Air Force Baseball

The Tampa Bay Rays are going to the American League Championship Series. One of the pitchers who got them there is the only person who has ever graduated from the Air Force Academy and reached the major leagues. He turned down professional baseball at 18 to go there. Start with his father. Garth Jax was the 296th player taken in the 1986 draft, in the 11th round. At Florida State in his junior year he hurt his kidney and his spleen badly enough that some doctors told him he was finished playing football. The Dallas Cowboys cut him on September 1, 1986. They signed him back about a week later because somebody else got hurt. He lasted ten years in the National Football League, mostly on special teams. In 1988 he led the Cowboys in special teams tackles with 24. He finished with the Arizona Cardinals in 1995. So that is the house Griffin Jax grew up in. In 2013 he went 7 and 1 with a 1.74 earned run average at Cherry Creek High School in Colorado and was named the state's Gatorade Player of the Year. The Philadelphia Phillies drafted him in the 12th round. He did not sign. He went to the Air Force Academy instead. He was not good there at first. A 5.86 earned run average as a freshman and 5.17 as a sophomore. Then as a junior in 2016 he went 9 and 2 with a 2.05 earned run average and 90 strikeouts, and was named co-pitcher of the year in his conference. The Minnesota Twins took him in the third round, 93rd overall, and gave him $645,000. Then the rules changed on him. In April of 2017 the Department of Defense began requiring academy graduates to serve two years of active duty before they could move to reserve status and play professionally. So Griffin Jax reported to Cape Canaveral, Florida, and worked as an acquisition manager while the rest of his draft class played baseball. Here is the part that is hard to believe. He was eventually allowed to pitch. But a person on active duty is not permitted to earn a second income. So the Air Force paid his salary, and the Minnesota Twins paid for his travel and his equipment. Two legal departments had to sit down and work out an arrangement so that a man could be a baseball player. He reached the major leagues on June 8, 2021, in relief, against the New York Yankees. He is a captain in the Air Force Reserve now. He won a silver medal with Team USA at the World Baseball Classic this year. In August his elbow put him on the injured list for the first time in his career and he came back on September 2. And tonight, in New York, in the game that finished off the Yankees and sent the Rays to the American League Championship Series, Griffin Jax pitched two innings and struck out four. Against the same team he debuted against. Nobody who graduated from the Air Force Academy had ever reached the major leagues. One has. It took him five years and two legal departments.