mind when he took the Minute Maid Park mound for his Astros debut last July 28.

The gist of the message delivered by the Astros’ analytics team and pitching coach Brent Strom was for Pressly to throw more breaking balls, curveballs especially, than he had with his previous team, the Twins, who had traded him to Houston the previous night. The rate at which he spins the ball is elite, they stressed. They recommended pitch usage percentages for which he should strive to maximize his skill set.

The introductory meeting and thoughts of what could be made Pressly anxious to put the new suggestions into practice. The wait for his first opportunity lasted only six innings of that night’s game against the Rangers, his hometown team.

Rougned Odor was first up, leading off the seventh inning. Odor bats left-handed, the handedness of hitter the Astros hoped Pressly and his breaking balls would help against most when they targeted him in the trade.

Perhaps overeager to make a positive first impression on his new team and fan base, Pressly fell behind in the count, three balls to no strikes. With the help of a couple of fastballs, he worked his way back into a full count.

On 3-and-2, Pressly was faced with a decision. In his Twins days, he probably would’ve stuck with the heater. But he was an Astro now. The situation called for a breaking ball.

He unleashed a slider at 90 mph and then could only watch in disgust as Odor lifted it into the right-field seats. After retiring the next three batters on a combined seven pitches, a pissed-off Pressly stalked back to the dugout, where he was met immediately by a smirking Strom.

“Relax,” Strom told him. “You’re going to be good. That’s just a bad example.”

Standing by his locker at the Astros’ spring training complex one morning last month, Pressly marveled at the accuracy of Strom’s statement. After Odor took him deep — he admits now he left that slider up and over the plate — Pressly allowed only one run in 22 1/3 innings the rest of the regular season. No more of his pitches left the yard. Merely two resulted in extra-base hits.

Strom’s assuredness was rooted in the numbers, the same data that prompted basically every contending team to express interest in Pressly before the July 31 trade deadline. The 30-year-old right-hander’s combination of spin and velocity arms him with one of the best swing-and-miss arsenals in baseball.

“His out pitches are disgusting,” said Nationals second baseman Brian Dozier, a teammate of Pressly’s with the Twins from the start of 2013 to last July. “And I’m not just saying that (from) playing behind him. I’m biased. But you can ask a lot of guys he’s faced. He’s got one of the nastiest curveballs in the game.”

MLB’s Statcast system supports that sentiment. Among pitchers who threw at least 200 curveballs last season, Pressly’s average spin rate of 3,225 revolutions per minute ranked first in the majors. Use the same qualifier for sliders and he ranked 17th with an average of 2,734 RPM. His four-seam fastball spin rate of 2,568 RPM ranked eighth.

Here’s how the spin of each of those pitches stacked up on the 2018 Houston staff.

On top of his innate ability to spin the ball, Pressly throws his average fastball at 96 mph, his slider at 90 and his curveball at 83. His weapons made him a frequent answer for A.J. Hinch when the Astros’ manager sought the best matchup in leverage situations last postseason. Pressly should have the advantage against any hitter who struggles with riding fastballs elevated in the strike zone or power breaking balls. He held lefties in check even better than righties last year.

The filthiness of his breaking balls is why this time next year Pressly’s could be a household name among baseball fans. The former Rule 5 draft pick will be a free agent after the season, and if he continues on his 2018 trajectory, it’s not a stretch to envision him garnering a payday north of the three-year, $27-million deal Adam Ottavino signed with the Yankees in January.

Last season, between his stints with the Twins and the Astros, Pressly had a career-best 2.54 ERA and 101 strikeouts against 22 walks in 71 innings. From August through October, he was Houston’s most valuable reliever. He proved to be a workhorse, leading the American League with 77 appearances in the regular season. He made five more in the Astros’ eight postseason games.

Including the postseason, Pressly had a 39:6 strikeout-to-walk ratio in his 28 1/3 innings with Houston last year. (Elsa/Getty Images)

Fittingly, Pressly learned both of his breaking balls from ex-major-league pitchers. His curveball came from former Royals starter Steve Busby, a two-time All-Star who was Pressly’s childhood coach in the Dallas area. The slider he learned one offseason during his minor-league years from former journeyman reliever Mike Munoz. He actually showed him a cutter, the Mariano Rivera grip, and Pressly personalized it by manipulating his fingers to a placement more comfortable for his hand.

In his breakout 2018, Pressly parlayed his combination of velocity and spin into 17.6 percent swinging strikes, more than 5 percent better than his previous career best in 2017, according to FanGraphs. Learning to land his curveball for a strike proved to be the key for him to unlock his potential. He has credited Garvin Alston, the Twins pitching coach last season, for that improvement. In spring training last year, Alston gave Pressly the freedom to throw the curve in any situation and in any count as a way to build confidence in his command of it.

Once he joined the Astros, Pressly saw his curveball usage skyrocket to 39 percent, up from his 24.3 percent with the Twins, according to Brooks Baseball. Against left-handed hitters, he threw it 49.2 percent of the time, significantly up from 31 percent with the Twins. “You see guys even sitting on it and they still can’t hit it,” Astros catcher Max Stassi said. “That’s how special it is.”

Pressly’s curveball surge came at the expense of his four-seam fastball, especially against left-handed hitters. His slider usage also increased but not nearly as significantly as his curveball. It moved from 27 percent to 29.4 percent overall and from 28.9 percent to 36.2 percent against right-handed hitters.

“He’s always had the stuff,” Dozier said. “Last year, I think he finally realized that he’s pretty dang good.”

As an athlete, Pressly’s first love was actually football.

He was born in Dallas and grew up in nearby Irving, then the home of the Cowboys, in the days of Aikman, Irvin and Smith. His late maternal grandfather, Tito Nicholas, was a personal friend of legendary coach Tom Landry from their shared time in flight school during World War II. His mother, Jan, went to school with and was friends with Landry’s daughter, Lisa. Landry even attended Pressly’s parents’ wedding.

If he didn’t have enough familial connections to his favorite football team, Pressly’s fiancée, Kat Rogers, is a former Cowboys cheerleader. They will be married Dec. 31 in Houston, her hometown. “We’re definitely ingrained with the Cowboy blue and silver,” Pressly said. They live in the offseason north of Fort Worth in the small town of Argyle.

Pressly was a two-sport athlete in high school. At American Heritage Academy, a private school just north of Dallas in Carrollton, he spent his falls as a wide receiver and free safety. His team featured a run-heavy offense, so he was mostly relegated to taking away a defender on the outside. Defense was where he had his fun.

Pressly was a wide receiver and safety at American Heritage Academy in Carrollton, Texas. (Courtesy of Jan Pressly)

“I liked picking people off,” Pressly said. Whenever his team prepared to oppose a spread offense, he was excited because he knew he’d get chances to break passes up or even snag one.

But in a bit of cruel irony, it was on an interception that his football career ended. It was his senior season in a game against Bishop Dunne. Pressly picked off a pass in the middle of the field and started to his left in his attempt to run it back.

“You know how they always tell you to keep your head on a swivel?” he said. “Well, I didn’t do that.” With his eyes fixed to his right at the open field, he forgot about the receiver. As he was tackled, his left foot stuck in the ground while his knee went the other way.

The next day in film study, a replay that showed the contortion of his knee made one of his teammates vomit. Pressly didn’t yet know the severity at the time, but his knee was shredded. He required surgery to repair his left ACL and MCL, he said.

Even if he hadn’t gotten hurt, Pressly never faced a serious decision between baseball and football. He was better at baseball, and it was always his ticket to potentially getting a free education and taking a financial burden off his parents.

While he loved the adrenaline that came with running around on a football field, baseball was more of his escape. Out on the mound, nobody could bother him.

“Except for one person — my dad,” he said with a smile. “He knew what to say and how to say it to get under my skin to make me get better.”

Each time he takes the mound, Pressly pays tribute to his father, Tom, who died Nov. 1, 2013, of kidney cancer at age 60. Before he toes the rubber, he will bend over and write the initials TP in the dirt. He’s long had “RIP DAD” stitched onto the thumb of his Rawlings glove.

“It’s what I have out there with me,” Pressly said.

Ryan and Tom Pressly before a game at Target Field during Ryan’s rookie season in 2013. (Courtesy of Jan Pressly)

Pressly is reminded of his dad every time he looks down at his left wrist, where he has a tattoo with the dates of Tom’s birth and death, a kidney cancer ribbon and boxing gloves, a nod to his fight. In a wooden box of personal items he travels with during the season, the pitcher has folded up a note his father wrote him before his death.

“It just shows you how strong my dad was. He knew it was about to happen and was like, ‘Look, this is the best advice I can give you right now and then from there on you’re going to have to figure it out on your own,’ ” said Pressly, who at the time had just completed his rookie season with the Twins. “I’m sure that letter is going to help me later on in life, as well.”

Tom Pressly was hard on his son. But when Pressly pitched, Tom watched as if he were the one on the mound. Jim Robinson, the scout responsible for the Red Sox drafting Pressly in 2007, remembers the look of anguish on Tom’s face as he watched those high school games.

“He just loved Ryan so much and he wanted him to succeed and wanted him to have as many opportunities as he could,” said Robinson, who became friends with the Presslys beyond the typical scout-player relationship. “He was one of those dads who didn’t say anything at the games but, boy, he lived and died with every pitch. He just wanted Ryan to do so well, and you could tell how important it was to him for his son to have success and he wanted to provide every opportunity he could for him.

“He backed him 1,000 percent, knew he was good and just wanted it to come out.”

An 11th-round draft pick of Boston in ’07, Pressly flew relatively under the radar in high school. As his small private school pondered whether to continue with its baseball program, he transferred for his final semester to Marcus High, a nearby public school. But between his shoddy knee and a coach who didn’t notify scouts when he was pitching, teams didn’t get many looks at Pressly.

“He would start with a really short leash,” Robinson said. “It was really a strange deal and unfortunate for Ryan.” Thankfully for Pressly, Robinson’s interest had been piqued the previous summer, and once he met the pitcher’s parents he was able to get a heads-up from them on his start days.

“He’d throw an occasional plus fastball, but he could really spin the ball well,” Robinson said. “That was the one thing that to me really stood out when I saw him, the crispness and how fast he could spin the ball. Then you add in the fact that he already had a little bit of a feel with a changeup. I just liked how everything worked. It was loose; it was pretty clean. His delivery worked well, and he was a pretty good athlete, too.”

The Red Sox gave Pressly a $100,000 signing bonus to forgo his commitment to Texas Tech and begin his professional career. They assigned him to the Gulf Coast League with many of the other new draftees. When he could barely get off the ground while jumping for a ball, the Red Sox sent him back to Boston to visit their doctors. As it turned out, he needed a second, corrective knee surgery.

Pressly was still a starter back then. It wasn’t until halfway through the 2012 season that Boston pulled the plug on that experiment. He was in High A with an ERA approaching 6.00. For a change of scenery, the Red Sox sent him to the bullpen and then to Double A a few weeks later.

To get a better feel for pitching out of the bullpen, Pressly wanted to play winter ball that year in the Dominican Republic or Venezuela. The Red Sox did him one better and sent him to the Arizona Fall League. He dominated his fellow prospects, finishing the fall with 18 strikeouts and only one walk in 14 innings.

His current battery mate was one of his victims.

“Yeah, he punched my ticket really fast,” Stassi said. “I think it was three pitches. Three or four pitches. Maybe he threw one ball. But he punched me out so fast.”

A month later, Pressly received a phone call from his agent telling him the Twins selected him in the Rule 5 draft. “What the hell is the Rule 5 draft?” he replied.

Pressly made the 2013 Twins and stuck on their roster the entire season. He was up and down from the majors to Triple A in 2014 and 2015 and even had two brief Triple-A stints as recently as June 2017.

This season, Pressly is poised to be the Astros’ primary setup man for closer Roberto Osuna. But while a majority of his outings are likely to be in the eighth inning with Houston ahead, a handful of his appearances will come earlier in the game when the situation calls for it, according to Hinch. Pressly is also a backup closer option if Osuna is unavailable for a given game. Hinch typically tries to avoid using relievers three days in a row.

“I plan to use him in high leverage, as important of outs as we need,” Hinch said.

Hinch will rely heavily on Pressly but also acknowledged he will try to not use him this season at the rate he pitched last year, both with the Twins and the Astros. Pressly’s not the type to speak up when not feeling his best, though he did thank Hinch when given an unexpected game off a couple of times down the stretch last regular season. The Astros reliever closest in appearances to Pressly, Héctor Rondón, had 14 fewer. Only two pitchers, NL sidearmers Brad Ziegler and Steve Cishek, racked up more appearances last year.

“We talk about gamers in this game, and we usually talk about position players. But he’s a gamer,” Hinch said. “I love his composure, his seriousness and his stuff.”

Among pitchers who threw 200 or more curveballs last season, Pressly’s spin rate led the majors. (Darren Yamashita / USA Today Sports)

Off the field, Pressly is understated and quiet. One of his best friends from the minor leagues, former Red Sox reliever Drake Britton, described him as “one of the most laid-back, go-with-the-flow type of guys that I’ve ever met.”

“He’s goofy. I make fun of him because I see him pitching and he has that demeanor about him that makes him so good, that ‘F you’ mentally,” Britton said. “But it’s like as soon as the game’s over, I’ll be texting him, ‘Hey man, good shit out there,’ and he’ll just text me back like goofy ass GIFs or emojis. That’s just him. I make fun of him all the time. I just say, ‘Hey, you may have them fooled at the plate, but you ain’t got me fooled with that hard-ass mentality out there. I know who you are.’ ”

Pressly prefers to keep a low profile. He can walk the streets of Houston by Minute Maid Park without being recognized. He’s not on Twitter or Instagram or any other social media.

To him, being dependable to his teammates is what matters. He prides himself on taking the ball every game, almost to the point where he shouldn’t.

“I want to be that guy who’s walking out of the bullpen door and all of my teammates are like, ‘We’re good,’ ” he said. “That’s what I want.”

(Top photo: Jeff Roberson / Associated Press)