Freak athlete Drey Jameson adds high-velocity swagger to Diamondbacks staff

When people with the Diamondbacks make the case that right-hander Drey Jameson might be the organization’s best pure athlete, they rattle off the freakish things they have seen him do.

He stands just 5-foot-11 but can dunk a basketball flat-footed. He weighs just 170 pounds but can deadlift 700 pounds. And, of course, Jameson can generate 100 mph fastballs and nasty secondary pitches, holding his velocity and stuff deep into games.

But there is one more data point that they note, perhaps the most impressive of all: Jameson is not just a fast runner, he is lightning fast — so fast, in fact, that he once beat teammate Corbin Carroll in a footrace. That is, the same Carroll who by one metric is the fastest runner in the major leagues this season.

“I think we’ve got a lot of athletes on this team and I think the best one, probably in all aspects of being athletic, I think the best one pitched yesterday,” Diamondbacks center fielder Alek Thomas said last week. “He’s a crazy all-around athlete.”

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Jameson, who will face the San Francisco Giants on Sunday at Chase Field in his third career start, is brash and cocky. He struts off the mound after strikeouts and peacocks in his colorful cleats. His small stature feeds a seemingly insatiable competitiveness. That desire to win helps explain how he has become one of the organization’s more intriguing young arms.

“When someone tells me I can’t do something,” Jameson said, “I want to do it even more.”

That, as it turns out, is how the race against Corbin ended up taking place two years ago, according to assistant pitching coach Barry Enright. A year earlier, in 2019, when Jameson and Corbin were teammates and Enright was the pitching coach for the Diamondbacks’ short-season affiliate in Hillsboro, Ore., Enright recalls marveling at Carroll’s ability to go first-to-third on the bases.

“I was talking about how fast Corbin is and Drey, being the little s*** that he is, says, ‘I’m faster than him,’” Enright recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘No you’re not.’ He goes, ‘No, I’m faster than him. I’ll bet you.’”

Jameson proposed a race. Enright quickly shot it down. He did not want either player — both high selections in that summer’s draft — to risk getting hurt. Enright remembers the topic coming up in jest the rest of that season, but no race ever took place.

But one day in 2020, at an instructional league camp for the team’s top prospects, Carroll was doing sprint work on an agility field at Salt River Fields. Jameson suggested they race. Carroll agreed. Enright said they yelled out his name from across the field before it began.

“We raced two times,” Jameson said. “We raced to the middle of the ‘A’” — the Diamondbacks’ logo marked the midpoint of the field — “and then we raced the whole way and I beat him both times.”

When asked about it last week, Carroll did not dispute the outcome of the race, though he did not seem interested in going into too much detail, particularly when asked how close the finish was.

“OK,” Carroll said, “I’m done talking about that.”

Said Enright: “Jameson just flat-out smoked him. He probably beat him by like three steps.”

That Jameson would challenge Carroll to a race comes as no surprise to those who know him. Competition seems to fuel Jameson on and off the field. Enright learned this quickly during their first season together, perhaps because he recognized so much of himself in the young pitcher. Once during a bullpen session in Hillsboro, after Jameson was struggling to locate his fastball, Enright ordered him to take his cleats off.

“I put his cleats on and threw three fastballs down and away without warming up,” Enright said. “I said, ‘It’s not that freaking hard.’ I took the cleats back off. He was so mad at me that he started dotting everything. Wham, wham, wham.”

That competitiveness also can work against him. Enright said that in the past, when Jameson would give up a home run, he would often respond by trying to blow his fastball by the next hitter. But on Tuesday, after giving up a home run to the Dodgers’ Max Muncy, Jameson quickly retired the next two hitters, giving Enright a sense of pride.

“His biggest attribute is also his biggest potential kryptonite,” Enright said. “We’ve tried to get him to understand that his superpower is not his 100 mph fastball. His superpower is all of these pitches combined because they’re pretty filthy.”

That seems to be an apt description through his first two big league starts. Jameson has given up just two runs in 13 innings, with two walks and 12 strikeouts, winning starts against the top two teams in the National League West.

“His competitive nature makes him think he can be the best at anything — or he knows he’s the best at anything,” Diamondbacks right-hander Ryne Nelson said. “I think that’s where a lot of his success comes from. I think he’s one of the most confident people I’ve ever met. It only helps him be better.”

Jameson seems to take it a step further than most. His swagger on the field — in his debut he executed a mini-moonwalk off the mound after striking out a San Diego Padres hitter — serves to hold him accountable to perform, he said.

“You can’t go out there and kind of be wearing Louis Vuitton cleats and get shelled or start walking guys,” Jameson said. “You’ve got to back it up. You can’t have the swag on the mound if you can’t back it up.”

Underpinning that swagger is his athleticism. Teammates talk about how far they have seen him throw a football. He won the minor league Gold Glove award last year for pitchers. Enright believes Jameson could be a shutdown cornerback in the NFL.

“He’s smaller than me,” Thomas, who is listed at 5-11, 175 pounds, said. “He weighs less than me. And he can jump out of the gym and throw 100 miles an hour.”

Carroll has been in the big leagues a little less than a month but already has logged a sprint speed of 30.6 feet per second, the fastest time in the majors this season. The only better time in Statcast's eight-year existence was set by former Diamondbacks outfielder Tim Locastro at 30.8 feet per second in 2019.

Jameson made a point to say that while he might have beaten Carroll in a straight-line race, he does not believe he is faster than him when making turns on the bases. But while Carroll thinks he might win if the two were to ever race again, he is quick to say that Jameson’s athleticism is something to behold.

“He does things that are jaw-dropping,” Carroll said. “He is a freak athlete.”

Reach Piecoro at (602) 444-8680 or nick.piecoro@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter @nickpiecoro.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Freak athlete Drey Jameson adds high-velocity swagger to Diamondbacks staff