Guest: Dominic Leone (Former MLB Pitcher) | Mental Health, Bullpen Reality, Identity After Baseball & Life Beyond the Stat Line | 124

Welcome to Episode 124 of Tablesetters, and today’s conversation goes well beyond wins, losses, and box scores.

We’re joined by Dominic Leone, a former Major League reliever who pitched professionally from 2012 through 2024, navigating more than a decade inside big league clubhouses during one of the most transformative periods in modern baseball. His career unfolded during the rise of Statcast driven evaluation, the reshaping of bullpen usage, and an era where flexibility, churn, and uncertainty became defining features of roster construction. Leone’s path was never linear, requiring constant adjustment just to remain employed in a role where reliability and replaceability are often separated by a handful of outcomes.

What makes this episode different and necessary is Leone’s willingness to speak openly about the human cost of that reality. Since stepping away from the game, he has been candid about mental health, identity, fatherhood, and the emotional weight of building a career without long term security. From going undrafted out of high school to earning trust at Clemson in a postseason elimination game that sent the Tigers to the College World Series, from adapting through injury to teaching himself a cutter by studying Mariano Rivera simply to survive, Leone’s story is defined by self direction, resilience, and constant reinvention.

Across this conversation, we explore when mental health stopped being background noise and became something requiring intentional care, the invisible strain of bullpen life and living year to year without certainty, and the routines and personal rituals that helped him stay grounded during the season. We talk about baseball as identity and what happens when that identity begins to loosen, how fatherhood reshaped his relationship with pressure and failure, and why he ultimately chose to speak publicly about mental health and life after baseball when those conversations were rarely normalized inside clubhouses.

We also dig into the razor thin margins that define relief pitching, the emotional reality of modern free agency, and how bullpen roles have fundamentally changed as teams prioritize depth, flexibility, and short term solutions. Leone offers perspective on clubhouse culture and whether winning creates chemistry or chemistry enables winning, what fans often misunderstand about the waiting and uncertainty of free agency, and what looming 2026 labor uncertainty means for players without guaranteed security. He reflects on what it is like to step away from a world where every pitch is tracked and judged, and what he understands now about baseball’s structure, culture, and economics that simply was not visible while living inside it day to day.

We close by looking ahead, what Leone is focused on now, where listeners can follow and support what he is building, his favorite offseason signing, and a lighter moment as he reflects on the one strikeout that still stands out above