The Bullpen Gospels – Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran by Dirk Hayhurst - Book Club Part 4

Person is told that they can’t do an sit up with their eyes closed and someone putting their finger on chest. when the person is ready to go, a person drops their pants and puts their ass in the path of the sit up. The person they got in basic was a huge health nut and buried his face right into some fat ass. Good stuff.

One guy spent $40 one night to get a square on his arm. I remember he was trying to save up to get it removed.

But my wife has one on her belly. She’s probably the least likely person in the world to have a tattoo.

And I suppose there are 3 reasons:

1. Not going to pay somebody to put something stupid on my body.
2. I used to put band stickers all over my car’s back window, and view tattoos as an equivalent behavior to that. Seems silly and childish now. If someone else has them it doesn’t bother me usually, but it’s just not for me.
3. But it does bother me when I see a beautful woman with some stupid ass tattoo in a highly visible spot. Neck, chest, arms should all be out for these women, but for some reason they want to ruin their natural beauty with somebody’s “artwork”.

/end bitchfest

I’ve thought about it, but I could never come up with anything that I was sure I was still going to still like when my skin was all saggy and the color had faded. And then EVERYONE my age got them, and I kind of don’t like going with the crowd, so it became a thing in my head to not get any. And then I had a roommate who got a full back tattoo and the pain of it contributing to him falling off the wagon again and back onto drugs and since he got red in it, there were little red flakes all over the house from where the skin was healing after each session. Ew.

I know a guy whose wife has lyme disease. Does not look fun.

For some reasons I loved spiders as a kid, then hit puberty and now hate them and freak the fuck out if they are crawling on me. Could have something to do with the fact that one bit me on my cheek right after I’d seen the movie “The Believers” in which a woman gets a spider bite and then all these spiders emerge from it because of some weird voodoo curse.

Also mice. Really anything creepy and/or crawly. This is one of those things about which I’m completely and fully girly. Jump on the counter, squealing, yelling “get it out of my hair! GET IT OUT OF MY HAIR!!!!!!”

It was on the lake front, pretty late at night – probably after hours. A park ranger comes by to look at our car. We see the flashlight and duck into the woods. So I’m standing bare-ass naked in the woods, while a park ranger is snooping around. Kinda killed the buzz.

and his little sister read it. That kind of sucked, in terms of making eye contact with her ever again.

and while hanging out at the minor league field during BP, a woman snuck around the outfield fence onto the field to snag a stray ball. One of the players saw her and they all started yelling – some to be sure BP was stopped so no one got hurt and the others telling her to get off the field. And as she ran off, one of the players in the infield yelled very clearly above the rest of the noise, “Don’t steal our balls! We’re a small market team!”

That got a pretty good laugh out of everyone on and off the field.

I really tell these stories terribly, but it was funny. I swear.

I should have figured it out a few years earlier

Wasn’t really expecting to get cut at all. I was the #2 starter freshman year, moved to the pen sophomore year, then got cut junior year. My teammates were pretty surprised too. I figured out that I would probably need to hit the Clear gym like a madman to get back to a good level of playing and there were too many other important things I had to do like pine about girls and listen to Nirvana CDs.

I decided to quit the team for a job. I may have lasted longer than I should have, but I had lots of fun playing until that year when we had a new coach. With him it just wasn’t fun anymore, so I took the job and decided to invest in a CDs. I bought a new one almost every week.

When your sports are in the same season, you have to choose. I probably made the correct choice, but still wish I hadn’t.

Like if you have good chemistry, a hitter may trust his teammates to pick him up more, and not try to hit a home run every time up…or a pitcher may trust his defense more. But the effect is probably pretty small.

But I think it makes a big difference in Little League for sure. When a team is having fun together well it can motivate the players to practice more and to trust each other more.

On the whole I think it affects things off the field more than it does on the field when we start talking about players who are on professional teams. While it may not affect the box score a lot, I think chemistry makes a difference in any job. We had a guy leave our workplace a couple of months ago because of conflicts with other workers.

I know professional baseball is a totally different kind of work environment from mine, but still I think there is something to being happy to arrive at a place and being part of a group that helps to push each other into performing better (through challenges, friendly rivalries, not wanting to let your teammates down, etc.) rather than using up a disproportionate amount of your mental energy into just coping with the douchebags around you so much. Not that I think most professional athletes at this level would intentionally dog it, but sometimes you just don’t have much left in the tank if you’re using up the tank to NOT smack Jose Guillen upside the head, you know?

But I don’t think I’d call that a philosophy. In general I think it depends on what you’re talking about. If it’s something like lawn care, then my goals are just “make sure the lawn doesn’t die”, but if we’re talking about something I care more about, then I definitely aim higher. I’m not sure I would call it a philosophy, though. That would seem to imply that I actually thought about this rather than just doing it.

Most people are trying not to fail and focusing on what would be a failure in an athletic endeavor. For example, bad golfers think about not hitting it in the bunker on short pitch shots, and as a result they end up in the bunker a good chunk of that time. If you were to give that player the same shot with the bunker removed, they would do much better usually because they wouldn’t be worried about a worst case scenario. There are mental roadblocks to success sometimes, and focusing on positive outcomes and what you need to do to achieve those outcomes can make things possible, while just relaxing and letting go of the worry also helps.

I’m sure I drove my co-workers nuts, because my renewed and fanatical interest in the Royals coincided with several promotions at my former job, and as I was figuring out my evolving management philosophy, I usually described it in baseball terms.

For myself, I think I’ve got a mix of the “trying not to fail” versus “aiming for success.” Really, I like being anonymously in the middle, but even though I’m not a spotlight seeker, I also have a strong work ethic and like doing things right, preferably the first time. I think I’m pretty dependable and ethical. I’ve just started a new job, so I’m definitely shoulder-deep in the “trying not to fail” phase, but I hope to get through this, learn what the heck I’m doing and eventually become very successful so that I’m promotable, because really, I want a big fat raise.

Was actually dating me and another guy when we first started dating. We both fell for her pretty hard and I don’t think she handled it particularly well. I “won” but the next year I was pretty mistrustful of her.