FRESH START
After leading Marple to state title and struggling as freshman at Saint Joseph’s, Zimmerman rebounds as soph
Luke Zimmerman was accustomed to being the man in high school.
In 2018, the Marple Newtown graduate had one of the greatest high school baseball senior seasons in Delaware County history. The left-handed pitcher and slugger led his squad to the PIAA Class 5A championship. He delivered the walk-off hit in the championship game, crushing a pitch to the rightfield fence at Penn State University’s Medlar Field at Lubrano Park in the 10th inning.
That senior season he also posted a
10-0 record with a 0.71 ERA while batting
.469/.500/.901 with 10 doubles, seven home runs and 38 RBIs.
Zimmerman was a special high school player. But everything would unravel his freshman year at St. Joseph’s University.
“I always had this mindset that I was better than everyone else, and I took that mindset to school,” he said recently. “The season came and we were down in UNC-Wilmington to open the year and I was throwing a bullpen ... and I was having a hard time throwing strikes in the bullpen.”
For Zimmerman, that’s when the nightmare began.
“The first thing I did when I stepped on the mound was I looked down at both my feet, I looked up at the catcher and I blacked out,” he said. “I never had a feeling like that in my life.
I was on the mound and I was lost. I had no idea where the ball was going and I had no control over any pitch, but somehow I made it through two innings. I mean, I was walking everyone I faced, but I made it through.”
It would get worse a few games later when he made his first start of the season.
“I was walking everyone. I was trying so hard to throw strikes and I could not do it,” he said. “The first few weekends I am a relief guy, but then the first conference weekend comes around. The three weekend games are the big games in college, you play Friday, Saturday and Sunday, which are your conference series games. I ended up getting the start in the first conference series on Sunday, At this point I was pitching decent, but my control was not there. I was walking a lot of guys. That was a huge difference from my senior year at Marple when I threw, like, 75 innings and I barely walked a dude. But now I was so worried ... and I was trying so hard to throw strikes and I could not do it.”
Zimmerman never reached out for help. He kept his mental struggles to himself.
“My freshman year in college, when you usually wake up and say, ‘Let’s go, we have a game today,’ I would wake up and say, ‘Oh (crap), we have a game today,” he said. “That’s how I felt.”
Zimmerman was losing the joy of playing baseball. Luckily, he found the Coastal Plain League.
“I played in the CPL with the same team I was on this summer, the Peninsula Pilots,” he said. “My college coach said to me, ‘You need to get out of Delaware County, you need to go away for the summer.’ I went down there in the spring and signed my CPL contract. But at the end of my freshman season, I was still messed up mentally.”
After a particularly difficult outing late freshman year against William & Mary, Zimmerman was at a crossroads. He felt he no longer belonged on a baseball team.
“I looked myself in the the mirror and was, like, ‘I’m done, I can’t take this.’ I had never had so much failure and my mind was scattered all over the place,” he said. “I like to think I’m pretty good ... but I was so down on myself and I had never felt that way before in my life. Usually, if I’m struggling, I’ll find a way to keep going and fighting.”
Despite feeling ill-prepared to play in one of the top summer college leagues in the country, Zimmerman joined Peninsula under the direction of coach and owner, Hank Morgan, whom Zimmerman called “one of my favorite people on earth.”
With the Pilots, Morgan has coached future major leaguers Ryan Zimmerman and Chad Pinder, among others. Luke Zimmerman had a solid summer campaign and returned to St. Joe’s with renewed focus.
“That pretty much turned it around for me. I loved being there and had the time of my life,” Zimmerman said. “I threw pretty well, too, and I started looking forward to playing the game again.”
Zimmerman said the structured lifestyle of college sports gave him problems. He is the type of player who prefers to show up a few minutes before the first pitch, throw a quick bullpen and is ready to go. That laidback approach had to change.
“I have a unique personality and I say and do ridiculous things. One day, my coach pulled me over and said, ‘You need to start doing this because this is the way we do stuff here.’ I listened then I actually said to him, ‘How about you give me a chance to let me do what I want to do?’ Well, he wasn’t having it at all,” Zimmerman said. “I said, ‘Arm care doesn’t do anything for me. I know my body and it doesn’t react to that stuff.’ Any normal person if I was sitting there talking to them would think, ‘This kid’s an idiot.’
“This year, I started to adjust. Obviously, my sophomore year went a lot better than my freshman year did before the season got canceled. I was throwing really well, and I only had one rough outing out of all my games.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Zimmerman pitched in five games for the Hawks, including one start. He registered a 3.60 ERA in 15 innings, striking out 19 and walking four. That’s a night-and-day difference from his freshman campaign when Zimmerman recorded a 5.26 ERA across 37.2 innings and walked a batter per inning.
“I was a miserable person to be around, but when I went down to CPL last summer, that changed my mind and attitude on everything,” Zimmerman said. “I might not be the best guy on paper, but I play hard and I play the right way. Obviously, the Delco in me, I like to chirp a little bit and that makes the game fun.”
For Peninsula, Zimmerman was named to the all-conference team this summer. In
10 games, he posted a 2.86 ERA with nearly
12 strikeouts per nine innings. Zimmerman also found his groove at the plate, hitting .300/.472/.500 with three doubles and a homer in 53 plate appearances.
“This summer is when I found it again with the bat, but it was on the mound where I had to look myself in the mirror,” Zimmerman said.
Now, Zimmerman is poised to have his best college season in 2021. He’ll spend the fall “getting in the best shape of my life” and getting back to being the ballplayer he knows he can be.
“I’ve had people tell me that I need a few more miles per hour on my fastball and to get my body right, blah, blah, blah. You know, it’s the same thing I’ve heard my entire life,” he said. “I always blew it off, like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ But this summer, something hit me. I see dudes playing their last baseball game and I think, ‘I’m getting pretty damn close if I don’t get it in gear.’ I’m not ready for it to be the end, I want to keep getting better.”