Payton Tolle will take the mound for the Red Sox on Mother’s Day, a day that already carried extra weight for the 23-year-old because Saturday’s rainout pushed his start off the two-year anniversary of his mother Jina Tolle’s death. Instead of pitching on that date, he is now slated to start on Sunday against the Rays.
The timing gives the start a different kind of meaning for Tolle, whose mother died at 48 after living nearly eight years with Stage 4 colon cancer. Doctors had given her three months to live when she was diagnosed in 2016, but she went through over 125 rounds of chemotherapy and kept pushing her son to stay honest about the game and about himself. “I’m not going to shut myself off from what it is like,” Tolle said, adding that his mother told him, “Show people why you play, who you play for, and why you love it.”
Tolle said that message still shapes the way he carries himself. “I just have so much joy playing this game. She helped me know it’s OK to show that,” he said. “More than anybody could ever imagine.” For the Red Sox, that means Sunday’s assignment is more than just another turn in the rotation. It lands on a day when Tolle will be pitching with his mother’s memory close at hand and with the same calm edge she encouraged him to keep.
That mindset was visible long before he reached Boston. Chris Reilly first met Jina Tolle at a 2019 showcase event in Oklahoma for top high school talent, when Tolle was a two-way player and rising junior at Bethany High School before later enrolling at Wichita State. Reilly was then an area scout for the Athletics and later moved on to become the director of pitching at West Virginia before the Red Sox hired him in 2020 to scout North Texas and North Louisiana. He remembered the family distinctly. “I was like, ‘Well, this kid’s completely different,’” Reilly said, describing Tolle as “more pleasant, more effervescent, more refreshing.”
The same standards that defined Jina Tolle’s fight with cancer also defined how she and her family approached baseball. There was no room for softness about work. “You could not throw the ball in the zone today — so go get better at it,” Tolle said, recalling the bluntness that came with love in his house. He said that development mindset “absolutely comes from her and my dad, too,” because they believed improvement started with admitting failure and then moving forward. On a day that began as a rainout and ends with a Mother’s Day start, that lesson may matter as much as anything he throws.
