Anything and everything goes in the off-season, especially when you get spoiled having the resources to burn and the time to burn them. In the off-season of 2003, my college mentor offered me a chance to teach a seminar on urban transportation with him  in South Africa. I had about a day to decide, after having just lost Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. But I agreed to go and was in Cape Town little more than a week later. Why not?

The best way to tell who had way too much time on their hands: they’ve bought something that they realized was absurd  a timeshare in a war zone, or an alpaca farm  but instead of admitting that, say, alpacas wouldn’t fare well in downtown Philadelphia, they try to sell you one, too.

The off-season would not be complete without creating the ultimate drill to fix your broken swing. Hit with one eye. Hit blindfolded. Hit with your back to the pitcher. Or maybe kneel on this hand while biting a piece of tree bark, and then swing. The best part about these homemade drills is the special bats or strange machines players usually invent so the drills can be executed correctly. Landfills near major league cities are full of ballplayers’ discarded off-season mock-science contraptions.

When I was in the minor leagues, I had the brilliant idea to work for some extra spending change over the holidays. So I took a job at a Barnes and Noble in North Jersey. (Although I was a first-round bonus baby, we only made $850 a month my first pro season, which was quite a shock.) I had an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, so in many respects I was considered overqualified for my job as a cashier. Still, I figured I was a ballplayer who was keeping busy and making some Christmas money.

That was until a guy walked into the store wearing a Penn Engineering hat. He was young, maybe a sophomore, and when I told him that I had graduated from the engineering school, his face fell. Then I pieced it together: I had shaken his hope for getting a job commensurate to his Ivy-league degree.

But I was only doing what ballplayers do in the off-season: something that makes no sense whatsoever.

So I have heard of teammates falling out of tree blinds, getting lost on mountains, flying fighter jets, dating supermodels, gaining 100 pounds of muscle, going back to some motherland, getting married while already married, or working out with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s butler’s personal trainer. After a while, no tales I might hear that first day of spring training could surprise me.

In the next few months, read your papers, surf your favorite sites. If you come across some crazy story about an athlete, it’s probably a baseball player with an inordinate amount of time on his hands. But forgive him  it’s just the off-season.