Tyler Glasnow on Playing With Shohei Ohtani, the Arm-Injury Epidemic, and How Meditation (Begrudgingly) Made Him a Calmer Person, If Not a Better Pitcher

Photograph: Getty Images; Collage: Gabe Conte

Tyler Glasnow is—and this is a dispassionate, clinical assessment—a stunning physical specimen. The 30-year-old Southern California native can throw a baseball 99 miles per hour, and with a superlative ability to extend his superhuman frame toward the awaiting batter, it looks far faster even than that. He can do a cartwheel and a handstand because his mother was a gymnast. He can do a backflip because he was once drunk in Mexico, standing in waist deep water and figured why not just try it. What he learned was that, for Tyler Glasnow, doing a backflip came so naturally that now he figures, “I think a lot of people could do it. It’s more about the fear of doing it,” as he told GQ recently. “Doing it isn’t that hard.”

He is also 6’8'' with a tousled mane of shoulder-length hair and a face that has drawn such consistent comparisons to a movie star that both men have been asked about it.

Such is the unique physical prowess and presence of Glasnow. And so it is notable that if you ask Andrew Friedman—architect of Glasnow’s National League West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers, and before that a longtime Tampa Bay executive—what it was that his old Rays’ colleagues liked so much about the pitcher, his first mention is of “how his mind worked.”

That impression has been amplified since getting to know Glasnow himself. “He’s just really curious,” Friedman says. “He wants to continue to get better, and I respect people who are like that.”

“He’s a worldly guy,” says Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager. He likes that Glasnow never has to be encouraged to explore the culture and culinary offerings of the various cities their schedule takes them to over the course of the baseball season. “He’s a foodie,” Roberts says.

Which maybe explains why even after getting a dream-come-true of a contract to return home to the L.A. area and pitch for a premier organization, Glasnow confesses, “I would live in New York in like two seconds.”

I can’t blame him: It's a warm, sunny morning in early June and we’re sitting in the spacious courtyard of the opulent, if dated, team hotel near Grand Central Station, a few blocks from Rockefeller Center, Radio City Music Hall, and MoMA. “It’s cool,” Glasnow says generously of the tourist-packed midtown neighborhood, “it’s just not a place I ever want to live.” He’d prefer to be in “Tribeca, or something like that.”

Among baseball players especially, this kind of opinion—sophisticated and discerning—makes him seem like an outlier. But Glasnow rejects that kind of characterization.

“I’m a high school-educated human being,” he says. He downplays his own intelligence relative to his family, praising his father, who owned a flooring company and recently helped him renovate his home in Tampa, for being able to fix anything, and his brother for reading a “psychopathic amount” of books. "I’m just normal, I guess.”

The Dodgers—who haven’t missed the playoffs in over a decade and have the most regular season wins of any team in that stretch, but only a single World Series ring to show for it—are coming off a billion-dollar offseason. Already star-studded and successful, the team leveraged those qualities to attract several of the most interesting players available, headlined of course by Shohei Ohtani—the two-way global sensation who transcends the sport in a way no one else has in the current era.

But because Ohtani won’t pitch at all this year as he recovers from elbow surgery, the Dodgers also signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the largest and longest contract awarded to a free agent pitcher. And, in between signing Ohtani and Yamamoto, the Dodgers traded for and immediately extended Glasnow—a tantalizing talent who had developed a level of national renown while not yet hitting his peak in Tampa.

After debuting and pitching poorly with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Glasnow almost immediately remade himself after getting traded to the Rays in 2018. Encouraged by Tampa’s progressive braintrust to pitch over the heart of the plate, Glasnow became a strikeout machine, and began to embody his physical potential. But then, the following season, in a start against the Baltimore Orioles, Glasnow threw a changeup to induce a double play and knew instantly that something was wrong.

“I just remember something was in the back of my mind, like, Why am I thinking about my elbow?” Glasnow says. He made one more start before going on the injured list, returning for the final month of the season. Maybe he should have missed more time, maybe he should have had elbow surgery immediately—now he says easily that he should have—but he worried he “just didn’t have enough stats to stop pitching.” At that point, Glasnow had yet to even reach the arbitration years when a player can begin to cash in on their production.

“I felt like I still had to fight to prove that I was a good pitcher,” he says. “And I could still throw hard, it just hurt really bad. I knew something was wrong, but I could still throw like 99 mph.”

Over the next few seasons, Glasnow tried first pitching through the pain and then rehabbing his elbow without surgery before ultimately having Tommy John mid-2021. At that point, he had only topped 100 innings once in his career.

The Rays signed him to a two-year extension while he was rehabbing in 2022, which afforded him some security, but Glasnow never confused that feeling with stability.

“I thought I was going to get traded the whole time I was there,” he says. The Rays, he knew, are famously frugal, competitive on a budget by erring on the side of trading players too soon rather than too late. “They were like, ‘Oh, we're probably going to keep you in ‘24 too.’ And I was like, ‘No, you're not.’ They were not gonna pay me $25 [million].”

Coming from someone else, that could sound resentful or disillusioned, but Glasnow delivers this assessment lightly and with a laugh. He loved getting traded the first time, valued his experience in Tampa tremendously, and was excited to see what would come next. He also had a degree of leverage uncommon for early-career players: With just a year left on his contract, everyone involved understood that the Rays would get a far better return if Glasnow was traded somewhere that he was willing to stick around. “I had a small list of teams I was willing to sign an extension for to forgo free agency,” he says.

The Dodgers were one of them. He had grown up in Newhall, Santa Clarita going to Dodgers games, staring longingly into the home dugout, hoping he was getting a glimpse of his future. “They were playing baseball and I had to go to school the next day and there was so much jealousy,” Glasnow says. “I just hated having to go to school the next day. I was like I have to be a big leaguer, I have to make this my job.” It didn’t hurt that the Dodgers have all that recent success, and his brother’s family lives nearby. And it really didn’t hurt when, in early December, while Glasnow’s landing spot was still up in the air, Ohtani announced he’d likely be spending the rest of his career in L.A.

To that point, the only interaction between the two pitchers had been when they faced one another’s teams. But evidently Glasnow had made an impression because within his first week as a Dodger, Ohtani recorded a video of himself making a personalized recruitment pitch to Glasnow. To Glasnow, this was not only very cool (everyone asks about it, but thus far he’s only shown it to his girlfriend and brother), it was indicative of how badly both Ohtani and the Dodgers wanted to win. Of course, that is the whole objective in sports, but a true commitment—financial, physical, spiritual—to doing everything possible is rarer than you’d expect. The Dodgers had just shelled out historic money to reel in Ohtani and here they were deputizing him to encourage other potentially pricy additions to pick L.A., while Ohtani himself wasted no time throwing his star power into building a superteam.

After getting reassurance from Friedman that the Dodgers had the kind of behind-the-scenes resources he’d found helpful in Tampa, Glasnow OK’d the trade and signed a $136.5 million, five-year contract. He joined a team at the center of a constant media maelstrom, the subject of discourse about whether so much concentrated talent was actually Bad for Baseball, and with a dollar sign-shaped target on their back. Despite having spent his career in two much smaller markets, Glasnow hasn’t struggled as much as he anticipated he might with the transition.

“I initially was like, alright, this is gonna be a lot different,” he says. “The only difference has been the cameras, otherwise it’s been insanely the same as Tampa Bay. Like in terms of playing on the field and all the things that I can control, it's shocking how similar.”

And Ohtani himself? “He’s a dude, he’s just like a friend. He’s just a normal baseball-playing person, who’s clearly amazing.” Even the language barrier has proven eminently surmountable. “It’s really good,” Glasnow says about Ohtani’s English. “He can have any conversation.” In fact, multiple people around the Dodgers indicate that Ohtani has become much more accessible in the absence of his longtime interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, who was fired from the Dodgers early this season amid reports that he had stolen millions of dollars from Ohtani to cover gambling debts.

All those cameras that Glasnow noticed translates to a whole lot more scrutiny in Southern California than on his previous two teams. Succeeding with the Dodgers would bring a new level of stardom—but success is the expectation.

No amount of skill can guarantee success—not for any athlete and certainly not in an unpredictable team sport like baseball. Baseball has both given Glasnow the perspective to accept inevitable peaks and valleys, and become a locus for his emotional intensity.

As a kid, he was incredibly volatile, prone to tears. But now, although he still cries easily at commercials and movies, Glasnow says it’s been a while since he last cried in true distress. And it was probably about pitching.

“The only thing that really gets me is the day I pitch,” he says. “The day I pitch I’m a psychopath.”

Glasnow is given, even in interviews, to this sort of perpetual self-assessment. His surfer-dude ease and speech patterns coexist with a vibe he describes as “pretty neurotic at times.”

Perhaps nowhere is this better exemplified than in his meditation practice: something that brings him inner peace, and a great deal of anxiety to talk about publicly. Since 2015, Glasnow has tried to dedicate roughly a half-hour every morning and evening to quiet contemplation. Table stakes for the cool-guy 2024 athlete, but Glasnow doesn’t want to give the wrong idea.

“I hate talking about this stuff in interviews,” he says. He worries he’ll sound smugly enlightened. “No, it’s just like mental working out,” he says.

“I think I started doing it to try to become a better pitcher, then I quickly realized that’s not how it works,” he explains. “It took a while, too. The first few years I was like, I don't think I'm doing this right. And I still have moments where I'm like, I don't fucking think I'm doing this right.”

But it’s helped him avoid both spiraling thought loops and the kind of sports-brain magical thinking he knows is illogical. He used to be prone to superstitions, especially as his starts drew nearer. These days, though, he makes a point to actively work against those inclinations—tying his shoes in a way that feels uncomfortably out of sync with what’s worked in the past, for instance.

Glasnow’s discomfort discussing transcendental enlightenment doesn’t extend to talking about his media diet—which involves a lot of podcasts and audio books. He pulls out his phone to rattle off titles of partially-consumed titles: The Way of Zen, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Calculating God (that one is actually a science-fiction novel, despite its similarly high-minded title), The Art of War.

“Just a bunch of random bullshit,” Glasnow says.

Because of his almost obsessive degree of self-evaluation, I thought Glasnow might bristle at public assessments of him—ones that point, say, to his paltry innings totals in past seasons and label him “fragile” or “injury prone.” But he doesn’t.

“‘Cause they’re right, if you look at it,” he says. He’s already more than halfway to his previous season high, and among the league leaders in innings pitched this year. To Glasnow, that simply stands to reason—he was hurt for a while, and now he’s not.

That sort of explanation may suffice to quell concerns about the value of a particular player, but the subject of elbows, especially for guys who throw gas, is not really that simple in the current baseball landscape. In fact, the issue is that, in this particular respect, Glasnow is not an outlier at all. His surgically-repaired ulnar collateral ligament is just one of many casualties in the pitcher injury epidemic that currently afflicts the sport.

Glasnow—for all his neuroticism—is blasé about the outcome, even as he is thoughtful about the conditions contributing to it.

“The reason everyone is getting injured is because the mentality of pitching nowadays, the last 10 years, has just been: Throw it really, really hard. Which, there's nothing you can do to change it,” he says. “You're compared to your peers, you're compared to other pitchers, and this guy is throwing 97 [mph] with this type of movement. You kind of have to do that.”

At least, you do if you want to be successful.

“It's ultimately your decision. No one is making you do it.”

Surgery on the UCL has become a rite of passage for the modern professional pitcher. There’s reason to believe the literal arms race for velocity is at least partially the culprit, but Glasnow would prefer that the league not attempt to regulate the competitive edge pitchers are incentivized to seek out. He doesn’t blame Major League Baseball for how we got here, and he doesn’t think it’s the league’s responsibility to do anything about it now.

And while some have suggested that the league’s newish pitch clock might bear some responsibility for pitcher injuries, he doesn’t mind it.

“I mean, I pitch once every week,” Glasnow says. “Every other game, I hated sitting there for four and a half hours. I love the pitch clock.”

So he’ll put up with the 10-15 pitches a game that feel a little rushed, or the strain of hurrying back to the mound after running to cover first. And he’ll even accept that at some point in many ambitious pitchers’ careers, a forced sabbatical for Tommy John surgery will be necessary. The medical procedure is improving, but now there’s a rash of players making the more arduous and uncertain return from a second UCL surgery.

But think about all the kids sitting in the stands wishing that instead of going to school tomorrow they were playing baseball for a living. It’s a trade-off Glasnow is happy to make. “I think what other people go through in life, to make money and have a living, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal in the grand scheme of life,” he says. “The risk/reward is worth it to me. Like, you get to pitch in the big leagues, you make money, you get to play a game for your job.”

The day after we have coffee, Glasnow takes the bump for the Dodgers in the most-watched ESPN Sunday Night Baseball game in two years. In a matchup breathlessly billed as a potential World Series preview, the billion-dollar Dodgers face off against the best-in-the-American-League New York Yankees. Glasnow struggles in the loss, but still manages to strike out a dozen Yankees—keeping him comfortably atop the K leaderboard this season.

In the hours before the game, he runs through his routine—as good a guard as any against his nerves. “I always get nervous before starts,” Glasnow says, “which is a good thing. It's adrenaline, I like that feeling.” He wakes up without an alarm, goes for coffee, and comes back to the hotel room to meditate. He eats a big breakfast before heading to the ballpark. Three hours before first pitch, he meets with his pitching coach and catcher to go over the lineup, and then does his best to keep his thoughts focused, but not obsessively trained on the game ahead, as he finishes his preparation. Probably he listens to rap music, the kind of stuff that’s referenced in a couple of his tattoos. He has NO JUICE—the title of a Boosie song—on the inside of his lower lip, and a faded image from an O.D.B. album cover on the bottom of his foot. (A few others: a basic beach scene and a baby giraffe on either side of his ankle. “They're all super stupid,” Glasnow says, “and that’s the only kind of tattoos I would get.”)

Once the game is underway, Glasnow sits down the first four batters he faces with relative ease. The fifth batter is a bench guy, filling in for Juan Soto, who works a walk.

“FUCK!” Glasnow yells clearly and audibly enough on the broadcast that the booth has to acknowledge the hot mic. This has happened before. In fact, it’s a moment of palpable passion that is classic Tyler Glasnow.

Even by the standards of sports, the elite starting pitcher is a strange creature. Pushing for insane speeds in a game of inches. Dictating the beats of a contest he hopes will be defined largely by inaction. Living a life of strict five-day routines to weather six months of constant travel. Accepting the ups and downs of a long season while mustering manic levels of conviction for each of literally thousands of pitches he’ll throw.

Perhaps Glasnow’s paradoxical nature makes him uniquely suited to the task. After all, how better to capture the contradictions of pitching than pairing The Way of Zen with The Art of War?

The day before, I’d asked how his intensity on the mound fits with his more mature, and (sorry, Tyler) enlightened way of being most of the time. “Maybe that’s what it is,” he said. “I hold it all in and then the day I pitch, I just let it all out. And then it starts back over.”

Originally Appeared on GQ

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