Tyler Glasnow on Playing with Shohei Ohtani, the Arm Injury Epidemic, and (Begrudgingly) How Meditation Made Him a Calmer Person, if Not a Better Pitcher [Video]

Tyler Glasnow is—and this is a dispassionate, clinical assessment—a stunning physical specimen. The 30-year-old Southern California native can throw a baseball 99 miles per hour, and with a superlative ability to extend his superhuman frame toward the awaiting batter, it looks far faster even than that. He can do a cartwheel and a handstand because his mother was a gymnast. He can do a backflip because he was once drunk in Mexico, standing in waist deep water and figured why not just try it. What he learned was that, for Tyler Glasnow, doing a backflip came so naturally that now he figures, “I think a lot of people could do it. It’s more about the fear of doing it,” as he told GQ recently. “Doing it isn’t that hard.”

He is also 6’8” with a tousled mane of shoulder-length hair and a face that has drawn such consistent comparisons to …