How this Clemson student went from summer baseball team’s intern to emergency pitcher
The conversation happened four months ago in a random visitors’ dugout in Virginia, but Clemson student Toby Corriston remembers it like yesterday.
Corriston, at this point, was wrapping up his internship as the social media coordinator and sports information director for the Harrisonburg Turks, a summer collegiate baseball team that plays dozens of games across Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley region every June and July.
And on this night, “we were getting killed,” Corriston said, something like 14-2.
As the Staunton Braves kept piling up runs and extending the game, Corriston and the Turks’ pitching coach, Matt Majewski, started commiserating in the dugout.
Harrisonburg was already down a few pitchers from its opening day roster, when it had 13 available. Now they were rapidly rotating through guys against Staunton, and some of them were approaching pitch counts that came with league-mandated rest periods.
On top of that, the Turks were about to play back-to-back doubleheaders the next two days, a four games in 48 hours crunch brought on by various rain-outs.
Long story short: Harrisonburg needed more pitchers. Badly.
“I don’t know who we’re going to throw,” Majewski said.
“I can pitch for you guys,” Corriston said.
Majewski paused.
“Are you joking?” he said.
Corriston wasn’t joking.
Yes, he hadn’t pitched in 14 months. And he’d spent the last month doing everything but pitching for the small-town summer league operation based in his hometown.
All things considered, though, Corriston wasn’t that far removed from his senior year at Harrisonburg High School, where he was a “decent” right-handed pitcher for the varsity team before enrolling at Clemson as a student in fall 2023.
So the next day, Corriston threw a bullpen session.
Later that afternoon, he was added to the active roster.
Later that week, he made his Turks debut … in the top of the ninth inning.
“And the rest is history,” Corriston told The State, laughing.
A need for pitching
Corriston, 19, is a realist about his wonky summer accomplishment. It’s not like he snapped his fingers and just magically appeared in the MLB, or Triple-A baseball.
His feat came at a strictly amateur level in the Valley Baseball League, one of dozens of summer wooden bat leagues across the country that run annually and give college players (especially underclassmen) a chance at offseason game reps.
The VBL isn’t as flashy as the Cape Cod League in Massachusetts — which is the gold standard of summer collegiate baseball — and generally draws a mix of skill levels from the Southeast: Some ACC, some mid-major, some Division II, some JUCO.
True to form, the Turks even had two Clemson baseball players on their opening day roster. Weeks later, a certain summer intern became the third Tiger on the team, listed by height, weight and batting/throwing hand just like everyone else.
The circumstances leading up to Corriston’s improbable appearance boiled down to a numbers game. Heading into the 2024 season, Harrisonburg had 15 pitchers committed to playing summer ball for the Turks — a healthy number of arms.
But there was a “slow revolving door” of departures, Corriston said. Some pitchers were wrapped up in the NCAA Tournament (which ran through late June) and couldn’t show up on time for the May 27 season opener. Others arrived with strict pitch counts or inning counts from their college coaches to avoid injury or overuse, and they understandably hit the road once they reached those totals.
The Cape Cod League poached a few of Harrisonburg’s pitchers. Another left for family reasons. And everyone was operating under league pitching rules, which required a certain number of days rest after throwing a certain number of pitches.
Before too long, the concept of Corriston pitching didn’t sound too crazy.
A few days after getting added to the roster he was jogging out of the dugout on July 18 to make his debut against the Staunton Braves … in the top of the ninth inning with one out and a runner on second and his team already trailing 7-2.
The Turks’ dugout, full of college players who’d been traveling with Corriston for games all season, burst into cheers as their newest teammate walked out, and the starting catcher, David Bell, pulled Corriston in for a quick chat at the mound.
Word had gotten around to the opponent, too.
“They’re more scared of you than you are of them,” Bell told Corriston.
As in?
“They know you’re an intern,” Bell said. “They don’t wanna strike out.”
Playing college baseball ... ‘sort of’
Corriston remembers telling himself something along the lines of: “Let’s just go out there and throw some strikes and keep these guys off balance.”
Then he spiked his first pitch directly into the dirt.
Ball.
His second attempt led to even more chaos: Corriston threw a wild pitch that allowed a Staunton runner to advance from second to third base — and try to steal home, too, and add to his team’s five-run lead.
“But instincts kicked in,” Corriston said.
He doesn’t remember too much from that moment: Just an opposing runner sprinting past him and a realization that he, as the pitcher, needed to cover home plate and get in position for a possible put-out from the catcher, who was scrambling to chase down Corriston’s pitch after failing to corral it at the diamond.
Mission accomplished. Corriston covered home and caught the ball for the putout, and Harrisonburg got another runner out at first to escape the inning clean. The Turks’ offense couldn’t muster any runs in the bottom of the ninth and lost 7-2.
But Corriston left having pitched 0.2 scoreless innings.
How’s that for résumé material?
“It’s a pretty cool story to have it in my back pocket,” Corriston said.
Alas, there was no late-season Cape Cod League call-up. Corriston never started a game (that was the initial plan for his Turks debut until another rain-out), but he made two more appearances and more or less held his own.
A capable athlete who was also an all-region golfer in high school, Corriston relied on off-speed pitches, touched 80 mph on his fastball and achieved his goal of never getting totally embarrassed.
His longest outing was 4.0 innings, and he finished the season with four strikeouts against four walks, plus six runs and four earned runs allowed while facing 31 total batters (all as a reliever). One positive: He never surrendered a home run.
“I can say that I played college baseball – sort of,” Corriston said.
Double duty
Emphasis on “sort of,” because Corriston’s intern duties didn’t change.
On nights he wasn’t pitching for Harrisonburg, Corriston would edit game notes from his laptop in the dugout while suited up in his No. 48 red and white Turks jersey and ballcap. Or he’d roam around the stadium with his camera, taking photos of teammates and posting them to Instagram while in full uniform.
While the two actual Clemson baseball players on the roster, pitchers Hudson Lee and Josh Davis, were reporting stats back to Tigers coach Erik Bakich and his staff, the other Clemson “player” on the roster was buried in PDFs and photo editing software instead.
This contrast led to some funny moments, like when another Harrisonburg intern, who wrote game recaps for the team, ended up interviewing Corriston after one of his appearances. Another time, a family friend attended a Turks home game and texted Corriston’s parents a video of him pitching that night, a little confused.
“Is this your kid playing baseball?”
Corriston’s high school buddies also had some fun with it.
“I had some friends come out to a game, and they’re like, ‘I thought you were just working for this team,’’’ Corriston said, laughing. “I’m like, ‘I was!’”
There’s also a cruel irony to the whole situation: Since Corriston was the only team photographer, there are zero photos of him pitching in a game for the Turks. Try as he might, Harrisonburg’s do-it-all intern couldn’t be in two places at once.
Still, he returned to Clemson for his sophomore year armed with a great story to pull out in press boxes or at parties. He’s covering the No. 11 ranked football team as an intern for the website TigerIllustrated.com this year, and he’s also working for the sports and photo desks of The Tiger, Clemson’s student newspaper.
Those opportunities, Corriston hopes, will help him find an even better internship in the sports media space next summer.
Wait — just an internship?
“Well, I want to work in the Cape Cod League,” Corriston said. “But I don’t foresee them needing any players.”
This story was originally published October 29, 2024 at 7:00 AM.
