One half of Georgia Tech’s starting pitching tandem has been riding on a track bound for moments like the one that awaits the Yellow Jackets this weekend. As a high schooler, Marquis Grissom was one of the top pitching prospects in the country.
As for the other half of the pitching duo in line to start for Tech in its NCAA regional that begins Friday in Knoxville, Tenn., no one could have predicted that assignment when he was coming out of high school. John Medich was recruited to play at the Division III level, and that was as a catcher.
The ascents of Grissom and Medich have traveled decidedly different paths, but they will align at Tennessee’s Lindsey Nelson Stadium, where Tech’s hopes of toppling overall No. 1-seed Tennessee likely will rest heavily on how the two young men perform. Medich will get the start Friday against Campbell in the first game of the regional. Coach Danny Hall’s plans for Grissom are not as defined, likely hinging on whether second-seeded Tech beats the third-seeded Camels to move to a potential winners bracket game with Tennessee or falls into the losers bracket and likely faces fourth-seeded Alabama State. But whenever he pitches in the double-elimination event, it will be in a pivotal role.
Regardless, Medich, Grissom and the rest of the Jackets pitching staff portend to be the variable for Tech that determines its chances. The Jackets’ prolific offense figures to be able to put up runs. Whether Tech’s inconsistent staff can slow Campbell (ranked 11th in Division I in scoring at 8.7 runs per game) in the opener or potentially Tennessee (third in scoring at 9.3 runs per game, a hair ahead of Tech in fourth, also at 9.3) is uncertain. Tech’s ERA of 6.54 ranks 225th in the country and third highest among the 64 teams in the tournament.
“I’ll be confident,” Grissom said. “We’re all confident. As a team, we’ve just got to be us.”
Grissom (5.40 ERA) and Medich (6.14) have not been immune from the team’s struggles on the mound, but both have demonstrated their potential to handle business. Medich held Miami (the overall No. 6 seed in the tournament) to one run in a six-inning start April 29. In his last start, against Pitt in the ACC Tournament, he had given up two runs through five innings before faltering in the sixth.
In his past two starts, the latter against overall No. 12-seed Louisville in the ACC Tournament, Grissom has given up five earned runs in 12 ⅔ innings with a 17/5 strikeout/walk ratio. After injuries hampered the beginnings of his first two seasons, Grissom – the son of former Braves center fielder Marquis Grissom – may be finding his groove.
“He’s a great competitor, great athlete,” Hall said. “The bloodline’s there. I always say, the gene pool is real.”
The influence of the father, whose 17-year major-league career most memorably includes catching the final out of the 1995 World Series for the Braves, involves drive as much as physical ability.
“My dad, win or lose, he’s still going to tell me, ‘You’ve still got to work,’” said Grissom, who is from Atlanta. “I could throw a perfect game, he’s going to say, ‘You’ve still got to work on this’ or what I need to work on. It’s always like, ‘And then what?’ for him.”
The latest push has been the rediscovery of his change-up with the help of pitching coach Danny Borrell.
“It was all over the place at first, and really continued to just work on it from a standpoint of being myself, just using the athleticism that I was blessed with and really just getting it in there for strikes,” Grissom said. “That just makes it easier.”
He has been on this stage previously. A year ago, in an NCAA regional game against overall No. 3-seed Vanderbilt, opposing Jack Leiter (himself the son of former major leaguer Al Leiter and the No. 2 pick overall in last year’s draft), Grissom gave up four runs in 4 ⅓ innings in a 4-3 loss, but none of the runs were earned, and he surrendered only two hits.
“I love the experiences in college baseball,” he said. “That’s just always fun for me.”
Medich’s experiences in college baseball may be unique to the game. Medich, from a suburb of Pittsburgh, was a catcher in his first season at Division III Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., in 2017. With a strong arm, he took some turns on the mound. As a sophomore, he found he was able to hit 93 or 94 mph on the radar gun despite, in his words, knowing nothing about pitching.
“Look at videos of then, it looks awful,” he said. “I looked like a catcher trying to get rid of the ball as quick as possible to second base.”
But it planted the idea that maybe he had a bigger future as a pitcher. But in the fall of his junior season, he blew out his elbow and needed Tommy John surgery, causing him to miss the entire 2019 season. That was followed by the 2020 season, abbreviated by the pandemic. It was then that Medich, with two more seasons of eligibility, decided to bet on himself. He had two reasons. One, he had earned degrees in economics and mathematics and Rhodes had no master’s program that would fit his interest in a combination of finance and math. Two, he wanted to develop as a pitcher at the Division I level.
In March 2020, Medich sent emails and his pitching videos to a slew of Division I schools – “I couldn’t even put a number on it,” Medich said – including one to Hall. He got a response from Borrell the following day. Not only did Tech boast a pitching coach who had been the minor-league pitching coordinator for the Yankees, but also a master’s program in quantitative and computational finance that has been ranked in the top 15 nationally among financial engineering programs. Sifting through a spreadsheet that included data such as schools’ grad programs, GRE requirements, the teams’ records the previous season and their draft history, Medich selected Tech.
When he enrolled at Tech in the fall of 2020, he said he viewed it as the start of his pitching career. In the 2021 season, he made 11 appearances for a total of 11 ⅓ innings with a 12.71 ERA. In light of his performance, “I don’t think there were a lot of expectations among anybody except between my own ears that I’d be our Friday-night guy by the end of the year,” Medich said.
But, improving control of his assortment of pitches (particularly his slider) and simply learning how to think his way through at-bats, innings and games, Medich earned more and more opportunities. Borrell has been a trusted resource.
“His wealth of pitching knowledge is just so vast,” Medich said. “Just being able to ask the questions, and he always has an answer for whatever it may be that I’m looking for.”
Medich made his first weekend start against Duke on April 23 and has stayed in that rotation since. Hall called him “probably the hardest worker on our team, most dedicated to his body, his eating, just everything. And then this year, got more opportunities, and the more he got, the better he pitched, and so it’s a neat, neat story. He’s just a special guy just because of how smart he is. It’s off the charts.”
Medich has learned, in his words, “a lot of complex financial mathematics, a lot of stochastic calculus, numerical methods and derivative simulation and pricing.”
He has accepted a position with Flack Global Metals as a commodities trader, a job that he hopes to delay, first with Tech’s run in the NCAA Tournament and later with an opportunity to pitch professionally.
“I hope that (beginning with Flack) is not for quite some time,” Medich said.
Along with Grissom, Medich will have a bit to say about that matter.
Said Medich, “This team is a long ways from done.”
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