Shelby Miller has been playing professional baseball for fifteen years, since he was a first-round MLB draft pick out of central Texas’s Brownwood High School in 2009.

The 6-foot-3 right-hander was pitching in the major league playoffs at age 21, even before he nearly won Rookie of the Year. At 24, he was an All-Star. He was also a key figure in two high-profile trades early in his career, sending him from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Atlanta Braves to the Arizona Diamondbacks. It was in Arizona, when he injured his throwing arm in 2017 and needed Tommy John surgery to reconstruct his elbow, that Miller’s career took a drastic turn for the worse.

Miller went 15–9 as a rookie and collected 37 total wins before the injury, his first four years all as a regular starter. He has since been a part of eight organizations, pitched for six more major league clubs, been moved to the bullpen, and won only a handful of big league games, three in sixteen appearances this season in his first season with the Detroit Tigers. In some of that time, he pitched more in the minor leagues than in the majors.

The 33-year-old reflected on his career this week, sitting at his locker in the visiting clubhouse at the Texas Rangers’ Globe Life Field. Hours earlier, Miller had been activated from the fifteen-day injured list after missing time with arm soreness that was resolved by exercises referred to as nerve flossing, designed to break up scar tissue around a nerve. “I really enjoy being in the bullpen, going and get three outs when we need it,” said Miller, no longer the mainstay of starting rotations he’d been early in his career and now the third oldest player on Detroit’s forty-man roster.

Just hours after he said those words, Miller was called upon to get a handful of crucial outs against the Rangers. The Tigers, aiming for their first winning season since 2016, held a tenuous 3–0 lead in the seventh inning over the defending World Series champions. The Rangers had runners on first and second with two outs when Detroit manager A.J. Hinch summoned him. Miller took the ball from Hinch and drew a cross in the dirt with his right index finger before taking his warm-up pitches. “Been doing that for years,” Miller said. A reference to a Philippians verse is tattooed near the surgical scar on the inside of his pitching arm.

The first Texas batter he faced was Jonah Heim, a switch-hitter batting left-handed. Miller started with a fastball high in the strike zone at almost 93 mph. Miller’s money pitch has always been his fastball, with help most recently from the split-finger fastball and slider. The nerve issue that kept him out for two weeks had slowed down his fastball a few miles per hour to about ninety, but now he seemed to have regained that velocity.

Heim jumped at that pitch and fouled it off. Miller then went to his splitter, which Heim watched come in low for ball one. Miller returned to the high fastball. Swing and a miss at 93.1. Miller stuck with “gas,” still high in the zone but this time more outside. At 94.2, Heim swung and missed for strike three to end the Rangers’ seventh-inning threat.

Miller went back out for the eighth inning. That began with a strikeout of Leody Taveras. Then, facing Marcus Semien and the top of the Rangers batting order, another strikeout. And, finally, a groundout by Corey Seager, the MVP of last year’s World Series.

Four batters faced, all four retired, the first three on strikeouts. He threw seventeen pitches, fourteen for strikes. “The stuff’s just playing well right now,” Miller said after the game. “That time off really helped.”

“It’s a different fastball,” Hinch said of the refreshed Miller’s performance. “It’s a confident ‘split.’ He came in attack mode. There are no soft landings coming back off the IL. I didn’t think it was going to be that tough of a situation [facing the tying run in the seventh inning and a pair of perennial All-Stars in Semien and Seager in the eighth]. It’s good to see him back in there. It’s good to see him let it go and get the swing-and-miss that we’ve seen before.”

After leaving the clubhouse following the game, Miller met with about thirty friends and relatives on the field—all of whom traveled to Arlington with fingers crossed that Miller would be activated during the three-game series and get into at least one game. That crowd included his parents, Mitch and Stacy; his wife, Erika; and their son, Kyler, who will turn four later this month. Miller’s parents still live in Brownwood. Mitch has been a career firefighter in the city; Stacy works for a local wholesaler. Erika and Kyler traveled from suburban Phoenix, where Miller has lived since being part of the Diamondbacks’ organization, but Erika and Kyler have also spent considerable time during the season in Michigan, which is her home state.

When Kyler was a few weeks shy of his first birthday in May 2021, he was diagnosed with STXBP1 encephalopathy, a rare genetic disorder that impairs the release of neurotransmitters. The Millers got the news just days before the Chicago Cubs released Shelby from his contract. He took about a month off and considered retiring from baseball, but he and Erika decided the best thing for the family was for him to keep pitching.

Stints in the organizations of the Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Yankees, and San Francisco Giants didn’t last long. Last year, Miller picked up with the Los Angeles Dodgers, going 3–0 with his first career save and finishing the season with fourteen consecutive scoreless appearances. But he wasn’t part of the Dodgers’ plans for 2024. Miller said the Tigers showed the most interest for this season, and he liked the direction of the organization; it didn’t hurt that their home field is in his wife’s home state.  

Given the yearslong swoon in the middle of Miller’s career, plus his son’s health condition, the decision to keep playing has come with angst. “I love the game so much, but it makes it hard to be away from the family,” he said, his eyes reddening. (Another tattoo, across his midsection, reads Family.) “Kyler’s doing amazing. Even with all the challenges that he has, having to do therapies, he’s just an absolutely wonderful kid. We’re super proud of him. I love bein’ a dad and specifically his dad. Time flies. I really don’t like to think about it too much.”

Tuesday’s outing was the first time in five years that Miller, whose boyhood dream was to play for a Texas major league team, got to pitch in the state. His family thought the Rangers might take him with the fourteenth pick in the 2009 draft—Nolan Ryan came out to the Big Country to scout him personally—but the team went in another direction.

It then appeared as if he’d go at No. 21 to the Houston Astros, the Millers’ favorite team (Mitch grew up in Eagle Lake, about an hour west of Houston). Miller said the family had even agreed on contract numbers with the club. But the Cardinals drafted him two picks before Houston was on the board.

The twists and turns of Miller’s baseball journey brought him to the Rangers in January 2019, after the D-backs allowed him to become a free agent. “That was one of those ‘dream come true’ moments,” he said. But it didn’t turn out well. He began the season in the rotation, winning one of eight starts, and was sent to the bullpen. Miller allowed eleven earned runs in eleven relief appearances over the next five weeks and was released in July.

“That was my first full year back from TJ,” he said. “One of those years I’d like to kind of have back.”

That was the Rangers’ final season at Globe Life Park, before the club moved into its current climate-controlled comfort. It was there in July 2011 that Mitch Miller’s roommate with the Brownwood Fire Department, Shannon Stone, fell into the area between the stands and the left-field wall while trying to catch a ball that Rangers star Josh Hamilton tossed into the stands. Stone died en route to the hospital after the tragic accident. A life-size sculpture depicting Shannon and his son Cooper attending a ballgame was erected the following spring.

“It’s amazing they have that statue,” Miller said.

Miller signed with the Tigers last December for one guaranteed season ($3 million), and the team has an option to pick him up for the same price in 2025. He continued the string of scoreless outings he’d ended last season on through his first five games with Detroit before the nerve issues in his arm began to bother him.

On Tuesday night, though, he looked like the pitcher who was so dominant with the Brownwood Lions fifteen years ago. “To me, it hasn’t seemed that long,” Mitch said from the Globe Life Field stands. “And then it’s like, you look back, and the next day he’s thirty-three, got a kid and a wife. He’s got so many years in MLB. It’s pretty impressive.”

The sizable Miller entourage will reassemble next weekend when the Tigers are in Houston, where Miller could pitch at the Astros’ Minute Maid Park for the first time since he was first called up to the majors in September 2012. After that, who knows how many trips back to Texas ballparks there will be.

“I’ve sat down with Erika,” Miller said. “We’ve talked about what our future looks like. We both decided . . . we’re going to play as long as we can. Hopefully it’s not performance that drives me out of the game.

“I think I’m a better pitcher than I’ve ever been.”