Before a kettlebell slipped from his grasp on Feb. 27, Joe Musgrove had never missed a turn to pitch for his hometown team. The Padres right-hander’s subsequent stay on the injured list has eaten at him, and not just because he is in the first year of a $100 million extension.
Manager and former big-league catcher Bob Melvin says Musgrove may well be the most diligent pitcher he has been around in four decades in professional baseball. Coaches, teammates and others attest to an unwavering commitment to physical and mental fitness. Musgrove prides himself on his reliability in games, and the reasons behind it.
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“He doesn’t like to ever miss a workout,” said Jono Green, Musgrove’s private trainer.
By his own estimation, Musgrove has spent more than $100,000 installing a gym and various pieces of recovery equipment — including an $18,000 cold tub — in his San Diego home. By comparison, he skimps on such things as shoes and clothes, preferring to invest in himself. After fracturing his left big toe in late February, he lay in a hyperbaric chamber for hours each week, hoping to accelerate the healing process.
So it is with great relief that he will finally make his season debut Saturday at Chase Field. Musgrove’s first IL trip since 2020 brought a sense of helplessness, even as it afforded him more time for a side project.
This June, Green and Musgrove will open a gym together. The new home of the Symbiotic Training Center is an industrial building in Miramar, less than half an hour north of Petco Park. At 8,500 square feet, the facility is more than three times the size of Green’s current gym in nearby Poway. There will be room for an array of amenities, including physical therapists, chiropractors, contrast baths, acupuncture and indoor pitching mounds.
And the way Green and Musgrove envision it, there will be plenty of opportunities for young athletes from around San Diego County to experience and learn from a major leaguer’s daily routine.
“We’ll run camps, we’re going to do all kind of seminars and certifications, whether it’s cold tub stuff or breathing seminars or all these things that I enjoy and I like,” Musgrove said. “I’ll do them myself and invite people to do it with me in the offseason. It’ll be sweet.
“I’ve just seen the difference in my performance when I do all those things, and I’m trying to pass that on to the next wave of guys that are coming, that I didn’t have when I was their age.”
When Green moved to Southern California in 2011, the English ex-pat knew almost nothing about baseball. He did know about basketball, the sport he’d played at a community college in Ohio, and he knew strength and conditioning, the career that landed him out west. But his adopted nation’s so-called pastime had yet to captivate him.
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“It was kind of like cricket,” Green said. “It was like, this is kind of boring.”
The seemingly mundane activity, though, offered a lifeline. Green needed his employer to sponsor him for a visa. The company he worked for specialized in training young athletes, mostly baseball and softball players. So he started to pay attention.
In time, he became obsessed with the physical preparation of the two sports. He learned how to watch a game through the eyes of the pitchers he girded for competition. And by late 2014, when renowned private pitching coach Dominick Johnson sent him a group of minor leaguers, Green was ready to dispense relevant wisdom.
Musgrove, Johnson’s godson, stood 6-foot-5, weighed 265 pounds and threw in the upper 90s. The 22-year-old also possessed a work ethic instilled by his father, Mark, who worked multiple jobs to support his young family and later fought the life-threatening condition known as Guillain-Barré syndrome.
But, three seasons after being drafted in the first round, Musgrove had yet to climb out of the low levels of the Astros system. He had been slowed by a series of physical ailments, and he was coming off a collarbone reconstruction surgery. He’d never had his own trainer.
“I had been going to LA Fitness, doing my own throwing, creating my own program just based on lifts that I saw guys do around the field,” Musgrove said.
In Green, Musgrove found immediate and effective guidance. He learned, for example, how to squat properly for the first time in his life. He gained mobility in his lower half he didn’t know he had. He began to shed the excess weight on his massive frame.
The next season would be the best of his minor-league career. Musgrove reached the majors with Houston a year later. He continued spending his offseasons in San Diego with Green, who co-founded Symbiotic Training Center in 2018. The new gym in Poway was a little under 2,500 square feet. Musgrove, by then, had begun floating a certain idea: If he ever established enough financial security, he would love to help Green expand.
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“His training was so good, I just felt like he deserved a better space to work in,” Musgrove said. “I felt like he had so much more to offer if he had the space available.”
Soon after the best season of his life, Musgrove received a platelet-rich plasma injection in the patellar tendon in his left knee, an attempt to address the wear and tear of a marathon 2022 season. The next day, he was back in the gym, doing upper-body exercises.
A couple of months later, Musgrove, Green and Musgrove’s agent, Barton Cerioni, toured the LeBron James Innovation Center at the Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. They learned there were no pitching mounds on the premises. They enlisted a former college catcher in the area anyway.
“Joe was like, ‘Well, it’s a bullpen day,’” Green said, “so he threw a flat-ground bullpen.”
“I really enjoy working out, man,” Musgrove said. “I feel like, as a professional athlete, that’s your job, to stay in shape.”
Over the years, Musgrove has increasingly added alternative skills to his routine. Many of his ideas stem from Green, who has studied with prominent performance coach Eric Cressey and received certifications in various training modalities. Instead of having to fly to distant parts of the country, Musgrove can sample a new discipline without leaving his Point Loma neighborhood: He and Green live just five minutes from each other.
Inside the Padres clubhouse, Musgrove’s curiosity has spread. Cold plunges and sauna sessions have become common among some of his fellow pitchers. When the club held a mini-camp in San Diego in January, Musgrove organized dinners and brought his teammates to the underwater workouts he has come to swear by. “We called it ‘Camp 44,’” Melvin said, “because it was organizational and his idea.” Reliever Tim Hill spent a month training with Musgrove and Green, then decided to pass the rest of the offseason with the duo.
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“He knows his s–t,” Hill said of Green. “He’s really smart.”
To hear Green tell it, he is merely trying to keep pace. “You get to a point where it’s like, ‘Oh crap, if I don’t step my game up, I’m going to become obsolete over here; my clients are all outperforming me,’” he said. “It’s made me work an awful lot harder so that I can continue to stay with those guys.”
Musgrove has stayed with Green longer than any client other than Olympic medal-winning softball player Janie Reed. He views Green as more than a trainer, describing him as a friend and mentor. So, after Musgrove signed a nine-figure contract last summer, the two of them went scouting for potential gym locations. They quickly settled on one in Miramar, an area central to San Diego County. Each man is a 50 percent owner of the new venture.
In recent weeks, as Musgrove’s toe healed and he built up his arm, he found time to make himself useful. He helped pile up trash and tear out drywall. He ordered equipment and contacted brands and companies. A bigger space will mean larger groups and lower client fees, but Musgrove and Green also hope to leverage the pitcher’s local connections to provide scholarship opportunities.
“Just trying to build out something that I’ve learned that has helped me over time and give that availability to everybody in the area, especially young athletes that might not know anything about that or the importance of those things,” Musgrove said. “And as a young kid … you don’t need to go and spend a ton of money on cold tubs and hot tubs. If it’s available and you have the chance, get in there once in a while. … But when I was 18, I didn’t do any of that s–t. I’d drink water and work out and run, and that was about it.”
Now, at age 30, Musgrove is far more advanced. He has recovered from a broken toe in less than two months. He has thrown the Padres’ first no-hitter, achieved postseason success and etched himself into San Diego lore.
But he has not forgotten where he was some eight years ago, when he was still learning how to squat.
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“He’s the exact same person,” Green said. “It only seems to affect him in a sense of, he seems to get appreciative of what has been given to him as far as salary and fame, and that now increases what he thinks he needs to be bringing to the game.”
(Photo: Matt Thomas / San Diego Padres / Getty Images)
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