The Bullpen Gospels Read Online Free PDF Page B

recently, I suck. Instead of gaining ground in life through my dream job, I’ve lost it. I’m further behind than when I started.
    People always say they’d do anything to play professional baseball. The feel of the grass, the smell of a hot dog, and all that other Disneyland bullcrap. Don’t lecture me about the magic of the game; I’m all magicked out. I’ve heard every cliché, read every quote, watched every Disney movie about overcoming. I know what Hollywood fabricates the sports life to look like, and this ain’t it. In real life there are no symphony scores playing in the background while we go through our moments of doubt. There aren’t always coaches pulling for us or family members spouting inspirational soliloquies. Sometimes there’s just you, your bed on the floor, and a mean old lady telling you to go to hell.
    Sure, I smell the hot dogs, and I feel the grass, but I also smell the scent of urine splashed on the walls of the minor league tour bus while the coach seats dig into my ass. I see sugar-crazed gremlins lining park fences, begging for baseballs. I say no, and those cute, innocent, dreamy little faces cuss me out like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket . Every two weeks my minor league paycheck affords me another round of value meals, and if I stay in the game long enough, I just might make as much as the high school dropout messing up my order.
    I don’t have a slick car or a nice condo. I don’t have a designer wardrobe or a good investment strategy. I’ve been slaving away at this job for the last four years, heading toward my fifth, and the only thing I have to show for it is an uncanny ability to hit squirrels with snowballs.
    This is my question—my giant, dinosaur-turd-sized question: How much longer do I want to keep living this dream ? Truthfully, not very much. I know folks would say that walking away from such a great opportunity would be a mistake. But what if giving up some of the best years of your life for something that may never happen is the mistake? There comes a moment in life, no matter what your line of work is, when you have to step back and wonder if you’re heading in the right direction.
    Most baseball players are content to play until they have absolutely no chance left. In fact, I’d say that’s the basic mindset: keep pitching, until your arm falls off or they tear the uniform from your back. However, I’m not most baseball players. I realize that if this doesn’t pan out, I’m not going to have anything to show for it except boring stories of glory days.
    While I lay there on my air mattress, some unremarkable Tuesday morning with snow and squirrels and screaming, I decided I’d start taking the necessary preparations to make my peace with baseball. I didn’t want to quit, but I’d run out of good reasons to keep playing. I couldn’t go on living like this, which wasn’t really living at all. I needed to get out before too much of my life had collected alongside the other broken-down relics in Grandma’s house. I just had one problem: I wasn’t the only person wrapped up in this dream.

Chapter Three
    Though my parents’ house was only a few miles away in Canton, I didn’t visit it very often. When I did, I didn’t have to be there long before I was reminded why I stayed away. Yet, I had to come home, they deserved to know what I was thinking. My parents were there at the start of my baseball career, and they should know how it would end.
    My dad sat at the kitchen table, smoke streaming up from the cigarette pressed in his off hand. I took a seat across from him and waited for a chance to talk. A gray smog had collected in the air above us, hanging there, dimming the light. He was so silent, one might suspect he was dead, stuck in place save for the way the smoke-filled air moved when he breathed.
    I didn’t know how long he was like that—minutes, hours, or days perhaps. The only way to measure was to check how much ash had accumulated in