It was all in the pursuit of greatness.
Quinn Mathews wasn’t worried about what armchair pitching coaches might think when he took the ball for Stanford in the ninth inning against the University of Texas in the second of a three-game NCAA Super Regional series last Sunday.
He recorded the final three outs, secured Stanford’s 8-3 win over the Longhorns and then did his best to ignore the rest: baseball pundits exploding in confusion after a college senior threw 156 pitches in a complete game effort.
It was the second-most pitches thrown by a Division I player this year. No MLB pitcher has thrown that many pitches in a game since 1997.
“It’s hard to justify to people,” Mathews said in a phone interview this week.
Mathews called it a moment he’ll always remember. Stanford coach Davis Esquer defended the decision and said he’d never put Mathews in harm’s way. The Cardinals toppled the Longhorns in three games and are now preparing for a matchup against No. 1 Wake Forest in the third game of the College World Series on Saturday at 11 a.m. PT.
“I’ll be good to go when coaches want me back out on the mound, if they want me back out on the mound,” Mathews said. “It’s going to be a tough test.”
Fueled by last summer’s draft — the left-hander wasn’t chosen until the 19th round by the Tampa Bay Rays — Mathews had been building up for his 156-pitch outing for the last 11 months.
As a junior in 2022, the Orange County native had put together a special season, going 9-2 with nine saves and a 3.09 ERA. But while waiting for his name to be called in the draft, Mathews had a revelation.
“I thought I was a lot better than I was,” he said. “I was hearing all this hype about what I was doing. Unfortunately it wasn’t the truth at the end of the day I just wasn’t that good. I’m not that good. It’s just a motivating thing for me.”
Mathews looked around and realized his low-90s fastball and signature pitch, an evaporating change-up that he threw 80 times in his 156-pitch outing on Sunday, wasn’t enough to make him a premier MLB prospect.
He decided he needed to take his blinders off and start looking at life outside of baseball. He returned to Stanford for his senior year, continued taking classes towards earning his degree in Science, Technology and Society (STS), and told his older sister, Remy, that he was going to be a more well-rounded person.
“He’s slowly figuring out how to make the balance work for him, what balance he needs the most,” said Remy, a four-year letter winner on the Rice University soccer team. “He reflects on that and tries to take actions to do that. I’m so proud of the way he’s grown.”
Quinn figured a more well-rounded life would relieve the pressure to eat, sleep and breathe baseball.
“It’s easy to become narrow-minded,” he said. “I call it the racehorse tunnel vision, where you can’t see outside of the game and week after week the stuff accelerates, speeds up and life seems to revolve around baseball. And unfortunately it doesn’t. You have to be a good human being first and foremost.”
By focusing on other things, Mathews noticed his strength as a person growing faster than his arm strength.
“The problem is the expectation all Stanford athletes have on themselves, students too,” he said. “The expectation is to be the best and we always have to be athletically and academically the best. So when people think of good, they think of top-200 or top-300, versus what we think of good, which is like top-10, top-five. Standards get mixed up so that’s the hardest thing to break down is that drive.”
A year later and he still throws a fastball in the low-90s, still lives off his change-up, still has an ERA in the 3s and yet his life has changed drastically.
He’s now Stanford’s ace, leading the team to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb., this weekend. He’s now ranked in the top-120 prospects in the country, with Baseball America expecting him to get drafted in the early rounds this July. And he’s soon to be the proud owner of a college degree after making his final presentation last Friday in MS&E 256: Technology Assessment and Regulation of Medical Devices.
His project was focused, coincidentally, on alternatives to Tommy John surgery and Mathews speaks regularly with Stanford’s elbow specialist, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Michael Freehill.
It all led to last Sunday’s game, when the coaching staff told Mathews it was his decision how long he’d pitch.
“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” he said. “In my eyes, it’s like weight lifting. You do it for 10 years and people are only going to see one day’s worth and freak out. Nobody does this. Yeah, nobody does it, and it’s out of the ordinary, and I’m not saying I’m going to do it ever again in my life, but I built up for it all year. My limit was going to be pushed. I was ready for it.”
