Josh Volmerding made it official on Thursday — the Maria Carrillo grad is making the leap to the pros.
Four days after being selected in the eighth round of the Major League Baseball draft, Volmerding put pen to paper and signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox, the team that took him with the 244th overall pick.
It’s been a whirlwind week for Volmerding as he heads into a new chapter of life and caps off what’s been an equally whirlwind amateur career.
“Honestly, it was kind of relieving,” Volmerding told The Press Democrat on Thursday from the Red Sox training facility in Florida about being drafted. “You try not to think about it during the season and I’d say I didn’t think about it too much, I was more focused on playing, but after the season ended, these last few months the draft is kind of all you can think about.”
The 6-foot-4 left-handed pitcher, who graduated from Maria Carrillo in 2023, just finished his junior season at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He said he started receiving interest from MLB teams after his sophomore year — his first as a full-time starter for the Mustangs — and was ranked as a top-150 prospect before the start of his junior campaign.
Things, however, didn’t play out how he had envisioned. He suffered a knee injury in the preseason and tried to play through it at the start of the year before eventually having to sit out for almost two months this past spring.
He finally returned in early May and delivered one of the signature performances of his collegiate career later that month, pitching six innings with seven strikeouts and two earned runs in a 5-2 win over St. Mary’s that sent Cal Poly to its first-ever NCAA Division I Super Regional postseason tournament.
While his injury had knocked him out of the list of the top 500 prospects heading into the draft, he still got plenty of interest from MLB teams in the month-plus after Cal Poly’s season ended. Whether or not he would turn pro and forgo his senior season would all come down to where he was drafted and what the signing slot would be.
“I knew once I came back and I was throwing hard and getting guys out, I knew I was going to get drafted, but I didn’t know how high it was gonna be,” he said. “We were looking at anywhere from round six to 15. I didn’t know exactly where it was going to be or what team.”
Gathered around friends and family in Santa Rosa this past weekend, he got his answer. His agent called him as the eighth round began and told him the Red Sox wanted him, and even for above his signing slot. Volmerding accepted, and then waited the longest 30 minutes of his life to see his name flash across the screen of the draft broadcast.
“It seemed like five hours waiting for that pick to come around,” he said.
Dinger to the Red Sox! ♥️💙
Congrats to @joshvolm on being selected by Boston in the 8th round of the @mlb draft!#RideHigh pic.twitter.com/AXA9l26Bs3
— Cal Poly Baseball (@CalPolyBSB) July 12, 2026
Volmerding has been bombarded with messages of support and congratulations in the days since from people in all corners of his life.
“Super appreciative of all of it,” he said. “Growing up surrounded by all these people, they’ve all had some part in where I’ve gotten, especially my high school and college teammates. Those are some of the guys that I’ll never forget and they’ve had a huge impact on my life.”
He’ll also be joining one of those former high school teammates in the Red Sox farm system: Austin Ehrlicher, a 2021 Maria Carrillo grad who was taken in the 18th round of the 2022 MLB draft and has spent this season with their High-A affiliate in Greenville. Volmerding and Ehrlicher were both on the varsity roster at Carrillo in 2021, when the former was a sophomore and the latter a senior. The two have stayed in touch over the years.
Volmerding was a multi-time all-league pitcher for Maria Carrillo during his prep days and helped lead the Pumas to a runner-up finish in the North Coast Section Division 2 playoffs his senior season. Over his final two varsity seasons, Volmerding went 14-9 with a 1.93 ERA with 220 strikeouts in 148 innings pitched. He struck out 128 batters in his senior season, which was among the top 10 in California for that year.
At Cal Poly, Volmerding battled through some self-doubt his freshman year and became a full-time starter by sophomore season. Over the last two years, he went 6-5 overall with a 5.47 earned run average with a 106-36 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 102 innings pitched.
While maybe not the most eye-popping stats, Volmerding says there’s more to him than those numbers might indicate, and the Red Sox seemed to agree.
“My teammates at Cal Poly know I’m a huge stat guy, and you could say the advanced stats were much more in my favor this year than my ERA shows,” he said.
Volmerding isn’t exactly sure of his next steps with the Red Sox but believes he will spend the better part of the next two months at their Florida training facility before being assigned to a low-level minor league team for the start of next season.
“I’ve had a couple of jobs in my life, but knowing that this job is like one of one, like very few people in the world can say they’re doing what I’m doing, it’s kind of sick to think that I’m going out there and doing something I want to be doing every single day,” he said. “I’m looking forward to having it as my job, and putting it in writing was a great feeling.”
