Eflin cherishes lessons learned from supportive father

ST. PETERSBURG -- Zach Eflin was 4 years old when his father, Larry, took him and one of his older sisters, Candace, to start playing Little League baseball. The field was where they got to enjoy themselves, have fun as a family and develop a love for the game that eventually led Zach to where he is now as one of the Rays’ top starting pitchers.

It was also somewhere they could temporarily forget about everything going on at home.

Zach’s older sister, Ashley, died of leukemia at 7 years old. His mother struggled with alcoholism. His parents divorced. Larry, working overtime to combat their subsequent financial issues, looked for anything he could to provide his kids with a sense of normalcy.

“I’ve described it as somebody rolling a hand grenade underneath your kitchen table while everybody’s eating dinner. Everybody kind of flies off in their own direction,” Larry said. “So it was kind of a matter of just finding things we could do together to keep our minds occupied. … Anytime I would come home from work and things weren’t good in the house, we’d just walk right through the house, grab our gloves and go out in the backyard.

“I guess it comes down to, sometimes in life, you just don’t have any options other than doing the right thing. That’s how I feel about fatherhood.”

It’s no wonder that Zach, now 29 years old and a father of three girls, describes Larry as “the rock of our family,” the man who helped keep them together. He’s close with his other big sisters: Brittany, the oldest, and Candace, who was born with global developmental delay. And he knows they can look to their dad for support and guidance about anything at any time.

“Given the circumstances that he had to go through as a father, working multiple jobs and having a child that was sick with cancer, he was always just a constant,” Zach said earlier this week, looking ahead to Father’s Day while sitting in the visitors' dugout at the Oakland Coliseum. “He’s always been cool, calm and collected.”

Larry said there was no secret to how he managed his family’s tough times. He didn’t necessarily know how to handle the unthinkable tragedy of losing a young daughter. He leaned on his father, Lloyd, a minister in Iowa for 60 years who moved closer to the Eflin family in Oviedo, Fla., understanding there was a need after Ashley passed.

“I’ve had my rock close, too,” Larry said.

Larry’s parents and Zach’s other grandmother helped support the family when they needed it, but Larry -- who played college football as a defensive lineman at Temple -- was determined to work through their problems. He took on “any sort of side gig that he could,” as Zach put it, but found a professional home at the University of Central Florida as a utilities supervisor. He just celebrated his 30th year working at UCF.

His perseverance, level-headedness and even-keeled composure still influence Zach to this day.

“The things that I’ve learned from him have made my job so much easier. In terms of being on the field, I don’t necessarily feel pressure,” Zach said. “Pressure’s when you have a sick child or you’re in the hospital, not knowing what’s coming next. I’ve always taken that cool, calm and collectedness that I’ve learned from him onto the baseball field and never let the game of baseball define me.”

Larry passed on plenty of attributes to Zach, from his all-around competitive nature to a passion for playing the guitar. Larry was Zach’s coach for years -- "Little League coach, pitching coach, hitting coach, life coach,” Zach said. But that changed when the right-hander was 13 and his father realized he no longer had anything to teach his talented, athletic son.

They spoke nearly every day early on in Zach’s career. He still texts his father before each of his starts and typically calls him the day after he pitches.

“There’s been so many things that I’ve learned from him,” Zach said. “I would say the biggest thing is just being able to navigate any scenario you go through in life just dead even and understanding that we’re all blessed to be in the situation we’re in.”

Zach has felt especially blessed this year, getting to pitch for the MLB-leading Rays -- about two hours from his family’s hometown -- after his wife, Lauren, gave birth to twin daughters in March. The Eflins now have three girls under 2 years old, as twins Austen and Hallie joined Ashton, born in October 2021. Being a father of three has provided even greater perspective.

“It’s a beautiful thing,” Zach said. “I’ve never let the game of baseball define me. I want to be defined as a good person, a good husband, a good dad, a good son. Those are all things I’ve learned from my dad.”

For both of them, family has always come first.

“I knew that he was going to be a really good father, he was going to love being a father and he was going to enjoy his children like I enjoy my children,” Larry said. “Just to see with his first one, and then with the twins, the look on his face when he looks at his children -- it’s awesome. It’s wonderful.”