Siena College starter Matt Gage is sitting in the upper 80s with his fastball all night. He’ll allow six hits over nine innings, throw 129 pitches and strike out five in a no-decision. Siena, in the NCAA tournament for the second time — its first berth in 15 years — lose to Texas Christian University, 2-1, in heartbreaking fashion on an 11th-inning walk-off single.

Afterward, the players line up to shake hands with the opposing team, each head coach at the back of the line. When Gage’s palm grazes Jim Schlossnagle, the legendary coach (currently at Texas A&M) stops for a second and looks the 21-year-old in the eye.

“I have a feeling you’re going to be in the big leagues some day,” Schlossnagle said.

That line, that brief interaction, kept now 29-year-old Blue Jays rookie Matt Gage going. It’s what he reached for countless times over seven minor-league seasons, time in Mexico and multiple independent leagues. It’s what kept him from quitting when he reached Triple A with the San Francisco Giants in 2017 and was released by the All-Star break — and out of pro ball — the next season. Or when the Colorado Rockies released him in 2019, or when all that was keeping his baseball hope alive was the newly formed Constellation Energy League.

Hope is a funny thing, isn’t it? It can help you put on 13 different team uniforms, live off $1,100 a month, watch guys you thought you were outperforming get promoted instead of you. Every time Gage wavered just a little or questioned his sanity, there was his wife, Paige, convincing him otherwise. Paige’s dad Ray Lloyd was a left-handed pitcher who played in the Phillies organization for a few years in the ’80s, topping out in A ball. She knew how fleeting this career could be. She didn’t want her husband to have any regrets, so when things got bad, she had the same mantra:

Let’s try this year and see what happens. I think this is our year.

From college, to the minors, to Indy ball, to Mexico…to the Major Leagues.

THIS is why you chase your dreams! @MattGage91 pic.twitter.com/5qnABoG6yc

— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) June 7, 2022

So Gage kept pitching anywhere he could. Hope is, by its very definition, just a state of mind. It can make you do crazy things, like turn on the television one day in 2020 to watch White Sox starter Lucas Giolito’s delivery and decide to mimic it with Paige and another friend in a nearby field. It can make you decide to abandon everything you know about pitching in an instant, on a blind leap of faith. Hope can make you believe Schlossnagle’s words were preordained if only you hung around long enough.

It’s June 6, 2022, and Gage is making his big-league debut. He’s throwing harder than ever before. He’s not the same pitcher Giants scout Ray Callari implored San Francisco to take in the 10th round of the amateur draft eight years earlier, but Callari — a Canadian who is watching on television — knows the makeup hasn’t changed. The pair have stayed close, as Callari was invited to Gage’s wedding in 2016. He’s hosted him at his home in Montreal. Now he’s finally seeing it, the guy he championed for years to anyone who would listen. Gage is Callari’s first player to reach the big leagues. He can say it now: he was right.

So can Paige, who is in attendance with the rest of their family in Kansas City: this is their year. You say it enough and eventually it will come true.

Gage strikes out two batters, throwing a scoreless ninth inning in the blowout win. He walks off the mound and thinks for a fleeting second about that interaction with Schlossnagle. For the first time it’s not an incentive to keep going, but an affirmation of the 2,929 days, of the countless sacrifices and hard work between then and now.

These are the moments that stick with you, the words Gage can finally speak out loud.

“It came true,” Gage said, “What he said.”

Gage’s baseball transaction page is as long as a CVS receipt. After Siena, there were the minors, independent league, the Mexican League and winter ball.

When he got drafted in 2014, the Giants told the big lefty they envisioned him as a fifth starter type. His goal was to throw 75 pitches in five innings, to keep the ball on the ground using the 3/4 arm slot Gage employed to sink the ball. He got to Double A in his first full professional season in 2015. By 2017 he was at the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, practically knocking on the big-league door. But baseball was changing: spin rate was in and hitters were imploring more uppercut swings, feasting on low pitches. A guy whose fastball was in the 80s pitching in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League was a disaster.

Gage had a 6.45 ERA in 11 games (10 starts) before the Giants released him. He signed with the independent Sugar Land Skeeters and pitched once before the Mets briefly picked him up for their minor-league system. Gage wouldn’t throw another pitch in pro ball for three years.

After he was released from Rockies minor-league camp the following spring, Gage spent the 2019 season pitching as a starter for the Diablos Rojos in Mexico. He would have gone back in 2020, too, before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down. Home and bored, Gage was tinkering with his mechanics. Did he want to be a guy who threw in the 80s in Mexico forever? Maybe his career was over in the States, but he should at least try to get to Asia.

Gage had seen White Sox starter Lucas Giolito throw on TV that spring before MLB shut down and was enthralled. His delivery looked totally different than when Giolito was in the minors with Washington. He was shorter now, quicker to the plate. And he was dominant. Gage wondered if it would work for him. He had nothing to lose trying, so he grabbed his wife and a catcher and headed to a field near their Delaware home.

“I want to try something,” he told the pair.

Paige, a former softball player at Siena, stood in the batter’s box, alternating sides. Gage alternated deliveries: his old one and a shortened up version, like Giolito’s.

Tell me which one looks better, Gage said. It was the shorter-arm delivery, every time. It moved better, it was harder and Gage was having no problem repeating it. They went back again the next day. And again a few days after that. When the Constellation Energy League started up as an option for players during COVID-19, Gage joined the Sugar Land team for the five-week season. There, he debuted his new delivery.

“I remember him pushing for 90 (mph), hoping and praying for it,” Paige said. “And now (his fastball) was 94. It was like, ‘Wow, this is going to work.’”

It was Giolito who inspired Gage’s new delivery and the Diamondbacks who taught Gage how to use it. After pitching winter ball in Mexico in 2020, Gage’s agent got him a tryout with a local scout, Alex Jacobs. It didn’t go well. So Gage called Jacobs back up and convinced him to give him another look.

“I wanted him to go back (to the Diamondbacks) and say, ‘We have to sign this guy,’” said Gage, who threw to a bunch of high schoolers.

It worked. Arizona signed Gage, made him a reliever and assigned him to Double A. His velocity touched 96 mph, a far cry from the 86-88 mph Gage had the last time he was in pro ball. The influx of analytics and pitching science had totally transformed, too.

The Diamondbacks showed Gage his metrics and how to use them. He added in a slider, made his cutter sharper and stopped throwing low in the zone. With a shorter arm slot and natural fastball ride, Gage pounded the top of the zone instead. He made it up to Triple A last year and went to Mexico again in the winter. This time, as a closer.

When Toronto came calling this winter, it was a familiar voice making the pitch: Matt Buschmann, the Jays bullpen coach. Buschmann had worked as a Giants pitching coordinator when Gage was there and, at that time, talk of spin rates and axis points was enough for Gage to think Buschmann “had seven heads.”

Their conversation this winter was markedly different. Gage spoke the analytics language and was immediately intrigued by the resources Toronto had and the ability to give the Blue Jays bullpen, which at the time had more lefty sinker-slider guys, a different look.

Gage signed with Toronto, showed up early to spring training and got to work immediately on some of the things Buschmann talked about, including tweaking his slider grip to get more horizontal movement.

“It’s really cool to see that the game does sometimes reward the guys who are willing to put in the work, that are willing to fail and keep going,” Buschmann said. “More guys are willing to rip the band-aid off and make a wholesale change (now), but it’s rare in that he did it all on his own. That allows him to own it.”

Gage has a joke with his wife that she’s on “scholarship,” traveling around with him as he chases a dream. In reality, Paige is the closest thing he’s had to a consistent coach. She gave up her softball coaching career after the 2018 season (though she still does some lessons in the offseason) when Gage thought he needed Tommy John surgery and there was nowhere to rehab near where she coached in Vermont. (It ended up being a bone spur that was removed.)

The pair have a secret language. Paige will make a tiny movement with her arm or point to her leg to signify something to get her husband back on track. She has notes on her phone with Gage’s mechanics and how they look when they’re right.

“I can find her in the stands in the middle of the game if I feel like my mechanics are not the greatest. I can look at her and she can tell me what I’m doing wrong,” Gage said. “It’s unbelievable.”

Paige is his offseason catcher until Gage gets too close to spring shape and then he has to get a different catcher and she stands behind the net. There haven’t been any officially broken fingers, but there’s been a few cases where she’s gotten swollen afterward. Wives and girlfriends ask her all the time, isn’t it stressful to be that involved? Neither of the Gages would have it any other way. They’re a team.

On the night Gage got the call to meet the Blue Jays to travel with them to Kansas City as part of the taxi squad, they were in Buffalo about to do two weeks’ worth of laundry on the road. Paige dropped Matt off at the airport, came home and discovered only one washer was working. She stayed up all night to do their clothes, took a 5 a.m. flight out and would do it 100 more times just to hear the loudspeaker at Kauffman Stadium announce Matt Gage is making his big-league debut.

“I feel like it’s not real,” said Paige, who has played Matt’s debut over and over on her phone. “Like I’m sleeping and going to wake up from this.”

There was no guarantee Gage would even be activated for the game, but his parents, brother, sister-in-law, agent and Paige made last-minute plans to travel to Kansas City anyway. Even when he was added to the roster, no one was sure he would pitch that night. The group sat and waited and wished. Hope is a wonderful thing. When Gage came in for the ninth and got his second strikeout, Paige lost it. Her dad sat there wordlessly. Callari got chills.

“I feel like it’s not real,” Paige said. “I’ve been playing that inning over and over again because I’m like ‘did that really just happen?’ We were so close so many times.”

Added Callari: “People have always said, ‘it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish’. If he plays the next five,10 (years) as long as this journey lasts, no one can ever take away that he played in the big leagues.”

Gage’s phone was flooded with messages for three days after his debut. Truthfully, he is still catching up. There are years of ex-teammates and friends all around the league, in indy ball and Mexico, who want to wish him well, people from back home and strangers on social media who say he’s an inspiration. One little boy asked Gage, did he think he could make the big leagues, too? Gage didn’t hesitate with that affirmation.

“It’s my story and it’s a long and crazy one but I feel like there’s not just one path to the big leagues,” Gage said. “As long as you can continue to grind and have an open mind anyone can get to the big leagues. I’ve proven that. That’s all my story is, not giving up.”

Gage hopes there’s room for more chapters. Getting to the big leagues is one thing, staying is another. Gage has thrown in six games for Toronto and enters Friday having allowed one earned run with six strikeouts over his first 7 2/3 innings.

As Buschmann points out, a guy like Gage — who has fought for a job every year — isn’t one who easily gets comfortable or folds under pressure. His steady heartbeat is something that already has stood out. There are things to improve on and offseasons for tinkering but right now it’s simple: get outs or they’ll bring in another guy who can. Mexico taught him that.

Gage doesn’t know if it will ever sink in that he’s a big leaguer, or if he’ll ever know what would have happened if he hadn’t seen Giolito on television. But he thinks about it all the time.

“I really have him to thank for saving my career just by watching him that one day,” Gage said. “It’s crazy to think about. I saw something I threw it at a wall and everything stuck. You throw one way your entire life and it only got you so far. It’s all about changes and being open-minded.”

With hope and a little blind faith mixed in.

(Top photo: Nick Turchiaro / USA Today)