I Signed With the Padres. Five Hours Later They Called It Off.

People assume I never reached affiliated baseball because I wasn't good enough. It's a reasonable assumption. It's wrong, and I've never told the whole story.

Four Major League organizations picked me up. Not one of them was allowed to keep me.

I signed a contract with the San Diego Padres. It lasted about five hours.

Peoria, late February 2009

I'd just finished two seasons with the Windy City ThunderBolts. Two championships, an All-Star selection, MVP of the 2007 championship series, a no-hitter in 2008, and the number six prospect ranking in independent baseball.

Bill Bryk was the one pushing for me. He'd been on me for a while and he got me in front of Grady Fuson, then the Padres' Vice President of Scouting and Player Development.

I threw a bullpen at the Peoria Sports Complex.

Afterwards Fuson told me something he did not have to tell me. He volunteered it. He said I was as good as anybody — any lefty they had in their minor league system.

I don't know if he was blowing smoke. I've turned it over for seventeen years. He had no reason to.

Then I signed the contract.

The parking lot

Tom Novak came to that bullpen.

Novak had been my pitching coach since I was a kid, and for years he'd told anyone who'd listen that I belonged in the big leagues. He believed it louder than I did. When I got my first professional contract, he's the one who made me call the manager and ask for fifty dollars more a month, because in Novak's mind I was underpaid at any number.

He was standing right there when I threw. Afterwards, in the parking lot, he hugged me.

I told him I wasn't going to celebrate yet.

I want to be precise about that, because I've thought about it a lot. I wasn't being humble and I wasn't being superstitious. Somewhere underneath, I already knew.

"Go across the street and get X-rays"

That's what they told me after I signed. Routine. Everybody does it.

I walked across the street and got the X-rays of a hip that had been replaced when I was nineteen. And while I was lying there I had a feeling in my stomach that this wasn't going to work.

I let it go. I hoped for the best. I'd just signed a professional contract with a Major League organization.

About five hours later, Grady Fuson called me and said sorry, it's not going to work out.

That was it. A phone call. I never got a reason in writing — or if I did, I don't have it, and I wasn't in a position to keep good records.

Here's what my life looked like that week: no parents, both gone since 2005. Essentially everything I owned in a truck. No home base. A bank account with nothing in it and student debt I was deferring as long as they'd let me.

I'd signed with a big league club that morning.

What actually stopped it

It wasn't the scouts. Bryk wanted me. Fuson had just told me I was as good as any lefty they had.

It was workers' compensation and disability liability. A club that signs a player with a pre-existing condition takes on insurance exposure for that joint. Nobody could work out how to underwrite a replaced hip.

I want to be fair here, because it would be easy not to be. Nobody at the Padres did anything wrong. They made an insurance decision, and the people making it weren't the people who'd watched me throw. That's exactly the problem — but it isn't villainy.

Two years later, the same man tried again

By 2011 Bill Bryk was Special Assistant to the General Manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He came back for me.

He told my lawyer he'd considered me a major league prospect when he signed me in San Diego, and that if I could show I hadn't lost anything, Arizona was interested now.

I hadn't lost anything. I threw the bullpen in February 2011 and I threw it well.

Then Jerry Dipoto — then Arizona's senior vice president of scouting and player development, later a big league general manager three times over — called me. We talked for about twenty minutes. He told me it wasn't going to work out.

I wasn't begging, but I was trying every avenue I had. I told him I had a lawyer. I told him I'd sign any document they put in front of me. I told him it'd be good publicity for the Diamondbacks if it worked — and asked what the worst case really was if it didn't.

The part nobody knows

While that was happening, this is what was going on behind me, and I only recently found the paper trail.

John Harrison, a lawyer at WilmerHale — one of the largest law firms in the world — took my case. He and his partner Justin Ochs and their colleague Emily Murphy wrote a research memo on how a club could sign a player with a pre-existing condition without taking on the liability. They got on a call with the Boston Red Sox about it.

Harrison took it to the Major League Baseball Players Association. Michael Weiner, the Executive Director of the MLBPA, personally forwarded my file to his legal team. Weiner died in 2013 and I never got to thank him properly.

Dave Prouty at the MLBPA worked my case for months, in the middle of salary arbitration season. He consulted workers' comp attorneys. He floated a workaround under Regulation 2 of the Uniform Players Contract. He looked at how the Barret Loux situation had been resolved with Arizona the year before. He raised taking it to the Commissioner's Office.

In the same stretch I threw a private bullpen for a Pirates area scout, and a team in Japan asked about me.

The players' union and a global law firm spent months trying to find a way for a healthy pitcher to be insurable, and they could not do it.

It wasn't one team. It was four.

I want to correct something, because for years I told this as the Padres story and it was never only the Padres.

Four different affiliated organizations picked me up and then would not clear me to play. Every time, the same reason: I was classified as a liability rather than an asset because of the hip.

The Padres in 2009 is the one that got furthest — I actually signed. The White Sox had a spot for me at Low-A Kannapolis and human resources stopped it. Arizona came for me in 2011 and got as far as a bullpen and a twenty-minute phone call. There was a private workout for a Pirates area scout, a call my lawyer had with the Red Sox, and a team in Japan that asked about me.

Four times a professional organization decided they wanted me. Four times something other than baseball decided they couldn't have me.

Learning to focus on how I responded to the answer — rather than on the answer — is the single most useful thing I've ever learned. That response is literally where MADE came from. Motivation, Appreciation, Dedication, EVEryday. Getting MADE was the process of making myself out of being told no over and over.

What I actually think about it

I don't look at any of this as a bad hand.

It made me who I am, and I'm not sure that's a trade I'd reverse. And I'll be honest about the other side of it too: if I'd been pitching every single day on that hip, maybe it gives out eventually. I don't know. Nobody does.

But I'd have taken that. That's the whole point. I was willing to let it run its course and find out, and I never got to make that choice — because the decision was never mine, and it was never a baseball decision.

I was a top left-handed pitcher for years and I was consistently overlooked, and the reason was an actuarial table.

I'm 41 and I'm still pitching. A hundred pitches a game, in Florida heat, twenty-one years after they replaced the joint.

The hip never gave out. It's the only part of this anyone was worried about, and it's the part that held.