DH

To start, a common misnomer is that when you become a professional baseball player — at any level — you become rich. As soon as you sign that pro contract, your life is presumed to become what people see and hear about on nightly broadcasts: the signing bonuses, the sponsorships, the star treatment.

However, life in the lowest levels of the game is often a brutal one. Very few players are paid livable wages. Very few get a noteworthy signing bonus. And very few will ever make it to the top of the sport. Even now, as I think of all the times I’ve tried to explain the simple but well-documented truth about life in the minors, I can hear what I’ve heard so many times before echo in my head: “Yes, but you’re living your dream.”

That’s categorically false. My dream and almost every single dream of every person I’ve ever known in baseball was not to be a poor minor leaguer piling up debt so we could brag in a bar about glory days. Our dream was to be grossly overcompensated for playing a game we love at the highest level.

Ironically, when I say this, I draw out a response from fans similar to the way a zealous believer might react to sacrilege: “Well, then you’re playing for the wrong reasons, because you should be doing it for the love of the game.”

The love of the game is a fascinating concept. It suggests that you’d play baseball for free, if they let you. And believe me, “they” would. They’d prefer to get you as cheap as possible. While someone on the outside of the game may see you as a hero in uniform, or a role model and the like, inside the game, you are still a commodity. You are bought and sold and traded. No matter how you dress it up, or how much poetry you put next to it, the game people love is not a game. It hasn’t been a game for a very long time. It’s an entertainment industry product.

Baseball is a business, and if you, as a player, want to survive in it, you need to treat it like one. It’s an investment of your time, your skill, your health. Just like any highly coveted, highly specialized job, you’ll pay a high cost to get into it and survive in it. However, because we romanticize the game and its place in our culture, you also have to act thankful for the opportunity to break yourself in its service. People see you as a chosen one, someone much better off than they are.

In my experience, the casual fan does not want to hear about your struggles as a player unless it fits into a narrative that serves to increase the entertainment value of your labor. So, if I tell you now, in my retirement, that I’m thankful for all that baseball has done for me, but also have a lot of moments of wishing I’d never played it all, you might think me unworthy of what I was given. I never would have told you this while I was playing, but now, years later, I know it to be true, and it gets stronger every year.