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. 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, and I remember exactly how: "Can I get fifty dollars extra a month? Because I eat a lot and I want to be able to buy groceries." That was the ridiculous thing I actually said to Andy Haines. I did not get the fifty dollars.

I also showed up to spring training two weeks late, because I stayed in Tucson so I could walk at graduation. I didn't want to miss it, and I had no idea that staying could cost me my pro opportunity. I was so naive I didn't even realize I needed to be there on time. I thought I'd signed a contract, and that meant I was there for the whole year. I genuinely did not understand that I could be released at any time, even before I ever left, and that the contract could have meant nothing. In hindsight it's absolutely crazy. That's how green I was.

Haines was the manager of our team that year, and a rookie manager, thank God. A veteran manager might have said, who the hell are you, kid? You don't have to come.

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.

How he saw 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. He looked at me as very valuable, long before I did. He knew I wouldn't win that negotiation. He just thought a man worth that much should be willing to say so out loud, to someone with the power to say no.

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 came from a man who valued me more than I valued myself, and who had a twenty-one-year-old call and ask for fifty dollars he was never going to get.

He never stopped saying it

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 for as long as I've known him, and he has never been quiet about it.

I believed it too. I never stopped. But Novak said it out loud. He told other people, for years, with total conviction, in rooms where it made him look ridiculous.

After the Padres signed me and then un-signed me, after the Diamondbacks bullpen in 2011, after being told for the hundredth time that the hip was the reason, he was still saying it. He never changed his answer. When the Padres let me go, he came to that bullpen. 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. He made me feel like a potential big leaguer before I felt like one. 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.

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

Thank you.