The Box Score
I’m not really sure where to start. I suppose my background makes the most sense. It’s nothing amazing, or as I quickly learned, it’s not the amazing thing I thought it was.
I’m 45 years old. I became addicted to baseball as soon as I could walk. I wanted to be a major leaguer. My heroes were Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, and Ken Griffey, Jr. I loved Mark Grace for a while. When I was seven, my dad built a baseball field in our yard. The house was 215 feet from home plate. He said that the day I hit a window is the day we’d move. We moved when I was 11. While our new house had almost 200 acres, my dad chose to build a batting cage instead of a full size field. I begged for a full field, but he lacked the Kubota tractor to do so this time around. When I couldn’t hit in the cage, I’d hit apples with a whiffle ball bat, usually at the house. That pissed my old man off something fierce.
Those were fun times. I loved Little League. I loved my team. I loved practicing. I also loved playing football, basketball, golf, sled-riding, fishing, riding bikes, skateboarding, four-wheelers, superheroes, baseball cards, Starting Lineups, hip hop, movies, and countless other things.
In the summer of 1994, I received a phone call from a man named Bob Burke. Coach Burke was the manager for the Youngstown Class B team, Fabulous Goldsteins. Fabulous Goldsteins was owned by Mike Goldstone, who had done amazing work helping kids get into college. Coach Burke invited me, a 13-year-old, to join the organization. Goldstein’s was a storied team, and it was an absolute honor to be asked to join. At that time, there weren’t huge divides between age groups, so it was basically that I’d join the 18U team, but I’d get most reps on the 14U team. This lasted for a season and change, and then I moved to 18U when I was in the latter part of 14.
Travel baseball was a fucking grind like nothing I ever experienced. I loved the game, but Goldsteins operated under the mantra that playing the game was your practice. We would sometimes be in two to three tournaments in parallel, interleaving them throughout the day. Parents usually didn’t come, so I jumped in with one of the older guys. My dad would do his best to make games when I was younger, and my mom and step-dad came a few times a season. I have no idea if we ever won a tournament. We were never in one long enough to know.
You could say that grind got me into college. I got a scholarship. Played Division 1 baseball. Transferred, too! And at the end of it all, I passed on playing my fifth year (had a red shirt) and swore that I would never put my children through what I went through. It wasn’t college that did me in. College is a grind, but it’s mostly a time-management grind.
My problem was travel. As I mentioned, I loved practicing. Because of travel baseball, I did not have time to practice. The thing that made me love the sport is the thing I lost. I burned out. I couldn’t be a teenager. I’d get home too late to go out, or I had a game early the next day. I kept playing because of the perceived glory that would come with being a Big Ten Commit. Within a week of becoming an official Big Ten Athlete, I realized all the people who I thought were watching did not exist. That glory? Not there. Hell, most people thought I went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). Nothing against IUP, but my ego held myself in higher regard than that. My friends always got a kick out of it, at least.
Let me be open and honest about something right now. I redshirted my freshman year. I was pissed about that because I was a young man-child and didn’t think to embrace it. Nobody told me how I could leverage it. Then I got mono. Then I came back from mono too early because anyone who has had mono knows you start feeling better, but aren’t better, after a few months. Lifted heavy. Hurt my back. Sucked at pitching. Lost velocity. And ultimately made my first adult decision with my own best interests at heart: I wanted to be in a city. Hence, I transferred to Temple University.
Here’s how my transfer went: I applied, got in, emailed the baseball coach, said I was coming, showed up for practice, and I was on the team. I got zero dollars, which was fitting for my zero fucks given. Baseball became something I did and gave me a social group, but I was focused on my major, which was computer science. Not only was I clearly not going to be a Major League Baseball player, but even if it were in the cards, I wouldn’t have taken it. I was very much done with baseball.
As I said, I bailed on the fifth year. Unfortunately, I needed a fifth year because transferring credits cost me some. I cherished watching my roommates travel all over while I had my weekends to be a college kid. I have zero regrets not using that fifth year. It turns out that the fifth year also found my girlfriend and me having a child, and I have zero regrets about it. My girlfriend is my wife now (about to be 20 years), and my first child is wrapping up undergrad. That’s nuts.
Our second child, born in 2008, is the one that forced me to break my own rule. I’ll leave you with this: right now, I’m in a hotel outside of Atlanta. I flew my daughter up on Thursday. I drove up on Thursday. My daughter stayed with her friend and teammate for two days. They played three 90-minute practice games on Friday and three more on Saturday. At one point, an umpire walked himself off the field due to the heat. Then we stayed in a hotel last night for an 8 am game this morning. We lost, were eliminated, and I dropped her off at the airport to fly standby home because the original flight was at 10:59 pm. Meanwhile, I got myself a hotel room for three days so I can work rather than travel. She’s flying back on Wednesday night for games on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Finally, we drive nine hours home.