Payton Tolle was slated to start for the Red Sox on Mother’s Day after Saturday’s rainout pushed his turn back a day. For the 23-year-old lefthander, the timing carried a heavier meaning: Saturday would have marked the two-year anniversary of the death of his mother, Jina Tolle.
Jina Tolle died at age 48 after a long fight with Stage 4 colon cancer that began in 2016, when doctors gave her three months to live. Instead, she lasted nearly eight years and went through more than 125 rounds of chemotherapy. Her son said he is trying not to block that out. “I’m not going to shut myself off from what it is like,” Tolle said. “More than anybody could ever imagine.”
He said his mother’s approach to the disease shaped the way he handles baseball and the way he carries himself in it. “The joy that she had, I try to keep with me, especially when it comes to baseball,” Tolle said. “She always said, ‘Show people why you play, who you play for, and why you love it.’ I just have so much joy playing this game. She helped me know it’s OK to show that.”
The emotional weight around Sunday’s start reaches back years, to a 2019 showcase event for top high school talent in Oklahoma, when Tolle was a rising junior and still a two-way player. Chris Reilly, then an area scout for the Athletics and later the director of pitching at West Virginia, noticed him immediately after Tolle put balls into the seats and into the scoreboard. “I was like, ‘Well, this kid’s completely different,’” Reilly said. He also had a deeply moving exchange in the stands with Jina Tolle about her cancer diagnosis.
Reilly was hired by the Red Sox in 2020 to scout North Texas and North Louisiana, a region that eventually pulled him away from Tolle at Bethany High School and Wichita State. Tolle spent two years as a standout at Wichita State before making his way to Boston, where the start on Mother’s Day now carries the personal history that baseball can sometimes only briefly expose. As Reilly put it, meeting someone like him was unusual: “The ability to sit down in a game and just meet somebody that’s different than everybody else — more pleasant, more effervescent, more refreshing — as a scout, that’s so unique.”
Tolle’s next outing, then, is about more than a rotation spot skipped by rain. It is a day that folds his major league moment into the memory of a mother who told him to show people why he played, and the way he plays suggests he has listened.
