The Summer I Played Professional Baseball in the Czech Republic

Written from Brno in the summer of 2012, in the middle of my sixth professional season, and lightly edited since.

Most people don't know you can play baseball across Europe if you know the right people.

Over my career I'd played with guys who'd played all over the world. One of them connected me, and in 2012 I left the Atlantic League mid-season and went to the Czech Republic.

That decision confused a lot of people. It's the one I'd defend hardest.

What I was leaving

The Atlantic League is the highest level of professional baseball outside of affiliated ball. Better, in my view, than most international leagues. It's where guys go to get seen.

I was pitching for the Bridgeport Bluefish, managed by Willie Randolph, a man with more than a decade in the big leagues as a player and a World Series ring as a coach. That's who was writing my name on a lineup card.

And I was, more or less, living in the clubhouse. I didn't have a car. My host family was thirteen miles away. Every single day was a logistical zoo before it was a baseball problem.

It was my sixth professional season and I had no money. I was pitching decently; a couple of blow-ups had my ERA up around six after seven games, but I'd had genuinely good starts in there and I felt like I belonged at that level.

Which was, strangely, the problem.

What European baseball actually looked like

There were eight teams in the entire country.

We played one doubleheader on the weekend and practiced twice a week. That's the job. Nobody there is trying to become a professional baseball player; the local guys don't get paid; only the imports do. They love the game and they want to be the best team in the country, and it's played more for pride than for a career.

The competition wasn't close to the American level, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Most of those guys couldn't have made an independent club in the States. That isn't a knock on them; they play a fraction as often, so they improve a fraction as fast. Frequency is most of development.

I say it plainly because a young player reading this should know what these opportunities are and aren't.

The part I struggled with

I'm someone who tries to get better every single day, and the Czech schedule made that genuinely hard.

Minimal obligation. Practice twice a week, play once a weekend, and the rest of your time is your own. I tried to get out four or five days a week anyway, but I'd be lying if I said my edge didn't dull that summer. It did. My work ethic slipped and I made some decisions I wouldn't have made at home.

I gave myself some leeway on that, and I still would. When you're somewhere genuinely new, you have to disconnect from your normal for a while to get anything out of it. But it was real, and it's the honest cost of the trip.

What pulled me back was yoga. I found a hot yoga studio in Brno, a short tram ride from my flat, and every time I've had a consistent practice, everything else in my life has fallen into line. That's been true for twenty years.

Why I actually went

Here's the real reason, and it's the reason I still think about that summer.

I never wanted to just reach affiliated ball. I wanted to pitch in the big leagues, and once it was clear that affiliated ball wouldn't clear me, my plan became: go as high as anyone will let me, anywhere on earth, and see if that opens a door. The Atlantic League was step one of that. Japan was the hope.

Then I was there, belonging, and doing the arithmetic. What is the point of pitching well at the highest level available if the thing it's supposed to lead to has already told you no, four times, for a reason that has nothing to do with how you throw?

That's a hard thing to carry to the mound every fifth day. I was at the end of my rope and spinning my wheels at the best level I'd ever pitched at, which is a combination I wouldn't wish on anybody.

Then a friend called. Trevor Caughey, another lefty, had pitched in the Czech Republic before me. He put my name forward and told me to go take the opportunity.

I didn't go because I'd given up on the major leagues. I went because I wanted to make one decision for me, rather than making every single decision in service of a dream.

You want it so badly that you become a slave to it. That's a real thing and it happens to good players. Every meal, every off-season, every relationship, every choice measured against whether it moves you closer to the show. And the cruel part is that the wanting doesn't actually make it more likely.

So for one summer I chose differently, and I decided baseball could also be a currency, a way to see the world I'd never otherwise have seen.

The one thing I do regret

I had to travel that day or miss the deadline. So I texted Willie Randolph and I was gone the next morning.

I never said it to him face to face. He'd given a thirty-year-old-looking twenty-six-year-old with a replaced hip a job at the best level available, and I told him by text message and left.

If I could take one thing back from that whole year, it's that. Not the leaving, the way I left. Going was right. A text wasn't.

That summer didn't get me to the big leagues. It also isn't the thing I regret.

What I'd tell a young player

The big leagues can be your pinnacle without being your only measure. I kept pitching for years after that summer, won another championship, and I'm still on a mound at 41.

There is more in this game for you than one destination. If the only version of a successful career is the one that ends in the major leagues, then almost every professional baseball player who has ever lived has failed, and that's obviously nonsense.

Use the game. Let it take you places.