The Marriage That Ended on New Year's Eve

I met Shayla in Mazatlán in 2010.

I was twenty-four, in Mexico for spring training with the Diablos Rojos, about to have the strangest and best season of my career. She was Canadian. We kept in touch — loosely at first, then not loosely.

In August 2012 I flew home from the Czech Republic on a few days' notice for a television show that never got made. The show evaporated. I went to visit her instead.

We were married in 2013. She took my name.

What I got wrong, and it was not subtle

She was twenty-one. I was twenty-seven.

I was ready to settle down. I had been professional since I was twenty-one, I had been to five countries, I had four championships and a replaced hip and a very clear sense that I had already had my adventure.

She had not had hers yet.

She wanted to be an actress. That was not a whim she picked up later — it was there, and marrying at twenty-one meant setting it down, and I do not think either of us was honest with ourselves about what that would cost.

The first couple of years were genuinely good. I am not going to revise them downward because of how it finished. I thought I was going to be with her forever. I thought she was the best. That was real while it was happening.

Then she moved to Los Angeles

She did it fairly abruptly, and we were still married.

I followed. Two months later we separated for good.

31 December 2016.

I moved across the country to give it one more chance and it lasted eight weeks, and it ended on New Year's Eve, which is a level of narrative tidiness I would have rejected if someone had written it for me.

2016 and 2017

2016 was the worst year of my adult life.

I had gone from a baseball career, to a marriage I believed in, to sitting in a city I had moved to for a person who was no longer with me. Everything I had organised my identity around had either finished or fallen apart.

2017 was the best year of my life.

Same person, twelve months apart. I started working at a bar on the Venice boardwalk. I started an Instagram account about my hip that turned into something. I went and saw Mack Newton. I was on fire, and I have never fully been able to explain the switch except to say that I hit a different frequency the moment we separated.

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this paragraph. The cheap version says the divorce was a blessing and everything happens for a reason. That is not what I mean.

What I mean is narrower and I think truer: I was in the wrong life and I could not see it from inside, and it took the thing ending for me to find out. That is not a reason it happened. It is just what turned out to be the case.

What she gave me

Here is the part I actually wanted to write, and the reason I am writing about an ex-wife at all.

Shayla introduced me to the concept of abundance.

I had not caught on to it. It was not in my vocabulary and it was certainly not in my behaviour — I had grown up with a real, specific fear of not having money, and that fear was making my decisions for me long after it stopped being rational.

She put the idea in front of me. I have practised it every day since, and it has completely changed my relationship with money and, honestly, with fear in general. It is the reason I make decisions now from the position that things are coming rather than the position that they are running out.

Every business I have built since 2017 was built by a person who thinks that way. I would not be that person without her.

That idea deserves its own post, and it has one.

Why I am naming her

I could have written this with the names taken out. Plenty of people would.

I do not want a version of my story where the good parts have names and the hard parts are anonymous. That is not authenticity, that is public relations. She was in it. She married me at twenty-one, moved countries, gave me the single most useful idea I have, and then went to chase the thing she had put down — which, for the record, was the correct decision.

We have not spoken since. There is no bad blood on my end and there is nothing I want from her.

I just was not going to write the last fifteen years of my life and leave her out of it.