When Zach Edey’s baseball career ended, there was no celebration. There was no jersey retirement.
He’d been a baseball player his whole life. He was over 7 feet tall, sure, and that meant there were always people trying to recruit him to play a different sport. He didn’t care.
But now the 10th grader had a problem — his arm hurt.
His mom, Julia, took him to the doctor. The prognosis wasn’t great. He was throwing too hard for the muscle mass he had, and he would’ve had to stop pitching until he stopped growing. That would’ve meant at least a couple of years.
“It was hard,” Julia said. “He was a little bit sad, too, because he knew that was his love. He loved the guys, he loved the dynamic. Baseball’s got its own rhythm. It’s like a chess match versus a checkers match . . . And he loved it. And he really loved his teammates. But he knew that his body wasn’t really serving him well.”
But earlier that year, he’d started playing a different sport.
Zach Edey was a lot of things at that point in his life, but one thing he was not: a basketball player.
“He got told all the time to do this one thing: Play basketball,” said his childhood friend, Brady Pereira. “And he just never wanted to do it.”
He’d been asked his whole life — friends, prospective coaches, prospective agents, pretty much everyone — but he always resisted it. He once told Julia that he wanted to be the tallest pitcher in MLB history.
The two-time college basketball national player of the year at Purdue, the No. 9 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, the 7-foot-4 savant who has Memphis Grizzlies fans dreaming about a championship ceiling for this team — no, he didn’t want any of that. For the longest time, he just wanted to play baseball.
Now, though, he had to make a tough decision. He told his baseball coaches and teammates he was going to play basketball full-time.
It was a transformative decision, not just for him and his family but for all of basketball. Seven years and plenty of accolades later, he’s on the cusp of making his NBA debut when the Grizzlies open their season against the Jazz on Wednesday (8 p.m. CT, FanDuel Sports Network) in Salt Lake City.
So, before that happens, here’s a look at the journey that brought him here.
How Zach Edey got No. 15
Zach was always tall. That made him an obvious recruiting target for coaches in pretty much any sport, and that included baseball, even when he was just 8 years old. Jeff Wolburgh, a family friend, wanted Zach to play on an all-star baseball team.
The Edey family decided against it — the time commitment wasn’t worth it.
Wolburgh didn’t take no for an answer. Without telling the Edeys, he ordered Zach a jersey. The baseball team had 14 players, with jersey sizes going up as the numbers went up. No. 14 was the largest, and Zach wouldn’t have fit, so Wolburgh went ahead and ordered an adult-sized jersey: No. 15.
A few weeks later, the Edeys decided Zach could play. Maybe just a couple of games. Julia called Wolburgh to tell him.
“That’s good,” he said. “Because I already ordered the jersey.”
So Zach was No. 15. That’s how he got the number he has worn his entire life, from the Leaside neighborhood of Toronto to IMG Academy to Purdue.
Until this season, that is. Brandon Clarke wears No. 15 with the Grizzlies; Zach will wear No. 14.
‘How is this allowed?’
Zach needed to play up a division in baseball — not because he was so dominant, but because Julia was scared watching the kids crowded near the mound during machine pitch games.
“Zach was always really coordinated,” she said. “And he used to be able to really smack the ball. When he got to the stage where it was pitching from the machine, and there wasn’t a parent there to kind of guard the kids that were close to the mound, we started worrying a little bit and thinking, he might need to play up an age just so he doesn’t kill someone.”
He was a dominant pitcher, however, especially when he was younger.
“When Zach would pitch, it would be legitimately terrifying for the other team,” said Sam Brown, a childhood friend who played baseball with him. “People were genuinely scared when they were up there.”
It wasn’t just his height. It was also that the mound was so close, and that Zach’s arms were so long. He was releasing the ball so close to the plate that the batters had almost no time to react.
Julia remembers Wolburgh telling her a story about one of those early games.
“The kids were just standing there, striking out,” she said. “They wouldn’t swing. They were just terrified. They were mesmerized . . . So the other coach called a timeout, brought his kids in and said, ‘Come on, guys. You know Zach. You’ve grown up with him. You know he’s not going to hit you. He throws hard, but he’s not going to hit you.’ And they went back out to start the game again, and the first kid back, Zach dinged him.”
That fear extended past the pitcher’s mound. Eric Stickney, who also coached Zach, remembers worrying as he watched much smaller kids pitch to Zach.
“There were kids that hadn’t even hit puberty yet but were playing really high-level ball,” he said. “They were really good athletes, but tiny. And they’d be pitching to him, and you’re just like, ‘If this guy hits a line drive back at the pitcher, it could kill him.’ It brought a whole other element to youth sports. It was just like, ‘Oh, Jesus, how is this legal? How is this allowed?’ “
Zach Edey the hockey player
Before there was baseball, there was hockey. Zach was a defenseman, but there was one year with the Leaside Flames where the coaches let him play forward.
Steve Taylor, whose son Magnus played sports with Zach, estimates he was probably already 7 feet tall on skates in middle school.
This was a league where checking was allowed, and there were plenty of kids who wanted a piece of the giant kid on the other team. It didn’t usually end well for them, Taylor said.
“The strategy was absolutely, get him in front of the net and wreak havoc,” Taylor said. “But I don’t want to misrepresent it: He had skills. He could create some offense for himself.”
Julia told Zach before he got to high school that he’d eventually have to pick one sport. He was sure it was baseball, and he gave up hockey after that season. She wasn’t surprised. Zach still never wanted to play basketball. Even as a kid at summer camps, he’d always choose another sport when everyone got to pick.
“He never would pick basketball,” she said. “In fact, I think he was adamantly disinterested in it because it was just too predictable.”
Too predictable, she said, that the tall kid would want to play basketball. That they would say he was good only because he was tall. Granted, this was more than a decade ago. Purdue coach Matt Painter was still defending Zach against that exact notion earlier this year during the NCAA Tournament.
When he makes his NBA debut on Wednesday night in Utah, he’ll be picked as a starter by Grizzlies coach Taylor Jenkins. There was a time, though, when he wouldn’t even be picked first in a basketball game at recess.
“I can remember, in grade 7 or 8, before he started playing basketball, we’d play at recess and stuff sometimes,” said Magnus Taylor, Steve’s son. “And he’d join in. And he was, like, not good at basketball . . . He couldn’t make any layups around the rim.”
Scholarship offers from everywhere
Zach went to high school as a baseball player. There, he worked with ex-minor leaguer Todd Betts. There’s one thing Betts wants everyone to know.
“He learned a lot of his hand-eye coordination through baseball,” he said. “One hundred percent.”
They spent hours in drills, with Betts throwing tennis balls off a wall and making Zach react. Or he’d tell Zach to stand on top of a medicine ball with one leg and catch baseballs.
Betts thinks Zach could’ve gotten a college scholarship to play baseball. He was a good player, but that didn’t stop basketball agents and coaches from coming after him.
Once, Betts was coaching Zach at a tournament at Canisius University in Buffalo. The baseball field was next to the basketball gym, and Zach had to go to the bathroom, which was in the gym.
He came back with a scholarship offer.
“The coach saw him go to the bathroom, and was like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Betts said.
That wasn’t the first time something like that had happened. Brown, who plays collegiately at the University of Guelph in Ontario, remembers going out to eat with Zach when they were younger. Sometimes people would see how tall he was, assume he was famous, and ask if they could take a photo.
“We were at a baseball tournament, at lunch,” Brown said. “At this point, I think he was like 7-foot-2 or 7-foot-3. Someone came up to him and just asked, ‘Hey, do you play basketball? Here’s my number, I’m an agent. Give me a call.’ And then took a photo with him.”
Finally, the 7-footer tries basketball
Zach’s basketball career started the way his baseball one did.
Magnus Taylor decided he wanted to switch from hockey to basketball. His dad agreed to coach him. Steve Taylor wanted Zach to play because — well, the kid was like 7 feet tall.
He asked Zach, and Zach said no.
A year later, he asked again. Zach said no.
Taylor pivoted with a different approach. “Will you just come to a practice? It’ll help get you in shape for baseball.”
Little did Zach know, Taylor had pulled the same thing Wolburgh had years earlier: He’d already ordered an extra large jersey. Zach agreed. What could be the downside to one practice with his friends?
That first practice wasn’t exactly fun. Taylor remembers telling the kids to run sprints, and he figured afterward he’d missed his chance to convert Zach to basketball.
“On the drive home, he turned to me,” Taylor said. “And he said, ‘These basketball practices, they’re a lot more fun than baseball practices.’ “
The next practice was a couple of days later. Taylor opened his front door and found Zach waiting on the steps.
The baseball career ends . . . with a home run
Zach still planned to play baseball the next season. There were a couple of problems, though.
For one, his strike zone had gotten so big that it was getting a lot harder for him to hit. He still could’ve had a future as a pitcher, but that’s where the other problem came in: the arm injury. That’s when he decided to step away from baseball.
For what it’s worth, though, he went out on a high note. He struck out 10 and had a game-winning home run in the Toronto Baseball Association title game that year.
To IMG, to Purdue
Within weeks of his basketball career’s start date, Zach started getting major attention. He was going to showcases and tryouts for national teams.
“I remember we went to a basketball tournament in grade 10,” Magnus Taylor said. “It was probably his first basketball tournament ever. It was at a place called the Hoop Dome in Toronto. He was just swarmed by people. He’s barely ever played in a live basketball game before, and he just got swarmed by people. People were calling him ‘Yao Ming.’ ”
He was at a camp at IMG Academy, in Florida, a few months after he started playing. Julia was there, and she remembers thinking the whole thing was surreal. How had he already gotten to places like these when he’d only been playing the sport for a few months? This was a camp with the best prospects in North America.
There was another tall kid who stood out. He wasn’t quite Zach’s height, but he had a wiry body type. She noticed and asked who he was.
It was Chet Holmgren, who would end up at Gonzaga and get drafted by the Oklahoma City Thunder as the No. 2 overall pick in 2022.
A watch party and an NBA debut
Zach returned to Toronto after the NCAA season ended in April. He took some time off from his draft prep and spent time with his old friends. He’d been booked for a KFC commercial, and there were spots for extras. He brought Taylor, Pereira and a couple of others along.
There was one problem during the shoot. He was supposed to say one line: “Butter my biscuits, that’s a good deal.”
“And he said, ‘There’s no world where I’m going to say that on live television,’ ” Magnus Taylor said, recalling the shoot with a laugh.
They changed it to: “Son of a bucket, that’s a good deal.”
The Grizzlies were interested in him at about that time. They called Taylor, Stickney and others from that period of his life to ask them about who Zach was and about the Leaside community he grew up in. Stickney and Taylor said no other NBA team called them.
When Zach was drafted by the Grizzlies, Taylor and his wife, Natasha, hosted a watch party at a restaurant in Leaside. There were 50 or 60 people there, with plenty of tears after NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced Zach’s name.
It’s fair to assume most players who heard Silver say their name that night played basketball their whole lives. Zach is only seven years in, including the four he spent in college.
Last month, Zach was back in Leaside with his childhood friends. They keep in touch by playing video games — one of Zach’s hidden talents is his ability to carry a team not on the basketball court but in “Overwatch” or “Call of Duty.” He’s also a good golfer, according to Taylor and Pereira. Someone in Memphis will have to find some clubs that fit.
Zach visited the Taylor house to hang out with Magnus before the draft. He walked up the stairs to say hello to Steve, then tripped on the top step going back down.
“Zach, please do not fall down my stairs. I do not want to be the one that ends your basketball career,” he said.
“Wouldn’t that be funny,” Zach said. “You’re the guy who started my career, and then you’re the one who ended it.”
He was wrong about the second part. It’s only just getting started.
Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on X @thejonahdylan.
