Even before he learned how to walk, Dodger Stadium has been part of Jack Flaherty’s origin story.
It’s where the new Dodgers pitcher first visited at 6 months old, and would return frequently alongside his mom, Eileen, sometimes as often as 20 games per year.
It’s where his early love for the game was planted and nurtured, putting him on a path to the big leagues that first began in Sherman Oaks Little League.
It’s also where — before becoming a first-round draft pick, one-time Cy Young Award contender, and resurgent veteran pitcher acquired by the Dodgers in a blockbuster trade last week — Flaherty produced one of the brightest glimpses into his big-league destiny.
On May 31, 2013, in the CIF Southern Section Division I championship game with his Harvard-Westlake high school team, he pitched a shutout while driving in his side’s lone run in a title-clinching 1-0 win.
“That day,” former Harvard-Westlake coach Matt LaCour said, “kind of exemplified who he was.”
In some ways, it was the start of a journey that will come full-circle Friday, when Flaherty — whose 8-5 record and 2.80 ERA make him one of the most important pitchers on the Dodgers starting staff — will make his much-anticipated home debut.
“I’ll have to probably take a breath and gather myself,” Eileen Flaherty said this week. “Because, he’s been there before, but now he has a Dodger uniform on.”
Flaherty’s future first became clear when he arrived at Harvard-Westlake’s Studio City campus, quickly making an impression on the school’s burgeoning baseball program.
“He was kind of touted as, ‘Oh, we have this incoming freshman who is super athletic,’” said Boston Red Sox pitcher Lucas Giolito, a fellow Harvard-Westlake product who was two years ahead of Flaherty in school. “He was like, varsity-as-a-freshman type of talent.”
Only, early on, Flaherty’s most obvious talents weren’t on the mound.
While the right-handed pitcher had sharp command and decent — though hardly overpowering — velocity as an underclassman, his tools as an infielder initially looked more promising.
“Everyone thought he would be a position player,” noted Harvard-Westlake’s then-pitching coach Ethan Katz (who has gone on to become the Chicago White Sox’s major-league pitching coach).
“He was gonna be the shortstop for the next four years,” Giolito said.
In Flaherty’s sophomore season, however, two things changed.
First, Katz helped Flaherty develop his now-signature slider, watching in amazement as the teenager quickly honed the pitch.
“I would tell him every day at practice, ‘Pitching first. Make sure you come down and see me,’” Katz recalled this week. “When he developed his slider sophomore year, that’s when he really took off.”
Then, when Giolito (the team’s senior ace and a potential No. 1 overall draft pick) blew out his elbow earlier in the year, Flaherty was elevated in Harvard-Westlake’s rotation, emerging as a reliable sidekick to another future MLB star, current Atlanta Braves pitcher Max Fried.
“That was kind of the beginning right there,” Giolito said of watching Flaherty that season. “It was like, this guy is a good hitter and a good infielder, but there’s something special about what he’s doing on the mound.”
With Giolito and Fried in the pros as first-round picks in 2013, Flaherty’s profile as a pitcher only continued to explode. He added life to his fastball. He put more bite on his slider. And he began to refine his mental approach, shifting more of his focus primarily to the mound.
“I get my work ethic from my mom, but also from the way that we worked [at Harvard-Westlake],” Flaherty said. “The way we went about our business, the way that we worked, the way we stayed after [practice]. Everything was detail-oriented.”
In that environment, Flaherty flourished.
In his junior year, he went 13-0 with a 0.63 ERA, earning National Player of the Year honors from Maxpreps while helping lead Harvard-Westlake to the CIF Southern Section Division 1 title game.
The added bonus: The final is annually played at Dodger Stadium.
“We obviously wanted to play for a CIF Championship,” Flaherty said this week, sitting on a railing of the Dodger Stadium dugout. “But we knew, with that, came being able to play here, which was just an unforgettable experience.”
Indeed, 11 years later, Flaherty and those close to him still remember the day vividly.
In the morning, the pitcher struggled to focus on his finals in school. “I don’t think I did well on them,” he joked.
As the team took a bus to the game, Eileen and other parents gathered for a meal, superstitiously repeating their outfits from each of the team’s previous playoff games. “I wore a pink shirt, like, the whole time,” she laughed.
Minutes before first pitch, though, Flaherty sat in the dugout with a quiet confidence, seemingly unfazed by a crowd of several thousand around him.
“You see it in championship games all the time,” LaCour said. “A lot of guys at that age, when the crowd gets loud, big environments, they kind of fall apart. But there was no fall apart in Jack. You knew what you were gonna get. You knew he was gonna execute and attack.”
Attack, Flaherty did, racking up eight strikeouts, giving up just six hits and escaping jams in both the third inning (leaving the bases loaded) and the seventh (when his left fielder threw out a runner at home plate).
“That’s game over,” LaCour thought to himself after the seventh-inning play at the plate. With Flaherty on the mound, “that ain’t happening again.”
By that point, Flaherty’s bat had also given Harvard-Westlake a 1-0 lead, driving in the game’s only run on a full-count single in the third.
“I was in Florida rehabbing from Tommy John [surgery], and I watched a live stream on my laptop,” said Giolito, who’d been drafted by the Washington Nationals the previous year. “I was fist-pumping and cheering. My roommate was like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’”
Full pandemonium followed the final out, which not only clinched a Southern Section title for Harvard-Westlake, but also a National No. 1 ranking from both Perfect Game and Baseball America.
“Four or five years before he got there, that program was a team that won like two games a year,” Katz said. “For the program, it was significant. It put Harvard-Westlake on a bigger map.”
Same went for Flaherty, who surged up draft boards during an equally dominant senior season in 2014 (he finished his high school career on a 23-game winning streak as a pitcher), before being drafted 34th overall by the Cardinals, giving Harvard-Westlake three first-round pitchers in three years.
“My time there was very instrumental,” Flaherty said this week. “Just in the way I continue to go about my business.”
Friday won’t be Flaherty’s first trip back to Dodger Stadium since. In his breakout 2018 season with St. Louis, he struck out 10 in a six-inning, one-run start. As a Cy Young candidate the following year, he spun seven scoreless innings while fanning 10 again.
But this year, the veteran pitcher has regained his old, familiar dominance, leading him on a nostalgic road back to Chavez Ravine.
“It was in the back of everybody’s mind that the Dodgers would be buyers and the Tigers would be sellers, and hey wouldn’t that be cool,” said LaCour, who is now Harvard-Westlake’s athletic director. “So I think everybody’s looking forward to this weekend, and see him wear the white uniform at the stadium.”
LOS ANGELES — When Eileen Flaherty looked down at her phone and saw the message from her son, she thought something was wrong. Just minutes remained until the trade deadline, but a day after Jack Flaherty’s start for the Detroit Tigers was pushed back, he texted his mom that he was heading to Los Angeles.
It took a half-second for Eileen, who had just flown back to LA from Detroit after visiting her son, to realize what it meant.
For years, Dodger Stadium had been something of a second home to the Flahertys. Eileen adopted Jack out of Burbank, Calif., when he was 3 weeks old. She brought him to the ballpark for the first time when he was 6 months old, creating something of a tradition in a place called Blue Heaven. Now he gets to call it home again.
“I didn’t think I was gonna get emotional when I talked to him,” Eileen Flaherty recalled by phone this week ahead of Flaherty’s first home start on Friday, “but then I did.”
Eileen was driving back from the airport when she got the call. Upon arriving home, Eileen began sorting through boxes of old photos until she found one of her then-infant son, less an a year old, wearing a Dodgers onesie, a sideways, flat-brimmed Dodgers cap and an unmistakable grin. Eileen sat in her hallway, hoping to block out some of the glare from the glossy ’90s print on her iPhone as she tried to take a photo of the photo. When she posted it online, it marked a full-circle moment for mother and son.
“Somebody had sent me an email a couple days ago and said, ‘How can you not be romantic about baseball?’” Eileen said. “Like the romance of the fact that this kid that went to his first game at 6 months old, and pretty much like 28 years later, is actually stepping on the mound as a Dodger. How do you not get a tiny bit emotional and romantic about that?”
It’ll be a night the Flahertys never thought would come.
“Just how cool it is, how special it is,” Jack Flaherty said last week after the trade. “I think everyone deep down wants to play for their hometown team. Getting the opportunity to do so is just special.”
Eileen first brought her son to the ballpark out of convenience. A friend had season tickets in the reserve level of Dodger Stadium and suggested that she bring Jack along. One game turned to about 20 per season. And even as infant Jack Flaherty turned into a mobile and restless toddler, he sat still at the ballpark.
“There was something about it that he loved,” Eileen said.
Eileen was a Mike Piazza fan, so for one game, she painted Piazza’s No. 31 on Jack’s face for a game. And as much as Flaherty idolized New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, he always came to the ballpark in Dodgers gear. Each night, he would split an order of nachos, then order a soft pretzel – no salt, extra cheese to dip it in. They always sat in the reserve level, watching the Dodgers of Piazza and Raul Mondesi, of Eric Gagné and Adrián Beltré.
When Flaherty pitched at Dodger Stadium for the first time, as part of a famed Harvard-Westlake High School rotation that also included future big leaguers Max Fried and Lucas Giolito, Eileen marveled at what she saw. She sat at the field level this time, not reserve, as Flaherty got the start on the same mound he’d watched countless Dodgers pitchers throw from over the years. Flaherty delivered six scoreless innings, striking out eight and driving in the lone run to defeat Marina, 1-0, in the Southern Section Division I championship game.
Eileen again sat in the field level in 2018, when her son pitched at Dodger Stadium for the first time as a major-leaguer and provided six innings of one-run ball, striking out 10 Dodgers as an ascendant star in his first full season with the St. Louis Cardinals. As her son delivered a dominant performance, Eileen looked back at a section of fans who had ties to his son, whether at Harvard-Westlake or beyond.
When Flaherty returned a year later in 2019 and tossed seven scoreless innings, again striking out 10, he was building his case as one of the preeminent young pitchers in the sport. He’d post a 2.75 ERA in 33 starts, winding up fourth in NL Cy Young voting. His sterling second half remains stuck in the minds of former teammates (“He was just about the best pitcher in baseball,” said Tommy Edman, who is now reunited with Flaherty on the Dodgers), as well as Dodgers personnel as the club looked to acquire Flaherty this summer.
The years in between haven’t been as storybook. Flaherty missed time with an oblique injury. Then a shoulder strain. When he did pitch, his production dwindled. His time with the Cardinals ended at the deadline a year ago when he was traded to the Baltimore Orioles. By the time the Orioles made the postseason, Flaherty had been demoted to the bullpen.
A one-year contract with the Tigers provided a chance at a reset. Flaherty spent much of the winter streamlining his mechanics and stabilizing his velocity. The staff, including Tigers pitching coach Chris Fetter, encouraged him to mothball his cutter in favor of throwing his slider more.
More than anything, Eileen said, Jack’s run of success with the Tigers (a 2.95 ERA in 18 starts before the trade), was “so encompassing of the happiness and joy that the Detroit Tigers were able to give back to him. It was just so fun to see him be so happy and settled, which I think for any of us with what we do for a living, the results are successful as well.”
This was Flaherty’s best performance since that prolific 2019 stretch. When Eileen flew to Detroit in April to watch her son face his former team for the first time, she recognized what she saw on the mound: Flaherty struck out 14 and didn’t allow a run over 6 2/3 innings. It wasn’t a reinvention, Eileen said. It was who Flaherty has always been.
That’s what the Dodgers are counting on as Flaherty became the most notable pitcher moved at the deadline. Their rotation is sprouting up with questions, and Flaherty is expected to provide answers.
Eileen attended the game Saturday in Oakland when Flaherty made his Dodgers debut by twirling six scoreless innings for a team that floundered for much of July. She had been in San Diego, too, riding down the I-5 to meet her son upon his arrival with his new team.
Of course, she will be there Friday, as well, along with her son, Grady. So too will countless friends and family who watched Flaherty from his youngest days in the reserve level.
“I’ll want to just break down and cry about the joy of all of it,” Eileen said. “It’s crazy.”
(Top photo of Jack Flaherty: Robert Edwards / USA Today)
