After a while, this attitude can take over just about everything. You start to notice your living quarters are getting nicer, more expensive, bigger and emptier. Single players usually ride this path right into enormous homes with no one living there except themselves and a dog, if they even have a dog. You have more services than you do socks.

The walls around your home also get higher  gated communities to protect privacy. Maybe you get that security system you thought was cool. For part of my career in Philadelphia, I lived directly across the street from Randy Wolf, a teammate and friend. I didn’t see him for almost two years unless it was at the ballpark.

Soon you are getting farther away from your original tastes and closer to what you think a major-leaguer is supposed to live like. It takes a lot of introspection to realize that as you are “upgrading” you hit an invisible peak and then hit this precipitous downhill slope of declining benefits  because this particular home plate keeps moving, teasing you into needing to go just a little further. Sure, you could date actresses and supermodels until you pry Angelina Jolie away from Brad Pitt, but you forget that when your career is over, the people whose approval you’ve been seeking stop paying attention. (Then again, baseball players have no sense of time; there is no clock pushing us to do anything.)

These diminishing returns are reflected in lost time or lost opportunity. Maybe you spend so much time chasing Halle Berry through her agent that you forgot about the girlfriend who was there for you when you had back surgery in the minor leagues. Maybe you get on a two-year waiting list for a car that only three people in the world have, only to miss driving your first car, the one with the sticky windshield wipers. Or maybe that McMansion going up on the waterfront for you and your posse (so that you can get onto “MTV Cribs”) takes so long to build that when your grandmother passes away you realize you spent more time looking at floor plans than sharing her last moments.

I recall a teammate at Yankee spring training giving me this wisdom about saving money: “Get a chef, you’ll save on groceries.” Sure, why not? But it’s a shame when, deep down, you really love to cook.

We call it advancement, the act of getting closer to something ahead or in front of us. But when we lock in on that target as the next step, sometimes we forget what got us here. The need to demonstrate success, the show and the glitter, all play into why we can end up chasing illusions that take us away from our true selves.

All players battle with this in some form, and most get lost for at least a moment or two (if you are lucky, that’s the worst of it). But when you get disoriented, you just have to be courageous enough to turn around, re-group and look for home. That place where you can look closer at the match-up of needs versus wants. Something all the more pressing in today’s climate.

Even if you have to go back down those stairs for a while.