According to the NCAA, out of almost 8 million high school athletes, less than 7% end up playing their sport at the college level.
An even smaller percentage of those college athletes go on to sign a professional contract.
Those stats are only for Americans. For international athletes, it’s a much steeper climb.
Josh Gessner was one of them.
After moving from Australia to Japan and back, Josh faced an uphill battle to capture the attention of American college baseball coaches.
“No college scout is going to fly out to Australia,” he said.
“You need to go over there and showcase in the U.S. for any kind of interest.”
If college baseball was a long shot, pro ball was a pipe dream.
And yet, through years of hard work and sheer determination, Josh Gessner made both dreams a reality.
As a 16-year-old, he threw just 78 miles per hour.
By 18, he was consistently hitting 95.
But after he signed a professional contract with the Philadelphia Phillies, things didn’t go as expected.
On his first day as a minor leaguer, he faced every pitcher’s nightmare.
“I was the worst player in the whole organization.”
Making it to the pros is one thing. Sticking around is another.
There are over 5,500 minor leaguers fighting for 780 spots in the big leagues. On top of that, a new crop of talent comes in through the draft every summer.
So Josh challenged himself to look inward and fix the root causes of his issues: fear of rejection and self-doubt.
Through his five professional seasons, he learned life lessons that only the game of baseball can teach.
“What I found was that if you’re a successful baseball player, everything else will kind of seem easy to you because baseball is a very difficult sport to succeed in.”
Today, he shares his learnings with a social media following of nearly 50,000 people.
I was fortunate enough to connect with Josh after he subscribed to my Underdog Newsletter.
In our exclusive interview, he shared his climb from international obscurity to pro prospect, the many roadblocks he overcame, and the lessons he took away from his baseball career.
When you moved from Japan to Australia, what was it like going from a place where baseball is massively popular to a place where it isn’t?
I started playing baseball after moving to Japan when I was 8 years old. Before that, I was a soccer player.
As soon as I moved there, the whole thing in Japan was baseball, baseball, baseball. I played every day after school with all of my friends at the local park.
When I came back to Australia, yes, baseball wasn’t that big. But there were still club baseball teams that I joined. So for the most part I was still playing or training every single day.
The competition might not have been as good as Japan or the U.S., but I was still getting a lot of reps. I was still training and playing, which really ignited my passion for the game.
As far as getting noticed and getting over to the U.S., it is a little bit more difficult for kids in Australia for a couple of reasons.
One is that no college scout is going to fly out to Australia to come watch the game. You need to go over there and showcase in the U.S. for any kind of interest.
Professional-wise, there are a few more scouts. There was a scout who covered Australia, but it is a lot more limited.
Also, the level of play just isn’t as high. So you need to understand that and be the best player in your state.
Even if you were the best player in your state, you probably weren’t good enough to go to a Division I university or professional level.
So, there are two challenges.
One is the lack of exposure, and the other one is that the level of play is lower. So you need to hold yourself to a higher standard than the people around you.
How did I get noticed? For me, it was firstly comparing myself to guys who are getting to the D1 level and the professional level, which is what I wanted to do.
I found this game called the All-American Perfect Game. And what I found was that every one of those pitchers was throwing 93 miles an hour. So that kind of became the benchmark.
In Australia, if you’re throwing 85, that would be considered gas.
But in the U.S., you really need to be in these low-to-mid 90s to actually get noticed and get to the upper levels.
The first step was raising that benchmark and raising my expectations. The second was training to get there.
I did a couple of things with this. I flew out to Driveline Baseball in Seattle, trained for a couple of months, and learned how to gain velocity.
I had to gain a significant amount of weight to get to the level that I wanted to. I ended up gaining 30 to 40 pounds. And I completely stopped playing baseball to focus on the development side.
When you’re playing, it’s hard to focus on the development side because you have to focus on competing and competing well. You’re focusing on command and on-field performance.
But the thing with getting noticed at high levels is that you have to throw hard. It’s a brutal truth in the baseball world these days. You just have to throw hard to get noticed. So that became my number one focus.
I stopped playing for 12 months and just focused on development. And after those 12 months, I came around to throwing in the mid-90s.
Then I was confident in myself to be good enough to get Division I-level and professional opportunities.
I started to get my name out there. I emailed a hundred-plus college coaches.
I thought I’d get a bunch of replies back. But I got no replies back.
Actually, I got 0.5 replies back because the coach at the University of Washington reached out to a coach in Australia who runs travel board teams to travel to the U.S. and showcase in front of college students. So he got in touch with me and then I decided to take on this travel board team that traveled to a showcase in Arizona.
At this Arizona Fall Classic, I pitched the best I had ever had. I was throwing in the mid-90s.
So, I think the lesson here is that you just have to be good enough first. And then, once you’re good enough, even just one showcase or a little bit of exposure can completely change your life.
I see a lot of kids these days trying to play and playing too much and trying to get exposure going to college camps and stuff without actually focusing on their ability and skill.
As for signing, there was an Australian scout who was very interested in me, and their interest grew as I started to throw harder.
But I was pretty stubborn and I wanted to go to college, so I declined all of their offers. But I had given them a signing bonus number where if they hit that number, then I would sign. It was a higher number than I thought any team would be able to offer.
The professional opportunities kind of slowed down because of the number I gave them.
But after all these showcases and seeing me grow in the mid-90s, the Philadelphia Phillies decided to take a chance on me and they hit that number and then I decided to sign professionally.
Before long, you were training at the Sydney Olympic Park — an hour-and-a-half drive from home. But you hit a turning point where you decided you weren’t a good enough shortstop or hitter to compete in American baseball. What led you to that point? Why did you decide to transition to pitching?
As I got a little bit better, I started training at Sydney Olympic Park, which was an hour-and-a-half drive from home. At the time, I was a position player. I liked playing shortstop.
We would go out there two to three times a week to train, and my mom would drive me. And so I would come back from school, and we would drive that, go train, and then come back late at night.
That’s kind of when my training started to go to the next level, and I started taking baseball a little bit more seriously. But I was still a position player at the time, and so all I would focus on was fielding, hitting, and stuff of that nature.
The reason why I converted to pitching was I just wasn’t good enough to go to the U.S. as a position player.
And I knew that because I wasn’t even one of the better ones in the country of Australia. I didn’t get selected for Australian national teams. They picked three to four position players over me. So that kind of just told me that I just wasn’t good enough.
And also at the time I was starting to grow an interest in pitching because I was having a lot of success. But at the time I was throwing 78, so I had a lot of ways to go. As I said, the best players are low to mid-90s.
But I kind of decided that that was the path and that I would just dedicate myself to velocity development training, try to get to the low mid-90s, and then go to the U.S. after that. So that’s kind of how that went, going from a position player to a pitcher.
You took a big leap moving from Australia to Seattle to work with the guys at Driveline Baseball. What kind of pitcher were you when you arrived and how different were you when you left Driveline?
Training a Driveline was a big leap for sure: from a financial standpoint and for my career.
I had to beg my dad to go to the U.S. to train because it was a big financial investment on his part and so after a lot of convincing, my dad finally let me do it.
I went over for a month or two. I was seeing a lot of guys use these training methods such as plyo balls, pulldowns, and they would come back throwing 3 to 5 miles an hour harder and so at the time I was stuck in the upper 80s threshold where I would touch 88 but I couldn’t get up to the 90 mark.
So the biggest thing for me was I wanted to get over that 90 mark.
It’s funny looking back because the Driveline staff at that time was just a bunch of All-Star coaches.
I worked with Eric Jaegers at the time who is now the pitching coordinator for the New York Mets. The pitching coordinator for the Dodgers was also there, along with the pitching coordinator for the Yankees.
So it was a stacked coaching group which I didn’t realize at the time.
When I was there I trained, did my pulldowns, and I learned how to train to actually gain velocity. So a lot of that was structured programming.
So what I got out of that was at the end of my visit I had a velocity bullpen and I was in the low 90s – I think I was 90 to 92. I got some video of that which is kind of what kick-started my career because I was 90-plus and when you’re 90-plus, college is going to take a little bit of notice.
So that’s kind of what I got out of Driveline. It definitely pushed my career forward a lot. It taught me how to train so that when I came back to Australia and trained by myself, I could implement all of those things that I learned and continue to progress with my velocity.
Once your velocity climbed into the 90s, you started emailing videos of yourself to any coach who would listen. What was the initial response like?
Yeah, it’s funny because I was in the low 90s, but I don’t think I threw a single strike in the video. But I sent it anyway because I was like ‘Alright, I’m 90-plus now. I should get a bunch of college offers.’
So I looked up every single coach’s email address and sent a personalized email. I probably sent like a hundred-plus emails. I dedicated a couple of hours for a couple of days and did that and so I was just patiently waiting.
And all I got was camp invites like, ‘Hey, come to our camp,’ and we all know that a camp invite is nothing close to an offer. It’s kind of more of a money grab for the schools, so I didn’t get any good responses out of it and I was super disappointed.
I thought nothing had come out of it, but I got a text maybe a couple of weeks later from a guy who runs a travel ball team that takes promising Australian players to the U.S. to showcase in front of college coaches.
He told me that the coach at the University of Washington reached out to him saying that he saw my video, he was interested, and he would want me to go on the travel ball team. So even though it seemed like I got nothing out of it, I still got half of a reply out of it, which kickstarted my career.
That travel ball showcase really changed my life and got me more offers than I could count.
So that’s kind of my advice to young kids: just try to increase your surface area of luck.
Cold emailing 100-plus coaches might sound like a lot and like a waste of time, but you never know what it might lead to. Just one little interaction is what can really change your career.
So I would say just put in the work if you’re good enough and then cold email as many coaches as possible because you never know what could come from it.
After that travel ball showcase, you started getting attention from big programs like Harvard, Stanford, and Wake Forest. You ultimately committed to Tulane before the Phillies snatched you up as an international free agent – signing you to the biggest contract for an Australian pitcher ever. What was it like for your dream to come together so quickly?
You know, getting all these offers from D1s where it really didn’t seem like something that was attainable. It was an overwhelming experience for sure, and I think my brain hadn’t really caught up to it yet.
All my life I wasn’t really that great of a player. I never really got that much interest and as I started to get all this interest, I started to feel a little bit of imposter syndrome.
Like, ‘Can I really do this? Am I actually good enough to go to these places?’ So I did struggle with that a little bit.
It was something that was a blessing for sure. It’s something that I had earned and I was ready for in hindsight, but at the time it was exciting but it was more overwhelming because the doubt started to creep in. The imposter syndrome started to creep in.
All of these emotions started to creep in as I started to get more and more offers which led to more expectations to play well, throw hard, and stuff like that. So It was a very exciting time, but it was also very overwhelming.
In parts of 5 minor league seasons, you struck out 173 batters across 140 innings. But you’ve often talked about the mental side of the game: fighting the dreaded ‘yips’ and doubting your own ability. You’ve written before that “the best lessons come from being humiliated on the baseball field.” How much has failure in baseball helped you off the field?
So I often say that the minor league baseball experience was my university for life.
I never went to university. I signed out of high school so I didn’t get that university education. But minor league baseball was that education for me.
For me, minor league baseball was not a smooth experience. As soon as I signed, I got a case of the throwing yips.
For those of you who don’t know what the throwing yips are, it’s when there is a disconnect between what your body is trying to do and what your mind is trying to do.
So, my body was trying to throw a ball accurately, but the brain didn’t want to do that because it was scared of embarrassment, it was scared of what other people would think of me if I made a bad throw.
What actually happened was when I went to go and throw, I would try to make a throw but the brain would shut it down and so I would spike it right in front of me or the ball would just slip out of my hand and I would sail it over my throwing partner.
It was a really hard time because I had come in with a decently big contract and I wanted to prove my worth. I wanted to prove everyone right that, yep, I’m worth this money, I’m good enough to be here, whatever.
But what ended up happening was I was the worst player in the whole organization. It felt like that at the time.
I couldn’t play catch, I couldn’t throw, and I was supposed to be a professional baseball player.
There were many players who talked behind my back saying, ‘He shouldn’t have gotten the money that he did’ and ‘I don’t know how he’s a professional,’ and stuff like that.
So for an 18-year-old kid, that was definitely a tough time. I had always been one of the better players on every single team that I was on in Australia.
As soon as I got into minor league baseball, even without the yips, I would have been just a small fish in a big pond.
But with the yips, it felt like I was the worst player on the team and I was even worse than anyone walking down the street.
That led to a lot of insecurities, probably depression, and all sorts of mental issues.
So, overcoming that was my first taste of how baseball helped me off the field because overcoming it was a process of overcoming your fears, insecurities, and anxieties, which actually had direct carryover effects on off-the-field stuff.
How I actually got over the yips was exposing myself to embarrassing, humiliating experiences so that I could desensitize myself. This is called exposure therapy and I think it’s one of the best ways to get over this.
I came across a TED talk called 100 Days of Rejection. And basically, for 100 days this guy would do crazy challenges and get rejected.
One was to go to a Starbucks and ask for free coffee, go to a burger place, eat the burger and ask for a burger refill, or go to a stranger and ask them if you could have $100. Just challenges like this that give you a rejection to get yourself over that fear of rejection.
So I kind of took part in this challenge. I did it all because I recognized that I had a fear of rejection.
Some of my throwing yips were rooted in the fear of rejection, the rejection by my teammates, my coaches, the front office, and people who actually invested in me and believed in me. I didn’t want to disappoint them or be rejected by them.
I kind of realized that that was a root issue that I had to address. So I did that, which really helped a lot and it helped my confidence in myself as a person in general.
I had many fears before I had the throwing yips and that’s kind of why I developed it, but the process of overcoming it made me a more confident person outside of baseball.
Baseball also has a bunch of adversity that you have to go through. I went through a lot of injuries, stuff like that and so, going through those experiences and being resilient through them and overcoming them is something that definitely translates to off-field stuff.
Another thing would be just work ethic, discipline, and consistency.
To be a good baseball player, you really need to work hard and be disciplined. So what I found was that if you’re a successful baseball player, everything else will kind of seem easy to you because baseball is a very difficult sport to succeed in.
If you’re able to succeed in that and you’re able to put all the work in, then everything else will seem easy.
If you were standing in front of a room full of Little League baseball players, what advice would you give them?
Firstly, be obsessed with your goals.
Obsession is such a powerful thing. If you are someone who is set on becoming a great baseball player, to play at a high level, you need to obsess about it.
Obsession is thinking about it when you go to bed and when you wake up. You’re excited to go and do the work. You’re excited to go play. It’s something that you think about constantly.
I don’t know if this is something that you can just start doing, but I think it is a requirement for the best players, and it’s common among the best players.
I see all these guys being obsessed. This is their number one priority.
The second is, yes, be obsessed, but make sure you keep your passion levels high. Because if you run out of passion, then everything becomes hard.
Discipline becomes hard. Hard work becomes hard. Everything becomes an uphill battle.
But when you have passion for something, you don’t mind working hard. You don’t mind being disciplined. You don’t mind putting in the work.
So if it’s something where you feel like you’re going to burn out, then take a little bit of a rest and come back. Make sure that you’re having fun when you go into training and playing games. Do things that are more fun.
For me, it was experimenting with different pitch types, training methods, and stuff like that. That was fun to me.
If you’re a Little Leaguer, I would also say just play multiple positions. Play all the positions and don’t specialize too early because especially if you become a pitcher, you can lose a lot of the athleticism.
And so I think those two things: obsess about your goals but also make sure that you stay passionate about the game because that’s what’s going to keep you going long term.
Since stepping away from baseball, you’ve grown a sizable following on social media, launched a newsletter, and started a training program for pitchers. I also hear you’re launching a comeback to hit 100 MPH and potentially return to pro baseball. What do you hope to accomplish over the next year or two?
I started with social media and the newsletter because I just liked writing, I liked learning, so I would just write about what I learned. It was just a hobby while I was playing.
But now that I’ve stepped away from baseball it is something that I am looking to take a little bit more seriously and create a business out of. I post about learnings from my baseball career to help younger generations and also share what I’m doing right now, which is training to throw 100 miles an hour so that it could help someone else gain pitching velocity.
With my newsletter, I want to build it up to be a very valuable resource for athletes who are looking for training information, any kind of information related to athletes, and stuff like that.
With my social media and my remote pitching development program, I’m just trying to help younger baseball players do what I did: go from being a non-prospect or someone who had a very slim chance of going professional or playing at a high level and training to become someone who can get to that level.
I know for me it took many years of mistakes and experimenting and trial and error and that’s something that I want to mitigate for a lot of the young players that I train.
We’re gonna give them a clear direction on how to become a better baseball player, how to actually get to that high level, and help them do that.
How can our readers follow your journey and support you?
@GessnerJosh – X
@JoshGessner – Instagram
Editor’s Note: I want to give a huge thanks to Josh for taking the time to do this interview. I was inspired by the lessons he learned in his baseball journey, and I hope you were too!
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