What does progress sound like?

If you’re a New Yorker, it’s the sound of welding torches and jackhammers building and repairing the city’s infrastructure.

If you’re the parent of a child learning an instrument, it’s fewer sour notes with each practice session.

If you’re Jose Trevino, it’s the whirr of a pitching machine on a January morning inside a chilly training facility along Nacogdoches Road in San Antonio, Texas.

The sun has only just risen, but Trevino has already been here two hours and gotten in a full workout before strapping on the catcher’s gear. The facility’s owner, Morris Libson, adjusts the machine so that it intentionally spits fastballs into the artificial turf in front of home plate. One after another, Trevino takes short hops off his chest protector, skillfully blocking each ball so that it falls directly in front of him rather than ricocheting off in some wayward direction. It’s not quite Happy Gilmore getting ready for hockey season, but it’s not far off.

Libson tilts the machine upward and aims the pitches into the strike zone so that Trevino can practice transfers, the art of receiving a baseball in his mitt and then, in an eye blink, popping up into throwing position with the ball appearing instantaneously in his bare hand. Like some magician’s parlor trick, it’s nearly impossible to follow the sleight of hand with the naked eye.

But Trevino insists that the real magician is Lee Fiocchi, the former big league strength and conditioning coach who, in 2008, founded Dynamic Sports Training. DST has grown to include five facilities across Texas and Arizona, including the San Antonio location where Trevino shows up at 6 a.m. four days a week throughout the offseason. After an initial assessment, Fiocchi prescribed a workout regimen tailored specifically to Trevino’s needs. It accounted for everything from body type to injury history to personal goals, and it demanded a level of commitment that could intimidate even elite competitors.

Trevino was all in.

“I just wanted to be a better player,” Trevino says. “Anybody that knows me knows that I’m always trying to find something to get better at. And I felt like this was something big I could do to improve. Basically, trying to get better in the movement aspect of things; being able to move freely, being able to move strong. Speed. Being able to move high weight at high speed, that’s what you want, and I just wasn’t getting enough of that in my offseasons.

“He changed my career.”

***

Trevino never imagined he’d end up catching in the big leagues. He had caught games at St. John Paul II High School in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, but what didn’t he do at the small private school? He played about five different positions for the football team (“We sucked, but I loved it”), spent some time on the JV basketball squad (“thinking I was Tim Duncan or something”) and he even did cross country … once. (“Bad choice! I didn’t know that we're going to run literally cross country.”)

When he got to Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, he put together a fine freshman season as a third baseman, earning 2012 Summit League Newcomer of the Year honors and being named a Baseball America first-team freshman All-American. In 2013, Ryan Folmar took over as Golden Eagles head coach and moved Trevino behind the plate, where he caught Friday night starter Chi Chi González, a first-round pick of the Rangers that year. (The college batterymates would reunite at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 2, 2022, in González’s one appearance for the Yankees.)

But in 2014, it was back to the infield, where Trevino picked up second-team All-Southland Conference honors as a shortstop. When the Rangers drafted him in the sixth round that June, he figured his catching days were over. Then he showed up at the team’s Short Season A-ball affiliate in Spokane, Washington, and found a bag of catcher’s equipment sitting by his locker.

Figuring it couldn’t possibly be his, he picked it up and moved it.

“Hey, man,” Trevino recalls Ryley Westman, who was the catching coordinator for the Rangers at the time, saying to him. “What’s your name?”
“Jose.”
“You get that bag?”
“That one?”
“Yeah, that’s your bag.”
“There’s catcher’s gear in there.”
“Yeah, you need to put it on and meet me outside in 15 minutes.”
“Whoa, man. … I didn’t even get your name!”
“Ryley Westman. I’m the catching coordinator.”
“Nice to meet you. … Dude, I don’t even have a glove!”
“You can use mine. Do you have an agent?”
“Yeah, I have an agent.”
“Tell him to overnight you two catcher’s mitts. I’ll see you outside in 15.”

Trevino caught 31 games that summer for Spokane, riding buses with a 19-year-old shortstop from Hawaii that the Rangers had taken in the fourth round named Isiah Kiner-Falefa. His skills behind the dish at that point were, shall we say, unrefined.

“I was terrible,” Trevino says. “I was so bad. My teammates were like, ‘Dang, bro, you need some work back there!’”

It was painful. Literally. He did not yet know how to properly block pitches or make clean transfers. And forget about framing. His forearms and collarbone were bruised and battered. He wanted to realize his dream of playing in the big leagues, but was this really the way?

Trevino returned home to Texas after that season in Spokane and contemplated his future. He flipped on the television and started watching postseason MLB games, and as star catchers Buster Posey and Salvador Perez led the Giants and Royals, respectively, to the 2014 World Series, he had something of an epiphany.

“I just saw the game so much differently,” Trevino says. “There’s so much strategy, so many ways to go about something, and that’s what I loved! I was excited about catching.”

That’s when he decided to take some of his signing bonus money and build a batting cage in his backyard. He bought a mini "Hack Attack" machine and had it fire baseballs at him from morning to night. His one regret is that he didn’t buy one with an automatic feeder; he’d have to convince his mom or offer a neighborhood kid some lessons in exchange for pumping baseball after baseball into the machine.

“I was like, 'Well, if this is the road that we’re going to take to the big leagues, this is what we’ve got to do,'” he says. “There’s a saying that goes, ‘People do it until they can’t get it wrong.’ That’s what I was going for.”

There’s another saying: The proof is in the pudding. And when Trevino showed up at Low-A Hickory in 2015, the difference was stark. After committing six errors in 260 innings of work the previous season, he made six errors in 729 innings behind the plate, was named a South Atlantic League Mid-Season All-Star and helped the Crawdads win the league championship. To cap it off, he earned an invitation to the Arizona Fall League.

“The same teammate that was telling me I sucked a few months back was like, ‘Damn, Papi! What’d you do!?’”

In 2016, the Rangers moved Trevino up to High-A ball, where he was again named an All-Star and won a league championship and his first minor league Gold Glove Award. Another Gold Glove Award followed at Double-A Frisco in 2017, when the Rangers tabbed him as their Minor League Defender of the Year and added him to the 40-man roster in November.

By 2018, he was ready for his first taste of The Show, seeing action during a three-game series against the Rockies in June. After coming in as a pinch-hitter in the second inning and going 0-for-4 in his debut, he caught the whole game the next day and collected his first hit. Then, in a Sunday afternoon barnburner at Globe Life Park, Trevino came in to catch the ninth inning. It was Father’s Day and his firstborn son was just a week old. Due up seventh in the bottom of the frame and with the Rangers trailing, 12-9, he didn’t think he’d get a plate appearance, but Colorado’s Wade Davis issued four walks and two hits -- the last one a two-run single off Trevino’s bat that gave Texas a 13-12 win.

It would be 412 days before his next big league appearance.

***

In September 2021, Fiocchi was in his fifth and final season as the Angels’ head strength and conditioning coach when the Rangers came to town. He had heard that Trevino was going to be spending the winter in San Antonio, where his newest DST location had opened about a year earlier, and he knew that he might be interested in a new training program. So, they met up at Angel Stadium and had a conversation.

Fiocchi mostly listened to Trevino, taking mental notes. He understood that the last few seasons had been a grind for the 5-foot-10, 215-pound catcher, who underwent season-ending shoulder surgery a month after his Father’s Day walk-off in 2018. Trevino spent the first four months of 2019 in Triple-A, working his way back up to the Majors, where he caught 40 games in August and September. But a global pandemic and a wrist injury limited him to just 21 games caught in 2020. He began the 2021 season as the Rangers’ regular backstop, but a fall in his bathroom in late June caused him to miss a month with a right forearm contusion. He was batting around .230 when he laid it all bare for Fiocchi.

The longtime trainer had heard plenty of athletes tell him they were willing to do whatever it would take to get better. Trevino sounded sincere, but “I don’t think you ever really know until the rubber meets the road,” Fiocchi says. He proposed a timeline comprising six phases of training, each requiring at least two weeks of development. If Trevino was serious, he couldn’t chill for a couple months after the season and then roll into DST and expect to see results once Spring Training came around. They had to get to work right away.

Any concerns Fiocchi might have had about Trevino’s dedication disappeared almost immediately. And what he discovered was that Trevino wasn’t just there to improve his own game -- that instead, he’s the type of guy who lifts up everyone around him, bounding into the facility with a wide smile and a positive attitude, ready to attack each day.

“He’s an energy giver,” Fiocchi says. “He’s been a guy that you look forward to seeing when you come in as a coach. And when you give energy to the room, it’s easier to do to the work when you don’t want to do the work.”

Like Trevino, Jackson Elizondo was intent on making 2022 his best season yet. The junior pitcher at Smithson Valley High School in Spring Branch, Texas, had heard about DST, so he and a few of his teammates -- along with some other local high school baseball players -- started working out there before school. On any given morning, eight or 10 or even a dozen baseball and softball players could be found there lifting weights, tossing medicine balls and doing various stretching exercises.

When Trevino showed up, Elizondo and his friends were a bit apprehensive about having a big leaguer in their midst. They watched from a distance at first, but slowly, they started asking him questions and becoming increasingly comfortable. It wasn’t long before they were legit workout buddies, with the high schoolers freely joking around with him while absorbing valuable lessons.

“He really just worked with me and taught me the mental side of the game,” says Elizondo, now a senior committed to play baseball at Baylor. “He’s a very confident guy, so he told me, ‘Don’t be cocky, but just know how good you are, and just be a dawg every time you go out there.’ It helped me a lot during my junior year, and especially now that I really understand. It’s been a great mindset to have.”

Trevino’s mentorship doesn’t end in the gym. He’ll watch their high school games and offer feedback, he’ll share posts on social media touting their accomplishments, and he’ll be a sounding board for them as their own baseball journeys progress. He loves teaching, and dreams of opening his own training facility someday in Corpus Christi, with fields outside for kids to practice on. Just don’t expect him to go easy on the young pups during their spirited games of spikeball.

“Oh, those are my favorite!” Elizondo says before adding, somewhat ruefully, “he would definitely whip us in spikeball all the time.”

For Trevino, forging relationships with the high schoolers and the young pros who use the facility brings him immense joy. The folks at DST offered to block out space so he could work in private, but he scoffed at that idea. He loves talking baseball and sharing his knowledge with those who share his passion for the game.

“He was an open book from the start,” says Yankees Minor League pitcher Jack Neely, a San Antonio native who has worked out with Trevino each of the past two offseasons. “He sees the best of the best pitchers, and so he has a ton of insight. And it would be stupid of me not to take advantage of that.”

***

Trevino had a gut feeling that he was going to be traded, but he was intent on making that decision extremely difficult. He showed up to Rangers camp in 2022 eager to translate the work he had put in at DST onto the playing field. He looked and felt terrific, and after several weeks of Spring Training, it seemed he might be the team’s Opening Day catcher after all. But then he got called into the office, where he met with Rangers brass and had “an unbelievable conversation, something that maybe later in life I’ll be able to tell people about, but not as a player right now. I won’t say anything about it because it meant that much to me.”

In exchange for reliever Albert Abreu (who would end up back in pinstripes before the season was over) and Minor Leaguer Robby Ahlstrom, the Yankees acquired Trevino on April 2. The catcher promptly went out and had by far the best season of his career, making his first All-Star team, winning his first Gold Glove Award and earning the prestigious Platinum Glove Award, given to the league’s top overall defender regardless of position.

Physically, Trevino felt incredible even as he caught more games than ever before.

“I felt like a way different ballplayer,” Trevino says. “I was moving better, strength was better. Rather than getting tired in the middle of the season and being like, ‘All right, we’ve got to figure something out,’ I was like, ‘It’s September, let’s roll! I’m ready to go out there and catch however much you need.’”

And so, Trevino spent this past winter doing much the same, showing up at 6 a.m. with a huge smile, ready to dominate the high schoolers in spikeball and joke around with the Minor Leaguers who dragged themselves out of bed for the opportunity to work with one of the best catchers in baseball. It was a whirlwind offseason for Trevino: Now a father of two boys, he bought a house in San Antonio, married his longtime partner on New Year’s Eve and continued to do incredible work in the community. (In December, the Yankees’ 2022 Roberto Clemente Award nominee rented out Six Flags Fiesta Texas and surprised the Uvalde Little League team by bringing them there for a day of much-needed fun.)

His hope was that 2023 would yield results similar to what he achieved last year, but more important than any accolades or awards, there is still one glaring hole on Trevino’s resume that he intends to fill.

“Going into this year, the goal is to win a World Series,” he says. “I’ve never been a ‘me’ guy; I’ve never been a selfish player. For me to get recognized, it’s great. But that’s all last year. Now it’s time to go get what’s supposed to be the Yankees’ and that’s a World Series championship.”