Mark “Lunch” McKenzie was the head baseball coach at Concordia from 1999 to 2019, but he never had a player from North St. Paul until 2015 when Adam Hildebrandt walked into his office and asked if he could join the team. Hildebrandt played baseball, hockey, and soccer at North St. Paul. He hit .361 in high school, and the MSHSL named him MVP of the state soccer tournament after he led the Polars to the 2A championship.
McKenzie liked him and gave him $500 to play. Hildebrandt recommended that McKenzie also look at Gus Varland, a promising pitcher from North St. Paul. Varland threw 82-83 mph with a curveball. McKenzie felt he could help the team and recruited him heavily. “Then,” McKenzie said, “he broke out a little bit.”
The Oakland Athletics drafted Gus Varland in the 14th round of the 2018 draft and traded him to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Milwaukee Brewers selected Varland in the Rule 5 draft, and he debuted in the majors on March 30 of this year. On the bus one day, a few of McKenzie’s players mentioned that Gus had a younger brother. Louie Varland was a year younger and threw hard, but he couldn’t find the strike zone. St. Mary’s in Winona was the only other team recruiting him. Still, McKenzie made him an offer.
“He was bigger, but he was really raw,” McKenzie said. “So the story goes, he contacted every team in the conference because he wanted to pitch against Gus.
“No one responded.”
Perhaps fortunately so because Louie, Gus, and Zach Lauzon, their friend from North St. Paul who transferred from Indian Hills Community College, formed a formidable trio in the rotation. Louie worked on his velocity with John Gaub, a South St. Paul grad who played at the University of Minnesota and reached the majors with the Chicago Cubs. He learned command from Lunch’s son, Marcus, a former assistant who currently manages the visitor’s clubhouse at Target Field. Ultimately, Gus and Louie’s blue-collar work ethic dovetailed with Lunch’s old-school coaching style.
“Those two Varland guys were the hardest-working guys maybe we’ve ever had besides a guy named Bryan Lippincott,” said McKenzie, referring to one of four players who got drafted out of Concordia under his watch. The Washington Nationals took Lippincott in the 19th round of the 2009 draft; the Cubs took Jake Schmidt in the 41st round in 2012. The Minnesota Twins selected Louie Varland in the 15th round in 2019.
“Whatever we asked those guys to do, they went about it,” McKenzie continued. “And then they’d go home and sheetrock with their dad. And he, there’s no doubt in my mind that those parents taught those kids the blue-collar work ethic, and they just had to find themselves and grow up a little, mature a little bit emotionally and mentally.”
On a trip to Arizona shortly before the Twins drafted him, Louie and a few other players were digging through leaves near a pool. One of the custodians told McKenzie and one of the trainers that there were rattlesnakes in the pile. McKenzie moved quickly to get Louie and the other players to stop. Later, on the bus ride to the game, McKenzie decided to mess with Louie. He told him that the Arizona Diamondbacks had called him, and Lunch told them that Louie wasn’t starting because a rattlesnake had bitten him. The lesson? Varland had a future and needed to protect himself. Louie still reminds McKenize of that incident to this day.
Despite his antics, McKenzie fell in love with Louie. He and Neil Lerner, Concordia’s current head coach and McKenzie’s former assistant, rave about the Varland brothers’ work ethic and attitude. They often speak of them as a pair. When you ask about Louie, you often get an answer about Gus. Lerner says they were inseparable at Concordia, and Lauzon was like a third brother.
They are very competitive kids in everything they do. They come back, and they’ve helped at our camps. I do winter camps. And they’re playing soccer with little kids, and they want to win. They’re competing in everything they do. And I think that relationship and rivalry between the two of them, they’re best friends, they want to beat each other in everything they do.
And then you throw in Zach Lauzon. Best friends to the core, but yet, if it’s any game, any competition, anything, it is ‘I want to win.’ And they do it in a way where it’s in good fun and in love and everything else, but it definitely drives him to be better.
Louie and Gus get their competitive streak from their father, Wade. The boys would occasionally work with him at Varland Drywall, a company their grandfather, Dennis, founded in 1994. After Gus signed with Oakland in 2018, he returned to Concordia’s indoor hitting facility with a special request for McKenzie. Wade wanted to see if he could get a hit off of him; Gus wanted to assure him he couldn’t. Lunch was the coach and athletic director at the time. His first thought? “Am I gonna get myself fired if [Wade] gets hit?”
McKenzie broke down and let them do it. Gus was sitting at 94-95 mph. Dennis never barreled one up, but he finally fouled one off. “That’s where they got that from,” Lunch said, laughing. “It’s in the gene pool.”
Upon meeting him, it would be hard to pick up on Louie’s competitiveness. He’ll greet you with a firm handshake and a warm smile. Lunch calls him “a hayseed Gomer Pyle” type, with a Minnesota accent, of course. Gus is a little more polished, but neither wants to be in front of the camera. “They don’t have a big-shot bone in their body,” says McKenzie. “They’re very confident kids when they’re playing, but they don’t assume anything or walk around like they’re anything special.”
Louie loves the support he receives. He’s often late to his postgame interview because he’s meeting hundreds of people who came out to Target Field to see him pitch. McKenzie and Lerner usually wait a day to text him because he receives 100 to 150 messages after the game.
“He’s handled that whole situation pretty well. It’s not that easy to play in your hometown,” said Rocco Baldelli, who spent most of his career in the Tampa Bay Rays organization but played the 2009 season with the Boston Red Sox. Baldelli grew up in nearby Woonsocket, RI, and says it was easier to play in other cities because there were fewer distractions.
We can pretend that it is [easy to play at home], and it’s a dream come true, and it’s the greatest thing ever. It’s actually more difficult to play in your hometown, if you ask me, than it is to play in a random city somewhere else. So he’s handled that great.
I’ve been very impressed with the way he’s handled it, both off-season and during the season, going up and down from St. Paul. I think he’s been able to limit distractions really well and just focus on pitching and doing a good job.
Lerner attended the game against the San Francisco Giants on May 24 with some of his assistants and head basketball coach Matt Fletcher. Louie had never met Fletcher but stuck around to talk with the group. “Lou didn’t pitch that day, but I told him we were there,” Lerner said. “A half-hour after the game, we waited around. He came out, met us, and talked to us. We were talking basketball with him, a basketball coach who he had never met, and he was talking to my assistant.”
However, Louie locks in when he’s toeing the rubber.
“You get him on that mound, and it’s different. He’s competing against you,” said Lerner. “But often he is just the nicest, hardest-working, easygoing [guy]. We’ll text him after games, and I talked to Gus for a while and Louie. ‘We don’t want to bother you, but we support you.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, you guys aren’t bothering me. You’re the reason we got here.’”
McKenzie and the Concordia staff laid a strong pitching foundation for Louie. However, he only threw a fastball. Now he throws a slider, changeup, and a cutter. The Twins also adjusted his pitching motion after they drafted him. Varland initially held the ball above his shoulder when he reached back to throw. Minnesota’s assistant director of sports science, Martijn Verhoeven, worked with him to create a 90-degree angle between his arm and body. By doing so, Varland reduced stress on his elbow and shoulder and threw harder.
“One thing we were seeing with Louie is as he moved through his delivery, his elbow kinda hiked up,” said Verhoeven. “What we see with a lot of guys, they get shoulder issues, and they just don’t throw as hard.
“Those things (velocity and a healthy throwing motion) usually are more often than not go hand in hand, which goes against what a lot of people think. People think it’s kinda one or the other. But actually, the vast majority of things contribute to overall efficiency.”
Varland was a hard-hitting safety in football and a wrestler in high school, so he always had plenty of upper-body strength. He also generated power with his legs. Velocity wasn’t usually an issue for him; he needed better command. Verhoeven says that pitchers often naturally improve accuracy over time, but it helped that Louie is coachable. McKenzie and Lerner also noticed that immediately. Varland is a sponge. He picks up something from everyone.
“When you design these programs, Louie’s the guy you have in mind,” said Verhoeven. “He’s really smart, and he does a great job of listening to coaches and combining those opinions and suggestions and forging a path forward. When you look back now where he is, obviously, he chose a really good path for his development.
“But I think he’s one of the most receptive people and always looking at those things that it takes to get better. When you look around the clubhouse, that, too me, is the hallmark of the most elite players.”
Varland quickly ascended through the minor leagues. He owned a 2.08 ERA in rookie ball after the Twins drafted him in 2019. A year later, Varland had a 2.09 ERA in A-ball and a 2.10 ERA in High-A. He made his major-league debut last year and is now part of one of Minnesota’s best rotations in recent history. Lunch saw a unique combination of work ethic and ability early. Verhoeven saw promising qualities when he worked out at Target Field before the draft.
We had our motion capture system running; that’s the part that I’m responsible for. And I remember sitting in the draft room and kinda reporting all that we saw on that motion capture report. [Varland] had a lot of traits that we uniquely saw in big-league pitchers from a mechanics point of view.
I would hate to say it as if we could look at it and project it. That wasn’t the case at all. But there certainly were really appealing qualities, from my point of view, in his mechanics. … It’s like a fixer-upper, a house. You see things that you really like, and there are parts where you feel confident in improving.
A fitting comparison, given that Louie used to sheetrock with his father against Lunch’s wishes. At first glance, Varland’s story seems almost impossible. A pitcher from North St. Paul with a hard fastball and limited command. A standout at Concordia, where he played with his brother and a close friend. Someone who dominated the minor leagues as a 15th-rounder and held the Houston Astros scoreless for seven innings on May 31.
But the more you know about him, the more it seems to make sense. Varland always had a blue-collar work ethic and a willingness to learn. He’d probably touch up your house if you needed him to, but the Twins would like him to pitch in Tampa on Tuesday.
