After pitching a quick inning during the inaugural MLB Spring Breakout last month, Chase Dollander was eager to return to the bump and officially start his career in professional baseball.
The No. Despite the pressure that can form with being a high draft selection taking the first step into a new professional chapter, Dollander, MLB's No. So as long as I know that I prepared as much as I possibly can for a start, there's no pressure needed to be put on myself. Dollander was a player to watch in his college days at the University of Tennessee, where he was named a Preseason All-America choice by nearly every major national publication.
In his final year as a Vol, he tallied strikeouts over 89 innings. But his ERA jumped from 2. The right-hander took that adversity as a challenge during the offseason, as he continued working on his grade slider, making small improvements each day.
And as long as I'm stacking that one percent every single day, then everything's just gonna kind of work out for itself. It's just kind of what my mindset is now and it's been helping a lot. Dollander was drafted nearly nine months ago, but he looks back on the whirlwind experience with excitement and hopes to take the lessons he absorbed with him while adjusting to his new surroundings. It's taught me how to handle all the attention that I'm getting.
It's really telling me how to handle all of that in a way that I'm not completely dismissing it, but I'm also handling it in a way that allows me to see it and to be able to move on from it, rather than trying to dwell on it too much. After checking off the first box in his professional career, Dollander is ready to grind through to the journey of making it to The Show. And it'll be really exciting to kind of go along this journey and to be able to do all of that.
