I Found a List I Made of Everyone Who Got Me Here

I found a page in an old notebook the other day, headed List of Influences, in my handwriting from around 2011.

Two columns. One is musicians. The other is people.

I've been writing this site for a few weeks now, digging through emails and documents from twenty years ago, and this page stopped me harder than any of it. Because I expected the second column to be full of names you'd recognise, and it isn't. There's one professional athlete-adjacent figure on the entire list, and he's a scout.

The rest are just people who showed up.

The first four names

Mary Evelyn Hess — my beautiful mother Pamela Hess — my strong aunt Garrett — my life Rodney Hess — my father

My mother died on 22 May 2005, a week and a half after she and I sat together in a meeting about what my life would look like after a hip replacement. She never saw the operation she'd prepared me for — it was two months later. My father had died the previous September, on the 25th. Eight months, the pair of them.

I wrote "my beautiful mother" next to her name maybe six years after she was gone, in a notebook nobody was going to read.

And there's Pamela, immediately after her. My aunt. When my mother died I lost my health insurance with her, and Pam is the reason I was covered again in time for the operation to happen at all. I have written about that on this site as a thing that occurred. Here's her name.

Garrett is my brother. "My life" is what I wrote.

"My angels"

Two names on the list have that written beside them: Bob Kysar and Julie Kysar, and further down, Andy — another angel.

I met the Kysars playing in the Connie Mack World Series in Farmington, New Mexico. The summer of my hip replacement — two months after my mother died — I went out there and worked for Bob helping open the first indoor baseball and softball training facility in town.

I was nineteen, both parents gone inside eight months, four weeks post-op. They gave me a job and somewhere to be. I got a truck out of it, which is the truck I later drove to Chicago to play professional baseball.

I called them angels in a private notebook. I'll say it in public now.

The one who was there from the start

Coach Novak — since the beginning

Tom Novak has been my pitching coach since I was a kid and he has believed I belonged in the big leagues longer and louder than I have. He's the reason I called my first professional manager to ask for fifty dollars more a month, because in Novak's mind I was underpaid at any number.

He was standing in the parking lot at the Peoria Sports Complex the day I signed with the Padres. He gave me a hug. I told him I wasn't going to celebrate yet.

"Since the beginning" is exactly right and I don't know that I ever told him I'd written it down.

The one I'm not going to name

There's a name on that list with my lady written beside it.

She was my partner for several years — the years that mattered most, as it turns out. She's the reason I ended up in Chicago at all: she was moving back there, so when a scout asked where I'd want to play, I said Chicago, and the ThunderBolts called me that night. My whole professional career started because of where she was going.

She was a professional dancer and she was very good at it, and watching somebody chase a hard thing beside me made chasing mine feel less absurd.

We're not together and haven't been for a long time, so I'm not putting her name on a website. But she's on the list in my own handwriting, and it would be dishonest to publish the page and quietly skip the line. She earned her place on it.

The baseball men are outnumbered

Out of a list of more than twenty people, only three are baseball professionals:

Jon Kazanas, the White Sox area scout who tried to draft me out of junior college, stayed in touch for years after nobody would clear me, told me about the open tryout that started my career, and later sent me to Mack Newton in Phoenix.

JJ Lally, the scout who pulled five of us aside at that tryout and got me into independent ball, then tried to sign me to Kannapolis a year later and got blocked by a human resources department.

Ricky Scruggs — beside his name I wrote centerfield baseball, which is a training facility, not a position.

Everyone else is family, or friends, or the Hyatts, or Dr. Larson, who is my chiropractor.

My chiropractor made the list of influences on my life. I stand by it.

What I actually take from this page

I've spent this year writing about the organisations that signed me and couldn't keep me, and the Hall of Famers who wrote my name on lineup cards, and a man who rehabbed Bo Jackson.

Then I find a page where I sat down, in a notebook, with nobody watching, and wrote out who actually got me here — and it's my mother, my aunt, my brother, a family in New Mexico who took in a broke nineteen-year-old, a pitching coach from my childhood, some friends, and a chiropractor.

Not one of them could have done anything for my career. Kazanas and Lally tried and were overruled. The rest had no leverage at all. They just kept showing up.

If you're building something and you're keeping a mental list of the people who could open a door for you — go and write the honest version. Mine had almost nobody on it who could have opened anything.

It has the people who were there.

And a whole other column

The left side of that page is twenty-three musicians. Talib Kweli, Nas, Citizen Cope and Jack Johnson have stars drawn next to them.

That's a different post, and I'll write it, because the honest answer to "what got you through the rehab" involves a set of headphones more than it involves anything I've said so far.