Rangers’ Jon Gray gets World Series ring, slays his demons

Todd Helton, Jeff Francis, Troy Tulowitzki, Kyle Freeland, Brendan Rodgers. First-round draft choices all. None of them have a World Series ring.

But Jon Gray does.

The Rockies’ top pick in 2013, selected No. 3 overall, just behind Kris Bryant, just won his with Texas.

And the “Gray Wolf” wasn’t just a sideshow in the Rangers’ five-game victory over the Diamondbacks. In Game 3 on Monday night, Gray dominated the D-backs after entering in the fourth inning in emergency relief of injured starter Max Scherzer. Gray delivered three shutout innings, surrendering just one hit as the Rangers maintained a 3-0 lead en route to a 3-1 win at Chase Field.

Of Gray’s 30 pitches thrown, 25 were strikes. Gray’s dominant fastball/slider combination induced five swing-and-misses and only three of the 10 batters he faced saw more than four pitches.

But when Gray took the mound I have to admit I was holding my breath.

He is one of the nicest, most likable, most genuine professional athletes I’ve ever covered. A few years ago, he agreed to meet me and Thomas Harding of MLB.com for an offseason sit-down. We gathered at a coffee shop near Gray’s home in north Denver. He showed up riding a scooter. We spent about two hours talking about baseball, his career and life in general. It was a delightful afternoon.

But the big right-hander, who came out of the University of Oklahoma with a 100 mph fastball, never became the ace he was supposed to be. He finished his career here with a 53-49 record and 4.59 ERA. Not bad by Coors Field standards, but not dominant either.

There were flashes, to be sure, most notably his masterpiece against the Padres in September 2016. In the most dominant pitching performance in Rockies history, Gray struck out a Coors Field record 16 in an 8-0 victory. In his complete-game four-hitter, he walked none. Not a single Padres batter got beyond first base.

“Jon was unbelievable,” third baseman Nolan Arenado said that day. “That’s probably the best pitching performance I’ve ever played behind. I didn’t even have to make any plays because he struck out everyone. But his intensity out there tonight was amazing. He was locked in from the first inning on. He just competed his butt off. We don’t see a lot of games like that here.”

But Gray also had huge disappointments and crumpled under pressure, much of it self-induced. That’s why I was holding my breath Monday night.

In 2017, in an 11-8, wild-card loss to the D-backs at Chase Field, Gray surrendered a three-run homer to Paul Goldschmidt on a hanging curveball just eight pitches into the game. He got yanked in the second inning with Colorado trailing 4-0 after yielding a second-inning, run-scoring triple to Ketel Marte. Gray lasted just 1 1/3 innings.

In the penultimate game of the 2018 regular season, Gray melted down again, this time with the Rockies’ first National League West title within grasp. Had Colorado defeated the Nationals on that Saturday night, and then repeated the feat on Sunday afternoon, it would have knocked the Dodgers off the throne.

But the Nationals routed the Rockies, 12-2. Gray got the hook after just two innings, having given up five runs on seven hits, including a two-run home run to Trea Turner in the second. At the time, I wrote that Gray “once again got shaky knees on the big stage.”

Gray, always an open book, win or lose, sometimes to a fault, was honest about his failure.

“I’ve thrown a lot of big games for this club. It’s just that, when things are shaky, I don’t know what to expect out of myself,” a dejected Gray said that night.

Gray was left off the 2018 postseason roster.

But the right-hander, who turns 32 on Sunday, seems to have found himself in Texas.