It is March 9th, 2026. Blas Castaño is getting A-side bullpen reps for the Mariners while some of his teammates are away playing for their respective teams in the World Baseball Classic. With so many regulars
resting or away at the WBC, the field looks much more like one of his Triple-A Tacoma games than big-league spring training. He’s not one to get nervous anyway—and when he was, like on the day of his debut, the Mariners mental skills people were really good at their jobs—but this environment feels familiar. Comfortable. Ten thousand people rather than thirty thousand.
Plus, his slider has good movement on it today—that harder vertical break he’s been working on to coax a few more whiffs—and his changeup feels good, ready to induce some ground balls. He hopes they’ll give him a few innings to cover, show off his use as a swingman, but he’s just happy to be with the A squad, the regulars who are left and the upper-minors guys he’s played with the last two seasons. Ready to show he belongs. Taking the mound, he stomps his left foot into the rubber, announcing himself.
It is March 9th, 2026. Blas Castaño buttons up the fire engine red Angels jersey, just the third one he’s had since his pro debut in 2018: from pinstripes to teal to this. But the Angels were giving him a chance as a starter again—maybe they remembered his seven-inning start against Salt Lake in 2024. He’d struck out a career-high 12 hitters that day and yelled as he came off the mound to end the seventh. He’s always demonstrative on the mound but that day he’d felt like he could pull the whole stadium out of the ground and throw it wherever he wanted. Maybe he could get that feeling back. He stomps his left foot into the rubber on the pitching mound, like maybe he can call it back out of the ground.
It is March 9th, 2026. Blas Castaño is back in Florida for spring training for the first time in years after signing a minor-league deal with the Twins and is enjoying the tropical weather, which feels more like home. He doesn’t even mind the thunderstorms. It wasn’t fun to get bumped off the 40-man roster in Seattle, the place he’d made his debut, but he’s keeping a positive mindset about this. The Twins have good pitching coaches and a lot of available spots in their bullpen, and they wanted him, jumping the line to pick him up from Seattle. And the first team he’ll get to face is the Yankees, the team that signed him. It was always a complicated relationship, the first team that took a chance on, and then gave up on, you, but only magnified when it was an organization like the Yankees. Backfield game or not, he knows he’ll bring his best stuff. His fastball has some extra heat on it, touching 95 today on the stadium gun, although he knows that’s probably just nerves. He stomps his left food into the rubber and stares down his first hitter.
It is March 9th, 2026. Blas Castaño chucks his phone into a locker so he won’t be tempted to check it during the showcase. There’s a scout from the Doosan Bears who’s already reached out, and a couple from NPB teams. Playing overseas wouldn’t be so bad, he tells himself. The money was good, and there were more contact hitters who might put his stuff on the ground rather than over the fence. He winces, thinking of the last pitch he’d thrown in a spring training game before getting DFA’d that some Quad-A slugger with a 40% K rate had demolished onto the upper berm. But there will be scouts from big-league clubs there, too, looking to fill out minor-league rosters. He reminds himself, sternly, that a minor-league deal is his second choice. He’d done his time—years!—in the minors, made his big-league debut—something a great many players didn’t ever get to do—why go back to subsistence-level meals in dingy locker rooms to play in front of small crowds in small cities?
Because it would always be his choice. He’d rather have the slimmest chance at the best dream. Looking around the clubhouse, he knows every other guy in here currently actively ignoring their phones would make the same choice. He slams the locker shut and finishes lacing up his cleats before stepping onto the mound that will determine where his career points next.
