Danny Borne Taught Me How to Be a Pro in the Year His Own Career Ended

I looked up Danny Borne this week for the first time in about eighteen years.

I was trying to spell his name correctly for something I was writing. I had it as Bourne. It is Borne. One letter, and then his entire record opened up in front of me, and I sat there for a while.

Who he was to me

2007 was my rookie year. Windy City ThunderBolts, Frontier League, Crestwood, Illinois. I was twenty-one years old and two years out of a total hip replacement, and I had no idea what I was doing.

Danny was the other left-hander in that bullpen. He was two years older, six foot three, and he had been somewhere I had not.

He was my mentor that year. I do not use that word loosely and I am not using it loosely here. He was the guy who told me how it worked — how to carry yourself, what the veterans expected, when to shut up. Some of the things I still say to twenty-year-olds I coach came out of that bullpen, out of his mouth, in 2007.

We won the championship that September. He is in the photograph at the top of this post, on the right, and I have looked at that picture a hundred times without thinking about what I am about to tell you.

What his record actually says

Baseball-Reference has him as James D. Borne, born 5 May 1983 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan. Marshall High School. Left-handed reliever.

Read it again and look at what is not there.

2007 is the last season on his record anywhere.

He was a St. Louis Cardinals draftee. Two years in a real organization, moving up. Then he was not in it any more, which is how it ends for almost everyone and almost never with an announcement. He landed in independent ball in Crestwood, and that was it. Nothing after.

I did not know. I genuinely did not know. I was twenty-one and I thought he was the established guy and I was the kid, because that is what it looked like from where I was standing. It never occurred to me that the veteran teaching me how to be a professional was, that same summer, quietly running out of career.

The season he spent showing me how to do this was the season his own thing ended.

He did it anyway

That is the entire post and I do not want to over-explain it.

There is a version of a man in that position who is short with the rookie. There is a version who is bitter, or who protects what is left, or who simply keeps his head down and gets through it. Those versions are common and nobody would blame him for any of them.

He was not any of them. He poured it into me while it was happening to him.

I have written about the surgeon who wouldn't tell me no and the chiropractor who threw with me every offseason and the pitching coach who made me ask for fifty dollars. Every one of those men was in a position to give me something. Danny gave from a season that was taking things away from him.

The part I am not going to do

I have his 2007 numbers in front of me. They are not good, and I am not printing them.

They are his, they are from the worst year of his professional life, and he is not here to put them in context. A stat line is a cheap way to make a point about a man who cannot answer back. The story does not need it and neither do I.

What the numbers are actually evidence of is this: he was having a terrible summer, and he still took the time.

Danny, if this ever reaches you

I have lost touch with you completely. I do not have a number, I do not have an email, and you are not on any of the platforms I can find.

I got seven professional seasons out of a hip that was not supposed to give me any. Four championships. Five countries. And the first one — the one that made all the rest of it feel possible — I won in a bullpen where you told me how to behave.

You have three seasons on a page on the internet and no photograph anywhere, and I only found the page because I finally spelled your name right.

You were a champion of a teammate in a year that was ending you. I noticed too late. I am noticing now.