I Got the Visa That Afternoon. That Night, the Tsunami.

In February 2011 the Arizona Diamondbacks told me no. That was the fourth organisation to sign me or try to, and the fourth time something other than baseball ended it.

So I stopped trying to get into affiliated ball in America and started trying to get to Japan.

Why Japan

There's a route people outside the game don't know about. You play independent ball in Japan, you pitch well, and you get looked at by Nippon Professional Baseball — the Japanese major leagues. It's a real path and it has worked for plenty of players.

I never wanted only to reach affiliated ball. I wanted to pitch in the big leagues, and once it was clear American clubs couldn't clear me, my plan became simple: go as high as anyone on earth will let me go, and see if that opens a door.

Japan was that door. The team was Niigata Albirex.

The man who was trying to get me there

The whole thing existed because of one person — a coach I'd played for with the Victoria Seals in 2009.

He knew my story. He knew what I could do and he thought the level of talent didn't match the way my career had gone, and he decided to do something about it. He functioned as my agent without being one.

We spent months on the phone. Because of the time difference a lot of those calls happened at three in the morning, me sitting up in the dark in Arizona working out the details of a life on the other side of the world.

I don't think I ever properly thanked him.

Where I was living while this happened

I should describe the situation honestly, because it's the part people assume was more glamorous than it was.

I was staying with my buddy Skyler. It was the off-season, and every off-season was an adventure in the sense that I never knew where I'd be sleeping. I didn't have a home base. Everything I owned travelled with me, season to season, city to city.

I don't tell that as a hard-luck story. It genuinely wasn't — I was a professional baseball player in my twenties having a good time. But that's the accurate picture of the man on those 3am calls: no house, no lease, all his belongings in a vehicle, arranging to move to Japan.

Four months, two thousand dollars, and a consulate

The Japan process took about four months.

It required an entertainer visa, which is what a foreign professional athlete travels on. That cost $2,000. It required me to physically go to California and appear at the consulate to have my photograph taken.

So I drove to California. I did the appointment. I had the visa.

The only thing left was one phone call: tell them which flight I wanted to take to Niigata.

I was going to make it that night.

11 March 2011

That night, the earthquake hit off the coast of Tōhoku — magnitude 9.0, the largest ever recorded in Japan — and the tsunami came in behind it.

Niigata is on the Sea of Japan, the western coast. The wave hit the Pacific side. Where I was going was, geographically, about as far from the damage as you can be while still being in the country.

I know that. I didn't go anyway.

I'm not going to over-explain this. I had spent four months and two thousand dollars and a great many 3am phone calls to get to the exact point where one phone call stood between me and Japan, and on that precise night the country I was flying into had the worst day in its modern history.

I took it as being told no. Not by a doctor or a lawyer or an insurer this time — by something else. Stay here.

Winnipeg

So I stayed, got back together with the person I'd been with, and signed with the Winnipeg Goldeyes in the American Association.

I'll be honest that it felt, at first, like spinning my wheels. Another indy season. Another year of pitching well somewhere that couldn't lead anywhere.

It wasn't like that.

Winnipeg is one of the best places to play independent baseball in the country — the organisation, the ballpark, the crowds, all of it. And they were high on me from the start.

I was the opening day starter.

For a guy four organisations had declined to clear, standing on a mound for the first game of the season in front of a real crowd for a serious club — that's not spinning your wheels. The photograph at the top of this website is from that period. Number 33, road greys.

What I actually think about it now

There's a version of my career where I got on that plane, pitched well in Niigata, and NPB looked at me. I've thought about it. Anybody would.

There's also a version where I went to a country in the middle of a national catastrophe, twenty-five years old with no home and no support system, and it went badly in ways I can't imagine from here.

I don't know which one I dodged. Nobody gets to know.

What I do know is that four separate times in that career, the decision about my future was taken out of my hands by something that had nothing to do with how I threw a baseball. Three of those were medical departments and legal departments.

The fourth was an ocean.

That one I've made my peace with.