He’s 34 now, which is odd in itself, he said, the years having hurried by, the way they do when everything else seems in a hurry, too. He has a couple boys of his own who fish the same ponds and hunt the same woods he did at their ages, back in Lowcountry, South Carolina, where his dad raised two boys and still tends to a few hundred acres of corn and soy beans and cotton.

He’s spent a good number of years now in New York City, a long way from home in about every way imaginable, away from those moody small-mouth bass, away from the bedroom closet that might hold some treasures from his youth, away from the lady they call Miss Punky, his grandma, who still stays up late every night to watch him play baseball.

Sometimes, and for some reason more lately than ever, Brett Gardner thinks about how it all came to be, how his father — the former minor league outfielder — wrote that letter to the college baseball coach that got him a chance to play. How he tried out, made the team, made a friend on the team, and how that friend had a sister named Jessica. How Brett married her.

How the New York Yankees discovered him without really looking for him, an outfielder who could run some and hit some, who reached the end of his college career without ever before having been a serious prospect or even drafted. How, in the next couple weeks, he will arrive at the 10-year anniversary of his major league debut, an amazing achievement for a player in any organization in any town, a near freak of nature to have it come for the Yankees in New York, as he didn’t start hitting home runs until he was 30, wasn’t an All Star until he was 31, and was never the superstar in a clubhouse that sometimes seems to demand it.

View photos New York Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner is approaching almost 10 years playing in the Bronx. (AP) More

How he was Brett, just Brett, and how that was almost always good enough, good enough for friends and family and Miss Punky, good enough for the Yankees when they were terrific and then in transition and now that they are terrific again. How he chased every line drive into every gap and down every line with all he had, and refused to surrender a single at-bat, and never asked out of a lineup, because maybe non-prospects wear that in their hearts and play today for a shot at tomorrow forever.

How he still does all that stuff, every day, without fail, and it doesn’t come with 460-foot home runs or MVP trophies or adoring crowds in local restaurants (not always), like some other Yankees, but it does come with a promise for precisely the same effort tomorrow.

So he remembers how it once seemed so far away – the big leagues, a career, 10 years a big-leaguer, all of them a Yankee – and how it sometimes feels like just yesterday.

“You know,” he said, “I was never the can’t-miss prospect. I was never the guy who was necessarily expected to probably do what I’ve done or have the career that I’ve had or still be where I’m at. I don’t want to say I didn’t have hopes and dreams and even expectations. But at the same time I wanted to be realistic about it and realize, even after a couple good years at school and getting drafted and getting to the minor leagues, still being realistic about the fact that the guys that are ahead of you and the guys in the big leagues are there because they’re better than you. They’re more consistent than you. There’s obviously still a lot of work to do to get to the big leagues at that point. Then, once you get there, you start hearing about, the hardest thing is not getting here, it’s staying here.”

***

In the weeks prior to the 2005 draft, Damon Oppenheimer’s phone rang, the soundtrack to a scouting director’s life. Particularly in the weeks prior to a draft. It was Brian Barber, a scout assigned to evaluate a pitcher at the College of Charleston.

“You need to come see this guy,” Barber told his boss.

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