Chance Fitzgerald became the first former Florida State commit to follow Jimmy Belanger to Clemson.
The right-handed pitcher and class of 2023 prospect out of Sanford’s (Fla.) Lake Howell High School announced his verbal commitment to the Tigers via social media last Saturday .
“With all the coaching staff stuff happening at Florida State, I’ve had a relationship with Coach Belanger for going on almost two and a half years now,” Fitzgerald told The Clemson Insider in a phone interview Friday. “It’s kind of hard to throw that out the window and try to build a new one with the new coaching staff in only a certain amount of time.”
Fitzgerald walked around Clemson and absolutely fell in love with the program as soon as he got there.
“With all that kind of piling into one, it made the decision pretty easy,” he added.
Fitzgerald heard from Belanger almost instantly.
Belanger called Fitzgerald to let him know — before it was in the press — that he wasn’t going to be kept at Florida State. Belanger had the idea right there and then that he was going to be Clemson’s next pitching coach.
This was Fitzgerald’s second time committing to Belanger as a prospect, so there are a lot of values that intersect, as well as their philosophies on the mound.
“It coincides to a T,” Fitzgerald said regarding his relationship with Belanger. “We both believe in the same stuff. He has some things that he wants me to work on that I also want to work on. All of his beliefs and teachings go along with everything that I’ve known as a pitcher growing up. I fell in love with him super fast, just hearing him talk about how he coaches…it’s hard not to bite on that.”
With the relationship already there, it was just a matter of Fitzgerald getting a chance to visit campus before he decided to follow Belanger to Tiger Town.
“Oh man, it’s crazy,” Fitzgerald said when asked about his unofficial visit to Clemson’s campus. “Everything’s brand new. It’s beautiful. Getting around campus isn’t this mind-numbing, confusing thing — it’s really nice. And then the baseball facilities, I mean I couldn’t ask for much more regarding those.”
He also couldn’t ask for much more out of a head coach either.
“He’s a great guy,” Fitzgerald said of Erik Bakich. “He’s the same way. He was on the phone with me for probably 45-minutes, just talking about beliefs, and expectations and they all lined up with everything I believed in. Bakich, he made it very easy to feel comfortable with being a part of the Clemson family.”
While Florida State’s new staff made an effort to keep in contact with Fitzgerald, he quietly decommitted from Link Jarrett’s program a little over two weeks ago. He didn’t publically announce his decision to do so, but he didn’t want there to be any false premises that his recruitment was now reopened.
Fitzgerald was going to Clemson.
“I was pretty set on where I wanted to go,” he said.
Fitzgerald isn’t the only prospect that was previously committed elsewhere that Bakich and Co. have been able to flip to Clemson. He feels like that says a lot about not only the coaching staff’s ability to recruit but the direction of the program.
“Clemson might be a sleeper program here in the next couple of years,” Fitzgerald added. “I personally love being the underdog and surprising people. I think we’re 100% going to do with some of the guys that we’ve recruited there recently. I think we might be a powerhouse program and nobody’s gonna know it.”
As far as his pitching repertoire is concerned, Fitzgerald has four working in his arsenal — fastball, slurve, changeup and cutter. Fitzgerald says that his fastball, which sits around 91-92 mph, will forever be his go-to pitch because it’s probably the easiest one to locate and it’s the hardest pitch to hit in baseball if you can locate it well.
Fitzgerald admitted that his breaker is his put-away pitch, but if he wants to go with a fastball up in the zone to try and get a bad swing off, he’ll do that if he needs to.
“I believe in pitching not throwing,” he said. “I want to be able to put a ball where I want it with strategy behind it, rather than just throw the hell out of it and hope it gets by him. I’m a big pitcher.”
What can Clemson fans expect out of Fitzgerald when he arrives on campus a little under a year from now?
“I’m a dawg,” he said. “I’m gonna do everything I can to help the program win because I want it as much as the fans want it, and as much as my teammates and coaches want it. I think everybody there wants to win. That’s gonna be my goal, to freakin’ work my butt off and do everything I can to win some baseball games.”
— Photo courtesy of Chance Fitzgerald.
