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I got drafted by the San Diego Padres when I was 22. That’s old to get drafted. Most draftees sign out of high school or as juniors in college. I was signed after my first senior year. I say first senior year because I had at least two more of them to look forward to at the pace I was completing course work. I got a small signing bonus, a plane ticket, and a hat with the team logo on it. After breaking most of the baseball records at Kent State University, I flew off to be a nobody in the lowest ranks of professional baseball.
I spent four months getting kicked around the Northwest League, playing for a team called the Eugene Emeralds. I spent weeks riding burned out tour buses from the 1970’s, crammed in with guys from all walks of life, including Japanese, Australian, and Latin American; Mormon, Buddhist, and Fundamentalist; hot head, felon, and alcoholic. Despite language barriers, racial tensions, and job stresses, we had to work together —our dreams depended on it. We had to bond to accomplish a common goal despite outdoing each other so we could further our individual ones.
For a time, you couldn’t find a happier person. I was one of the chosen few who got to do a dream job. I was playing ball for a living. More than that, I was one of our culture’s elites. I grew up watching and worshiping pro athletes. Now that I was one, I expected that same type of treatment. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what I got.
In the minors, players really don’t exist unless they are what is called “prospects.” A player who has received prospect designation has been graded by scouts, coaches, and analysts as projecting to become a someday, be a big league star. Supposedly, prospects will make it to the big leagues and make sizeable impacts on the team and its ability to win. Winning means money; therefore prospects are very important to baseball and the industry around it.
When you are a young baseball player who wants nothing more than to be a big league baseball player, you don’t realize there are minor league nobodies out there. You don’t see the stories of the guys who struggled and fell by the way side trying to make it to the top. You assume that becoming pro means you are special, your life is easy, and you can switch your life to auto pilot. You think it’s only a matter of time before you are on television, under bright lights without a care in the world. But the bills don’t stop coming in. There is no immunity to life and its problems. The euphoria of playing your childhood fantasy quickly wears off as the cold water of living in reality splashes you in the face.
I was not a prospect. In fact, I was far from it. I didn’t sign for a lot of money so, having nothing invested in me, the Padres didn’t have to promote me. They let me languish in the minors for years. Instead of fans screaming my name, no one knew who I was. My life was summed up by the string of numbers accumulated next to my name, and when people found out what I did for a living they’d ask, “So, are you any good?” When I pitched badly I was a loser, when I won I was a winner, but I was never just Dirk Hayhurst. I was now the lackluster ERA, the minor leaguer, the irrelevant, unimportant non-prospect. After four years of being summed up as a lackluster stat, the role of Dirk Hayhurst the baseball player wasn’t that much fun anymore.
Baseball is a hard life, harder still when you believe it to be something it isn’t and near impossible when you believe you are only as valuable as the result you get while doing it. I wanted to be a baseball player so badly, I became the job and discarded my individuality. I did it willfully because I believed a job like baseball, and an existence like pro athlete, would make me happy. Indeed, I thought it would satisfy me for the rest of my life.
This idea may sound foreign to you, but I don’t think it should. Everyday there are kids in class who want to be something when they grow up. They may say firefighter, veterinarian, or baseball player. Most of them will get older and realize their dream isn’t what they thought it was going to be. For some, it will happen too late for them to do anything about it. They will have committed the better part of their life learning the trade only to discover they don’t like the trade as much as they believed they would when they set out to master it. Or, that trade will master them, and they will be slave to it for the rest of their lives.
In the off-season preceding my fifth year as a professional, I woke up on the floor of my grandmother’s basement. I’d sacrificed everything to keep my dream of professional baseball alive. I had no money, no love life, and no degree. But worst of all, I had no satisfaction. I was floundering in baseball, and I didn’t know if I wanted to go on with it anymore. I was at a crossroads. I knew I wasn’t getting any younger, and yet I knew I would never get this chance again. At least if I spent years becoming a veterinarian I could always go back to being a vet if some other direction didn’t work out. With baseball, there were no second chances. I had to choose: keep going with baseball, or get out and get on with my life.
I decided to give baseball one more year. If things didn’t turn around, and I expected they wouldn’t, I would cut ties and head back to normal life. However, this year I wouldn’t play the way I had so many years before. I would play with a new sense of direction. No longer would I let the game tell me who I was, or what I was. Instead, I would find the Dirk Hayhurst I had flung by the wayside as I dashed to pick up the mantle of pro. I would play for me, and whatever the result, so be it. As one final precaution, in case things did blow up as I feared, I decided to record my last days. Maybe those notes would turn into a book someday, or maybe they’d just become notes to look fondly back on.
I can’t really explain what happened next. It seems so organic, so natural, and yet so complex. Maybe the best way to say it is, I started living. I believe it was Bob Dylan who sang, “When you ain’t got nothing, you ain’t got nothing to lose.” I always thought that was a noble sentiment best left in poetry and verse, but he was right. I’d already experienced the slow death of an existence built on the wrong pretexts; why not make some bold moves? What’s the worst that could happen? I was already at rock bottom.
The year I came to this epiphany turned out to be the best year of my career. Oddly, I played the game with the same intensity I always had, but my perspective changed. I stopped being afraid of failure or living for the acceptance granted a winner. No longer was I worried about being labeled a prospect. I realized it was I who validated such labeling, and I could bury it as well. I pitched so well and had so much fun at it you would have thought I had just learned the game. I was reborn. I turned a career on its last legs into a big league job.
It wasn’t just my on-field abilities that blossomed. Because I wasn’t worried about how people perceived me, I started expanding my writing into broad media venues, first for baseball-specific publications and then for a local newspaper. I shared my views and thoughts on life, and the most amazing thing happened— people related! I was suddenly able to reach out to fans and followers in a way that wasn’t mitigated by my statistical success. I felt as though I existed as a real person with real thoughts, not simply Dirk Hayhurst, right-handed pitcher.
One year after standing at the edge of my career’s ruin, I was in the big leagues with a book deal. People send me letters to thank me for writing. Parents pay me to teach their kids how to pitch. Clubs ask me to come speak at their benefit dinners. Even as I look back now, I am blown away. I could do my best to write down each individual brick that went into the creation of my life as it is now, but I’d rather tell you in person. I rather tell you about the life experiences, the encounters, the life changing faith that molded me into the man I am today. Hopefully you’ll catch a bit of the inspiration that changed my perspective, and my life.
“While it is commonly accepted that most professional athletes are experts at talking about one key thing: how great they are; Dirk’s message is an everyman’s tale easily related to and not hinging on pomp or titles. From weathering the fallout of family dealing with alcohol abuse and suicide, to stepping on a big league mound for the first time in front of tens of thousands, Dirk not only has an amazing set of experiences but a gift to share them in an articulate and edifying way.”
~Dirk has spoken to sports teams, church congregations, businesses, and convention attendees.Inquire about having Dirk Hayhurst speak at your next gathering at the Contact page
