Young Baseball Ace Tristan Gasset Shares His Love Of The Game Story by Paul L. Gaba • Photos by Abner Pedraza
Tristan Gasset of Wellington is not your typical 12-year-old, hard-throwing pitcher, and not least because his favorite baseball player is… not someone you might expect. “Lou Gehrig has been my favorite player for a long time,” Gasset said. “It’s because he was more than just a baseball player.” Tristan admires Gehrig not just for baseball, but for how he lived his life — from his stand against segregation to how he fought the disease that would claim his life. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disorder, became so entwined with the Yankee legend that it is still known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “His retirement speech was amazing, where he said he was the luckiest man in the world,” Tristan said. “I think he was a great baseball player and a great person.” Tristan was recently recognized by the United States Specialty Sports Association as one of the top young players in the nation, chosen out of thousands of youth baseball players. The USSSA is an official member of USA Baseball, the national governing body for the sport in America. “He loves baseball,” said his father, Nestor Gasset. “He’s a pitcher. There are throwers, and there are pitchers; and he’s a pitcher. Pitchers analyze. They get better as the game goes on, because they’ve seen the batters before,
and they know what to throw and what not to throw. He understands the game, and that’s one of the things that really helps him.” Nestor recalled a story from 2013, when Tristan offhandedly commented to his father and one of his coaches, “I love when guys come up and swing, because I look for the hole.” “That’s usually a high school pitcher who knows something like that,” Nestor said. “The hole is where the batters are weak. He’s bright and mature for his age.” That’s evident on the mound, in how Tristan adapts to various batters and situations. “When he was younger, and he was experimenting with different pitches, he’d give up some home runs,” said Nestor, a real estate agent with his wife, Katerina. “Other young pitchers, when they’d give up a home run, would fall apart, but Tristan becomes Cool Hand Luke. He just goes on to the next batter, and doesn’t get shaken at all.” Tristan, who will turn 13 on Aug. 28, is a home-schooled seventh-grader who plays for a number of different local teams, including the Wellington Landings Middle School Gators. He also played in the Wellington Little League,
on the Wellington Little League All Stars team, and had two stints with the Wellington International All Stars. The 5-foot-1, lanky right-hander is the youngest of nine — he has four brothers and four sisters — and if he’s anything like his older brothers (who are between 6-foot-3 and 6-foot-7), he will tower over most of the population by the time he competes in high school. Tristan was introduced to baseball by his father and an uncle when he was 7. “They both love to watch baseball, and I watched it with them, and that’s how I got into it,” Tristan said. “The first team I watched was the New York Yankees.” While he plays any position except catcher, Tristan’s favorites are pitching from the mound and playing shortstop. “Having the ball in my hand, on the mound, when the batter comes up, you don’t want him to hit it,” Tristan said. “It’s so much more complicated than it looks. There’s a battle going on right there; you’re fighting against the batter for that out.” If he can’t be on the mound, shortstop also keeps him close to the action. “I like to play the middle infield; turning two, a double play, is really fun,” Tristan said. “When there’s a ground ball to me at shortstop, there’s more of a flow of coming to the ball, fielding it, and throwing it to first or second.” Along with the local circuit, Tristan
“Lou Gehrig has been my favorite player for a long time,” Tristan Gasset said. “It’s because he was more than just a baseball player.” 38
august 2015 | wellington the magazine