Overview:
UCSB junior Jackson Flora earned consensus first-team All-America honors and two National Collegiate Pitcher of the Year awards by leading the NCAA in pitching victories with a 12-0 record and with his earned run average of 1.06
Jackson Flora could be shaving in one of those Gillette commercials in the not-too-distant future.
In the distant past, however, he more likely would’ve posed for the advertisement that hawked the Charles Atlas bodybuilding program in comic books.
It depicts a peach-fuzzy, 97-pound weakling who bulks up after a bully kicks sand in his face.
Flora didn’t need a bad beach day to spur his transformation from a 5-foot-4, 100-pound high school freshman into the 6-foot-5, 205-pound UC Santa Barbara junior who just won the National College Pitcher of the Year Award from both Perfect Game and the College Baseball Foundation.
The competitive juice has boiled inside the Gaucho ace ever since he and his kid brother first mixed it up in the backyard of their Pleasanton home.
Hudson Flora, a highly recruited catcher who just graduated from Pleasanton’s Foothill High School, will join the Gaucho family next fall.
“We were always competing in everything … baseball, or tag, or spikeball or whatever we were playing,” Flora told Noozhawk. “I just love winning. Winning is so much better than losing.
“At the end of the day, you’re going to crawl into bed and go to sleep no matter whether you compete your ass off or if you let other people beat you, so you might as well compete your ass off.
“I think that’s where that started … and it’s never stopped.”
He never started losing for the Gauchos this season.
Flora led all of NCAA Division I in pitching victories with a perfect win-loss record of 12-0 in 16 starts.
“He easily could have gone 15-0 with some help offensively on some of those weekends,” Gaucho coach Andrew Checketts said.
He even won his share of UCSB’s conditioning contests.
Flora’s competitive spirit boiled over during the intrasquad spikeball tournament that kicked off their training last fall.
“He almost got in a fight with coach (Dylan) Jones in the final, and even Jackson admitted afterward that he went a little overboard,” Checketts said. “It was pretty funny, but that’s how competitive he is.
“He was the last guy standing (with partner and fellow pitcher Josh Jannicelli). He’s going to run until he drops or wins, one of the two.
“That shows up on Friday for you, and it’s pretty valuable when younger guys see that.”
Where the Heart is
Flora admits that leaving UCSB after three seasons “feels pretty bittersweet.”
“It’s always been a dream of mine to play professional baseball, so that part of it’s pretty cool, to potentially have that opportunity,” he said. “But you know, I love Santa Barbara so much.
“I had a ton of fun here, and I loved all the guys on the team this year.
“We all got along really well and would hang out all the time outside the field.
“I think that’s important, and it’s the kind of the stuff you’re going to miss most about leaving college baseball.”
That love of teammates didn’t stop Flora from driving spikeballs through many of their hearts last fall.
“Spikeball is really my best sport,” he shrugged with a laugh. “I just play baseball for fun.”
Flora did feel sheepish about his championship match dustup with Jones, a pitching coach who’s helped develop him from a raw recruit into a consensus, first-team All-American.
“It’s one of our team bonding things, but I don’t think I really bonded with anybody during that one,” Flora said.
“I don’t think they liked me very much while I was competing against them in spikeball.”
They did like Flora’s NCAA-best earned-run average of 1.06 this season. Oregon State’s Trey Morris finished far back in second at 1.98.
The Gaucho righthander also was fourth nationally with a school-record 133 strikeouts and third in WHIP (walks and hits allowed per inning) at 0.85.
Every scout and pundit lists Flora as the top pitching prospect for the Major League Baseball draft that begins July 11. Most predict he will go somewhere between the No. 3 to No. 5 overall picks.
Checketts has developed his share of first-rounders such as Tyler Bremner (No. 2 last year with the Los Angeles Angels), Dillon Tate (No. 4 in 2015) and Michael McGreevy (No. 18 in 2021).
And that doesn’t include Shane Bieber, a fourth-round pick in 2016 who won the American League Cy Young Award while pitching for the Cleveland Indians (now known as the Guardians) in 2000.
Four of Checketts’ other pitching protégés at UCSB — Kyle Nelson, Noah Davis, Andrew Vasquez and Greg Mahle — have also pitched in the big leagues.
Seven more are currently in the higher tiers of the minor leagues, just a phone call away from the majors.
“Jackson is a scout’s dream,” said Checketts, who was an All-America pitcher himself at Oregon State in 1998. “He’s got a low-mileage arm — somebody who didn’t pitch until his junior year of high school — and he’s been healthy his whole career.
“He’s this athletic, explosive, whippy, mobile, hyper athlete who throws strikes and has room for more growth on his frame.
“I can see him being one of those guys who goes out and throws the first 20 pitches at 100 miles an hour in a game.”
Flora’s fastball ticked past the 100-mph mark several times while he was at UCSB.
Little Big Man
His childhood dreams about making the big leagues were as a shortstop, not a pitcher. It was his position all the way through his sophomore season as a junior varsity player at Foothill High.
“I was always athletic and had the skill to play shortstop, but I was also a really small kid,” Flora said.
A summer ball coach noticed his lively arm, however, and gave him a turn on the pitcher’s mound after his sophomore year.
“He was like, ‘Hey, you’re pretty good at this,’” Flora recalled. “So I started pitching when I went back to high school, and my coach there thought that I could help the varsity team.”
Flora posted a 7-2 record and 1.27 ERA his junior season to help Foothill High win the East Bay Athletic League championship.
By that time, he’d grown nearly a foot in just two years.
The sprouting began during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“My (freshman) season got shut down, and so I pretty much just started eating and sleeping a bunch,” Flora said. “It was definitely a growth period for me, when I just got bigger and stronger.
“My dad and I would also go to the batting cages, and he would hit me ground balls at our park here in Pleasanton.
“It was nice having a little brother who plays baseball, too, because we could work out together, and hit together, and do all that stuff.”
They also would battle each other and their cousins in every sport under the sun, spikeball included.
“He always gets frustrated because he and I can never be on the same spikeball team,” Jackson said. “We’re the two best players so we have to split up …”
He laughed before adding, “… so he never wins.”
Family Affair
But Hudson says he’s gained much from the countless hours he’s spent with his brother.
“His influence on me has been great,” he told Mitch Stephens of the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Seeing all the cool things he’s accomplished in Santa Barbara and how hard he worked to get where he’s at has inspired me to become not only a better baseball player, but a better person.”
Jackson also encouraged UCSB’s coaching staff to take a look at his brother. Hudson attended nearly every Gaucho game that didn’t conflict with his schedule at Foothill High.
“He hung out with me and stayed at my house a couple times,” Jackson said. “I think he loved it, too, when visiting and watching the team play.”
Hudson and sister Ellie also send text messages of support to Jackson before every game he pitches.
“When you have a family like I do, failure becomes much easier to deal with because I don’t do it alone,” Jackson said. “And in a game full of failure, that makes the biggest difference.
“They give me reasons to play this game.”
His father, John Flora, had been a multisport star in high school before playing on the club baseball team at Cal Poly.
His mother also excelled at sports, earning induction into the Athletic Hall of Fame at Sacramento’s St. Francis Catholic High. She helped the school win the 1993 CIF State Girls Basketball Championship when she was known as Lisa Devincenzi.
“My dad was my first baseball coach, from the day I could walk until I got to high school,” Flora said. “He was my coach all throughout Little League and travel ball, and he really helped me fall in love with the game.
“He wasn’t too hard on me, but he was hard enough to turn me into a competitor and a guy who works hard.
“He taught me how to hit, taught me how to throw, all that good stuff.
“I owe everything to my dad, and my mom, too. She’s always been my biggest supporter.”
Student of the Game
Flora became so obsessed with pitching during his last two years of high school that he’d pull out his cell phone during class to study the videos of big-league stars.
“I’d get all my work done and then go watch some YouTube in the back of the classroom,” he said. “All the teachers knew I was a baseball player … I never got in too much trouble for it.”
Flora admits that he’s turned into a “baseball nerd.”
He constantly studies his own pitching mechanics with Trackman, an advanced Doppler radar and optical tracking system that measures such factors as velocity, spin rate and spin angle.
“We have a really good analytics team at UCSB which helps a lot with that stuff,” he said. “They’re really very knowledgeable in pitching metrics and stuff like that, so I listen to them and look at that stuff.
“I love those guys.”
He actually first committed to play college baseball at Loyola Marymount. He reopened his recruiting, however, after coach Nathan Choate left LMU for the head job at Washington State.
Flora’s baseball adviser immediately pointed him toward UCSB.
“I knew it was a place that was really good at developing pitchers,” he said.
Former Gaucho All-American Matt Ager, a Foothill High graduate two years ahead of Flora, also gave UCSB a glowing review.
“He was one of my first phone calls when my recruiting opened back up,” Flora said. “I knew he had been super successful at UCSB, and it definitely made me more interested to follow the same path.”
Ager, a three-time All-Big West Conference pitcher, has a record of 2-1 and ERA of 2.91 this season for the Altoona (Pennsylvania) Curve, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Class AA affiliate.
He earned 11 saves as the closer of UCSB’s Big West championship team of 2024. Flora had five saves of his own that year as a freshman reliever.
“Matt was my roommate in the hotels on all of our road games my freshman season,” Flora said. “He showed me around, taught me how to be a Gaucho and what it takes to be successful.
“I’ve known him for a very long time — he was good friends with my older sister in high school — so it’s cool to watch him pursue his dreams, too, in professional baseball.”
Flora’s stock with pro scouts rose after that freshman season when his fastball was clocked at 101 mph during an outing on the summer collegiate circuit with the Corvallis Knights in Oregon.
He came back to UCSB the next season as the Gauchos’ No. 2 starting pitcher, following Bremner in the rotation.
He logged a record of 6-3 and ERA of 3.60 with 86 strikeouts in 75 innings. It earned him an invitation to last summer’s USA Baseball National Collegiate Training Camp in Cary, North Carolina.
Change of Pace
By that time, Flora had topped out in height at 6-foot-5.
His growth as a pitcher continued last fall, however, when Checketts and Jones taught him the kick changeup. (In the kick-change grip, the knuckle of the middle finger is raised off the baseball to create a sharp, downward movement of the pitch).
“I had a pretty good sophomore year — showed flashes with some really good outings — but I wasn’t as successful as I wanted to be,” he said. “I was fastball, slider, sweeper the entire season.
“I talked to Checketts, and he told me, ‘Your low-hanging fruit is developing a changeup and working that in your arsenal.’
“I had kind of struggled with left-handed hitters, so a changeup was an easier way to get them out.”
Flora turned the heads of pro scouts in the season opener when he reached 100.5 mph on the radar gun during a win at nationally ranked Southern Mississippi.
But the new changeup made him nearly unhittable throughout the entire season.
“Those coaches are really good at what they do,” Flora said. “There’s a reason that we have one of the best pitching staffs in the country every single year.”
UCSB’s team ERA of 3.53 last season ranked fifth in the nation. The Gauchos were seventh in WHIP at 1.23.
“They have so much knowledge, and they coach each guy individually to help them pitch to their strengths,” Flora said. “They don’t try and turn everybody into the same pitcher because they know that’s not how it works.
“But part of it also is their recruiting. They like to bring in big pitchers and guys that are competitors and want to win.”
Even when it comes at their own expense in spikeball.
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