The Bullpen Gospels Read Online Free PDF

looks much. Permanently hunched over like some evil scientist’s assistant, if she wore a hood, she could get a job haunting bell towers.
    She grabbed my door’s handle and just before slamming it screamed, “If you’ve got it so bad, you can just move out!”
    “Good luck with those squirrels.”
    “You can go to hell!” came her retort. See, I told you she could hear me through the door.
    “Pretty sure I’m already there….” I sighed, and flopped back onto my makeshift bed.
    Five minutes later, I reluctantly got up and chased the squirrels out of her feeder in my underwear and pair of snow boots. She asked me what I wanted for breakfast as reward for my good deed. I told her I could really go for some chocolate cake.
     
    We fight about the bedding, the food, the clothes, the neighbors, the squirrels, Harriet Tubman, and whatever else she can think up—every day, one futile battle after the next, always ending the same way. You know, Grandma’s house, Grandma’s law. If I don’t like something she does, she tells me I can just move out, and, of course, she knows I can’t.
    This is my life now. I’m a poor twenty-six-year-old professional athlete who lives on the floor at his grandma’s. I don’t make enough money during the minor league season to afford living any other way in the off-season, and as long as I want to keep chasing my dream, I’ll have to sacrifice. She’s about as sweet as the living dead, but she’s my sugar momma, and no matter how bad she treats me, I’ll always keep crawling back to her.
    My days start with mornings full of obscenities aimed at woodland creatures banging and screaming. I trudge through the snow and run the squirrels off, but they come back—rinse, lather, repeat. It appears the squirrels and I have a common enemy. I guess maybe we should work together. Someday I could leave the door unlocked and let them in when she’s sedated, watching Judge Judy. They could ambush her. I’d act as if I didn’t know anything. I’d feign devastation to the authorities and make a good sound bite for the local news. As soon as it all passed by, I’d throw the rest of the birdseed out, burn those feeders, and drive off into the night cackling maniacally. But, and this is no joke, she already suspects we’re up to something.
     
    Something about lying in my underwear with snow boots on while my right arm throbbed got me thinking. Suffice to say, this was not how I pictured my life as a professional baseball player. Me shacking up with the withered old puppet of evil I called grandma, hanging on to a crumbling dream while the world passed me by, is not how things were supposed to go.
    There is so much you don’t know when you get into the baseball business. You think you know it all. You’ve certainly seen enough of it on television to form an educated guess. But the stuff that happens on television isn’t real, no matter how bad you want it to be. I thought signing a contract to play was going to be my promotion into the glamour lifestyle. I would walk down the street and people would whisper, “There goes Dirk Hayhurst, professional baseball player.” Maybe they’d stop me for an autograph or ask me what it was like to be so awesome. I was going to live the big-league dream life. What the hell happened? Where were all the millions? Where were the luxury cars? Where was my first-class jet to paradise? Where was my dignity?
    Instead, my career has crash-landed me on the floor of Grandma’s sewing room. If this is a dream come true, then dreams come packed in mothballs, smell like Bengay, and taste like lard-flavored turkey leg. My dream has made me into a commodity, a product, only as valuable as the string of numbers attached to my name—like some printout stuck in the window of a used car. The reality of my professional baseball player’s life is that most people have no idea who I am, nor do they care. The pay sucks, the travel sucks, the expectations suck, and,