After missing nearly all of the past two seasons while recovering from Tommy John surgery, Robbie Ray is looking a lot like the pitcher who won the 2021 Cy Young Award.
Now with the San Francisco Giants, Ray is tied for the major-league lead with seven wins, has yet to take a loss, and is sporting a 2.56 earned run average. His hot start comes after making just seven starts all of last season and one in 2023 before suffering the injury.
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Robbie Ray: 6.0 IP | 3 H | 1 R | 1 BB | 7 Ks
He moves to 7-0 on the season 👀 pic.twitter.com/ChZpVP0Msl
— SFGiants (@SFGiants) May 25, 2025
It’s been quite the rollercoaster for the veteran pitcher, who signed a five-year, $115 million contract with Seattle Mariners in 2022 following his stellar 2021 with the Toronto Blue Jays, but was traded to San Francisco prior to the 2024 season.
He’s proving he’s still one of the best pitchers in baseball when healthy, and he’s helping the Giants (31-25) keep pace in a tough National League West. They currently sit just three games behind the defending-champion Los Angeles Dodgers, and one game behind St. Louis in the wild-card race.
As Ray’s career has progressed, so too has his faith in and dependence on God. No matter the results, he knows where his security comes from.
“As long as you’re grounded in what your true identity is — and that’s a child of God — it makes everything a lot easier,” Ray said during a February 2024 event called Tales from the Dugout. “For me, throughout this whole process, understanding that is who I am. I’m not defined by what I do; I’m defined by who I am, and that’s a child of God.”
After being drafted by the Washington Nationals in the 12th round of the 2010 MLB Draft, Ray was traded in 2013 to the Detroit Tigers, with whom he made his big-league debut in 2014. He was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks later that year and was named an All-Star in 2017. He stayed in the desert until August 2020, when he was traded to the Blue Jays.
With his other two stops in Seattle and San Francisco, he’s bounced around a lot. But there was a time early on his career when he thought he might not make it far enough to play for even one MLB team.
After pitching well in his first full professional season at low Class-A in 2011 — a 2-3 record and 3.13 ERA over 20 starts — he struggled in High-A the next season, going 4-12 with a 6.56 ERA and giving up more than 10 hits per game. It was so bad that he thought his career was over.
“I was like, ‘God, why are You doing this to me? Why?!’” he told Sports Spectrum in 2018.
Ray said God answered, “‘I’m not doing this TO you. I am doing this FOR you, so you can see that life is bigger than just baseball. I have a purpose for you.’ It’s like He was saying, ‘I have given you this great opportunity, this awesome platform and you’re squandering it. I gave you this gift of baseball to reach out to people and you’re doing nothing with it.’”
During the Tales from the Dugout event, Ray said that 2012 season felt like “the lowest of lows.” His self-worth at the time was wrapped up in baseball, so it accentuated the failures even more.
“I picked up my Bible and I just started reading,” he said. “I felt this peace come over me and it was like God was saying, ‘This is the moment that I’m choosing you to be mine and my child.’ I felt that overwhelming peace come over me.”
Ray decided in that moment to go all in with God. “The good, the bad, the ugly. I’m giving it all to You,” he said. “I’m giving You the glory.”
“It didn’t mean all of a sudden I was in the big leagues or a Cy Young Award winner,” he continued. “I still struggled. I still had doubts. I still dealt with my flesh. But having that faith and having a relationship with Christ, it helped carry me through those moments.”
Now he has a testimony share, and he said in the various clubhouses he’s been in, he’s made himself available to teammates and share about his faith if they ask. He’s had several occasions where teammates who weren’t believers came up to him to have an unprovoked conversation about faith topics.
“It goes back to living your life as an example. Being the example of Christ to these guys,” Ray said during the 2022 Tales from the Dugout event. “They knew that they could come to me in those situations and ask those questions because they had seen the way that I had lived out my daily life at the clubhouse.”
Ray and the Giants are off on Thursday before a three-game series in Miami, where Ray is scheduled to start on Saturday.
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