‘He was loved here’: M’s pitchers reflect on Luis Castillo’s impact

Sunday morning there were three packed moving boxes and a large equipment bag in front of Luis Castillo’s almost empty locker. “The Rock” was gone but the impression he left on his fellow Seattle Mariners pitchers will remain.

Watch: Drayer breaks down Mariners’ Luis Castillo trade

For Logan Gilbert, the realization Castillo had been with him for all but one year of his big-league career hit him when he was talking to his wife on the phone shortly after the news Castillo had been traded to the White Sox broke.

“It’s sad,” he said. “He’s been the staple and the old guy and the vet and, gosh, he’s helped me more times than I can even count. So yeah, he’s a tough one to lose for sure.”

For Bryce Miller, Castillo had always been there.

“When I first came up, he was the main vet that I could look at and learn from and learn something from him while he was here,” he said.

Castillo was the vocal leader you didn’t hear much about outside the Mariners’ clubhouse. His impact on the Mariners went well beyond the 126 games he pitched in. His acquisition in ’22 signaled it was go-for-it time, the rebuild was over. He was the boost the Mariners needed to propel them to their first postseason appearance in 21 years. He was also the veteran they needed to raise a young, homegrown pitching staff.

“It’s so much more than people know behind closed doors,” Gilbert said. “The things that he said, the lessons… He’s a very wise person in a way. He’s always chill and calm and all that stuff, but the presence that he carries and the lessons he learned and passed down to me and other people, he knows how to relate to everybody. I think that’s a really rare thing to see, but especially on the pitching side of things. He did more for me and other people than fans will ever realize.”

“He’s just the best, man,” George Kirby said after throwing seven scoreless innings against the Twins Sunday afternoon. “I like the way he just carries himself every day. He just always has a smile on his face and that’s something that I really admire, something I wish I could do a little more often. So yeah, I mean he’s just a pleasure to be around. And him being the vet in our clubhouse for us pitchers, it’s somebody we really looked up to. And I always just kind of look forward to seeing Louie any day because he always just made you feel better.

“So yeah, it was tough to see him go. But he was loved here and he did a lot of good things.”

For Andrés Muñoz, Castillo was a friend and mentor, someone he could feel confident in asking anything about pitching.

“Not only because he was Latin player,” he explained, “but because he was almost 10 years in the big leagues. So, that tells you a lot about how much you know about baseball and all the things that he has been doing for so many years, consistently. That is why my first thought was, like, follow the leader. And for me, he’s a leader. And that is why it hurts a lot.”

It is rare a team keeps a full rotation, let alone a rotation that four out of five or five out of six of which came up through the farm system. They are a tight-knit group that is invested in each individual. They watch each other’s bullpen sessions, collaborate, advise and speak up when they see things. A bullpen session in Minnesota Gilbert threw two years ago came to mind when asked to share something he learned from Castillo.

“One of my famous freak-out bullpens,” he remembered with a smile. “It didn’t go well and I’m panicking and trying to change everything and threw too many pitches, and he would just sit back in the corner and laugh for a second but then afterwards take me aside and say, ‘Don’t change anything. Don’t think too much and don’t try so hard.’ And I’m like, ‘How did he just make it that simple that quickly?’

“It seems like such a simple thing to say, but I’ll remember that the rest of my career. He just says it at the right time. He just has the perfect awareness, perfect feel for the situation.”

His teammates talked about Castillo’s consistency of demeanor on and off the field, how he remained the same regardless of situation.

“That is the thing that I learned the most about him,” Muñoz said. “It doesn’t matter how the inning is going, or it doesn’t matter how the outing is going, you have to stay the same. And he was the perfect example for everybody. It’s just that he was obviously the best leader that I have(been around) and somebody who I want to follow his footsteps.”

As for Castillo the pitcher, one game in particular stood out.

“I wasn’t here, but that first playoff game in Toronto (’22) when he was pitching, I remember watching on TV and I remember we had just traded for him and extended him and then I watched him in the postseason sit (at) 100 (mph) and tear up the Blue Jays,” Miller said. “That was really cool. I was like, ‘This is what you got to do to be in the big leagues? This is pretty impressive here.’ I was like, ‘I better get to work.'”

“We still go back and watch the tape on the iPad and stuff,” said Gilbert, who called it the single best pitching he had ever seen. “It was crazy. I mean, you could go to the Yankee game right away when he came here at home. And I was just like, ‘Who is this guy?’ Like, we knew we saw him on TV, but to show up in a trade like that and then deliver for the rest of the year and since that moment?

“That’s what we needed,” he continued. “Like, we were trying to make a big splash. We got him. We started rolling there and yeah, without him, do we make the playoffs? What he did when he came over and that he threw there in the playoffs, he was the staple and he’s been since that moment.”

He was “The Rock” and will be missed in the Mariners clubhouse.

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