The Fifty Dollars Tom Novak Made Me Ask For

Tom Novak has been my pitching coach since I was a kid.

That sentence undersells it in a way I want to fix, because Novak is not a man who has been around my career. He is a load-bearing wall in it.

The fifty dollars

I signed my first professional contract and I was so happy to have it that I would have played for a bus ticket.

Novak told me to call the manager and ask for fifty dollars more a month.

I want you to sit with how absurd that is. I was an undrafted kid with a replaced hip that four organizations had already flinched at. I had no leverage of any kind. Fifty dollars a month is not money — it's a tank of gas and a couple of meals.

He made me do it anyway.

I called. I asked. I did not get the fifty dollars.

I also showed up to spring training two weeks late because I was finishing my degree, and — this is the part that makes me wince twenty years later — I genuinely did not understand that I could be cut. That's how green I was.

So on paper the whole thing was a failure. Ask, get told no, show up late, keep the same salary.

Except that's not what happened at all.

What he was actually teaching me

It took me years to understand that the fifty dollars was never about the fifty dollars.

In Novak's mind I was underpaid at any number. That was the whole lesson. Not that I'd win the negotiation — he knew I wouldn't. But that a man who thinks he's worth something has to be willing to say so out loud, to someone with the power to say no, before he's earned the right to.

I've thought about that call more times than I can count. When I priced my first lessons. When I quoted my first software project. Every time I've sat across from someone and had to name a number that felt uncomfortably high.

The habit of asking got installed by a man who made a nineteen-year-old beg for fifty dollars he was never going to get.

He believed it louder than I did

Here's the thing about Novak that I've never quite been able to explain to people.

He has believed I belonged in the big leagues longer and louder than I have.

Not "believed in me" in the soft way people mean that. He told other people. For years. He'd say it to anyone in earshot, with total conviction, in rooms where it made him look ridiculous.

There were long stretches where I was the one wobbling — after the un-signing, after the Diamondbacks bullpen in 2011, after being told for the hundredth time that the hip was the reason. Novak never wobbled once. Not audibly. Not to me.

When the Padres signed me and then un-signed me, Novak came to that bullpen. He was there. He's always been there.

And when I was nineteen and deciding whether to have my hip replaced — after Paul Laxalt got me to go get a second opinion — it was Novak who pushed me the rest of the way.

So the two most consequential decisions of my athletic life, getting the hip done and continuing to believe there was a career on the other side of it, both have his fingerprints on them.

What I do with it now

I coach kids in Central Florida. I've written before that I never wanted the professional coach's life — I want to compete, I want the ball. That's still true.

But I coach because there's a kid out there who needs what Novak gave me, and I happen to have it.

Not mechanics. Mechanics are the easy part and everybody teaches them.

What Novak gave me was a person outside my own head who held the high estimate of me steady while I couldn't. Every kid I coach has some version of the same gap — the distance between what they might be and what they currently believe. The job is to stand in that gap and refuse to move.

He's been doing it for me for thirty years.

---

Coach, I never got the fifty dollars. I got everything else.

Thank you.