A New Father, Athletics' Sonny Gray Stars with Own Dad in His Memories

Father's Day means a whole lot of things to a whole lot of people. To baseball's best pitcher at the moment, it arrives with past and present converging, the hard break of a biting slider with the promise of what comes next.

Because the Oakland Athletics mostly serve as little more than background noise on the national stage, you probably will meet Sonny Gray for the first time at the All-Star Game. He should start for the American League. If he doesn't, maybe the FBI wants to look into that, too.

But before we get to Cincinnati next month, there is Father's Day, and there is Sonny's son, Gunnar, born Jan. 27, and his own father, Jesse, who was killed early one morning in an auto accident coming home from work when Sonny was 15.

For years, Father's Day brought with it an unfillable void.

Now, Sonny, 25, will look at little Gunnar and begin a lifelong process of transferring to his newborn son much of what his own father left him.

"I can't wait for it to happen," Gray says. "Everyone keeps telling me it goes so fast, but I can't wait to experience every part of his life.

"It's been so nice having him around."

As many of us hug our own fathers and unwrap gifts from our own children, there are those for whom Father's Day is not a joyful day.

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"When you lose your father like I did, especially at an early age," Gray says, "me, my mom and my two sisters were in the same house, I was a freshman in high school, it was right in the middle of football season, you don't know what to do.

"That's something nobody can prepare you for."

Like many fathers, Jesse Gray was his son's first coach. Together in Smyrna, Tennessee, they talked sports, played catch and dreamed.

"My dad always talked about me pitching in the big leagues, from an early age," Gray says.

His world changed forever that autumn morning of his freshman year.

"We were so lucky that we had so many people to help us," Gray says. "My mom was super. Still, to this day, I don't know what went on behind the scenes (at the hospital and at home). But she stayed strong and smiling, letting my sisters and I know that everything was going to be OK.

"Now, having Gunnar, that's so awesome to me. I don't know what I would do without him now."

The night of the morning his father was killed, Sonny had a high school football game. Because sports are what he and his father knew and loved, he asked if he could play that night.

"I don't think you ever get over it," Sonny says. "But you come to an understanding.

"The easiest thing for me to try and get over it right away was, he passed that morning and I played football that night.

"It was sad. It was awful. I don't wish that upon anyone. But if my dad were here, he used to say, 'Don't dwell on things.'

"I think of him all the time. He wouldn't want me to sulk. He would want us to continue being positive, to keep having a positive outlook on life."

Is it any wonder that Sonny Gray is one of the all-time favorite players Oakland skipper Bob Melvin has ever managed?

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On the mound, Gray is like a jazz musician. He improvises. Sometimes he makes things up as he goes along. He throws a two-seam fastball and a four-seam fastball, adding some mustard and subtracting some heat as he goes. As he says, he can achieve an eight miles-per-hour difference with the exact same pitch.

He learned this at Vanderbilt, under pitching coach Derek Johnson, who now is the minor league pitching coordinator for the Chicago Cubs.

"He was big on changing speeds," Gray says. "He'd say, 'Throw a batting-practice fastball, and then throw a fastball with something extra on it."

Just a 25-minute drive from Smyrna High School, Vanderbilt was the perfect place for Gray—especially given his still-raw family situation, with his mother now home alone with a young daughter.

The A's picked him in the first round (18th overall) of the 2011 draft after he helped lead Vanderbilt to its first-ever College World Series appearance.

Less than two years later, he debuted for the A's and then started two key division series games that autumn against the Detroit Tigers.

He started throwing a slider last year, just picked it up and began winging it, and now it is one of his most effective pitches. It helps, because he says he's never really had a good feel for a changeup.

He still throws one, infrequently, along with a cutter. He changes speeds on all of his pitches, changes his spin on some of them, rarely set in a pattern, always going with what is working on a particular day—even if he has to invent a pitch here and there as he goes along.

It is working, beautifully: His 1.60 ERA leads the majors. His 0.93 WHIP is second in the majors to Washington's Max Scherzer. His .194 opponents' batting average is third-lowest in the majors, trailing only the Pirates' Francisco Liriano and Houston's Dallas Keuchel. He leads the majors in pitchers' WAR at 4.2, per Baseball-Reference.com.

"He comes with great stuff, but really, it's his intuitiveness in the game and his understanding of the game and competitiveness that set him apart for me," Melvin says. "He was great when he got here, but he's learned. He watched the game in the right way. He's come up with new pitches. He reads swings.

"His baseball IQ is very high."

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He is not a video junkie. Instead, Gray prefers to watch live action. On days he is not starting, he is in the dugout, locked in, studying opposing hitters, collecting observations like a novelist. In that way, he is reminiscent of Hall of Famer Greg Maddux. In this way, too: At just 5'11" and 180 pounds, his look on the mound is more bookworm than intimidator.

"I've been around Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling," Melvin says. "At his age, he's as advanced as any pitcher I've ever been around."

A's teammates love not only his A-plus stuff on the mound and the fact that he is there to support every single one of them, but also that sometimes he's as goofy as a teenager at an amusement park. He's been known to talk to himself in the bullpen while warming up. He chatters on the bench during starts. And he once created a fake Twitter account for former Triple-A teammate Grant Green.

"You won't hear a teammate say a bad word about him," Melvin says. "He's out here on the bench on days he's not pitching, pulling for the rest of his teammates. Not just the starting pitcher, but everybody. He loves being in Oakland, which can be difficult, for obvious reasons. Maybe we don't have the best ballpark in the world, the best facilities and so forth. But he just loves being here.

"On top of that, you look at the performance you get out of him and it's awfully nice having Sonny Gray on your team."

So here comes Father's Day, with so much to celebrate. On top of having the best baseball season of his life, his family is in a great place now as well. There is older sister Jessica, younger sis Katie, and their mother, Cindy, has remarried. And that's been terrific. Stepdad Barry Craig has fit right in.

"He's been amazing," Sonny says. "He's been nothing but great for everyone."

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"Great kid with a great family," says Barry Vetter, Gray's high school baseball coach in Smyrna who is stepping down this spring after 25 seasons. "Fantastic people to be around."

One other thing has been great as well: As any dad can understand, sleep for new fathers typically is in short supply. But as Sonny's dream season continues, one key is that he's moving through it mostly well-rested.

For this, his own personal battery mate, wife Jessica, has been solid gold. Though they were not high school sweethearts, they were friends in high school, wound up together and were married three years ago.

"Jessica was one of my favorite students of all time," says Vetter, who taught her in physical science as a freshman. "She is a fantastic young lady."

Most important, Gray tries to get as much sleep as possible on nights around his starts, and just last Sunday in Anaheim, on Gunnar's first road trip, the boy woke up in the hotel room around 6 a.m.

"I'll take him out for a walk," Jessica said, and Sonny rolled over. Two hours later, his wife and son returned.

"I don't know what they did," Sonny says, smiling. "They were having some bonding time, I guess."

A few hours later, he was on the mound, doing what he does: changing speeds, figuring out on the fly what was working and what wasn't, holding the Angels to no earned runs while scattering five hits and fanning nine in 7.2 innings.

"It changes your lifestyle," Gray says of fatherhood. "Which is obvious.

"A lot of things you do now, you do to see what's better for him."

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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