They Asked Me to Coach. I Still Wanted to Play.

In 2024 I was the pitching coach for the Party Animals.

Sold-out ballparks. Big league stadiums. The most fun anybody is currently having in baseball. I moved my family across the country for it, and I'd tell you honestly that a lot of it was great.

I also spent the entire season standing in the wrong place.

What the days actually were

Up around seven to eat. On a bus by nine, or ten, or eleven, depending on which bus you were on. At the field until roughly midnight. Sleep. Do it again.

You're on stage the whole time. Not during the game — the whole time. Fans first, always, every interaction, all day. That is genuinely the job and it's why the thing works.

And I want to be clear that I liked that part. I'm weird and I'm loud and I'll dance in front of ten thousand people without needing to be talked into it. I'm not a good dancer. It has never once stopped me. If the job had been be strange in public for a living, I'd have been perfect for it.

Coaching pitchers in a format built to invert pitching

Here's the part I found genuinely hard, and it isn't a complaint about anybody.

Almost everything I know about pitching is about staying within yourself. Finding your own tempo. Slowing the game down when it speeds up. Controlling the one thing on the field that only you control, which is when the next pitch happens.

Entertainment baseball inverts that on purpose. The clock is the point. So the coaching reduces to two things: throw strikes and be entertaining. Work fast. Keep it moving.

That's the correct coaching for that product. I'd give the same advice again. But there's not a lot of pitching coach in it, and there's not a lot of room to work on somebody's craft when eleven other things are being thrown at both of you all day.

The actual problem was sixty feet six inches

I could tell you the hours were long or the money was light and both would be true, and neither is the real thing.

The real thing is that I can still pitch.

I'm forty-one and I throw a hundred pitches a game in Florida heat. I've never had my real chance as a player — I've written elsewhere about the four organizations that picked me up and couldn't clear me. And when this job came, some part of me genuinely believed it was the answer to that. That it was the thing finally arriving. That I'd end up on a mound in a major league stadium after all, just by a road nobody could have drawn.

Then I spent the year in the dugout, watching, forty feet from where I wanted to be.

That's not a knock on the job or the people in it. It's that I took a coaching job for reasons that were never really about coaching, and a season is long when you're standing next to the thing you actually want.

What it taught me about myself

I've coached kids for most of my adult life. I'm good at it, I love it, and I'm not about to stop — it's most of what I do. So for years I assumed the professional version was the natural next step: same work, bigger stage.

It isn't the same work at all, and I'm not sure I ever wanted the professional coach's life. I want to compete. I want the ball. Coaching is the thing I do because I have something to give and because there's a kid in Central Florida who needs what Tom Novak gave me. It was never my substitute for playing.

That's a useful thing to find out at forty, even if the finding out costs you a year.

Where that leaves me

Still pitching. Still expecting a hundred pitches out of myself every outing. Still, honestly, wanting the shot — and now saying so out loud instead of hoping a coaching job turns into one sideways.

If you're taking a job adjacent to the thing you love because the thing itself hasn't come — I'd think hard about that. Adjacent is not close. Some days adjacent is further away than being nowhere near it, because you can see it from there.