Alright well thank you for having me this is uh it's been an interesting
three years since I retired from baseball in 2017 I officially hung them
up 2016 was my last year and it's been my first experience in the real world
which has been exciting strange somewhat fascinating at times but I like to start
you with a story and so a couple years ago most notably in 2017 I was just
having a really tough time processing the end of my career because it was it
was difficult I had been through a lot and it was the only thing I did since I
was a little boy and so when I Drive I I think and I have a lot of time and I
listen to audio books but a lot of times I just have no radio on I'm just lost in
my own head and what I found in the in the immediate months after retirement
was that I was pretty broken up and I'd find myself teary-eyed sometimes sobbing
just in these little car rides or just sitting in the parking lot and so so one
day I'm sitting in my car and I parked and I start thinking about something
that triggers the waterworks a little bit I started to get teary eye and I
said Dan we're not gonna do this again we've been doing this a lot I don't know
what's going on but you're gonna be strong you're gonna March inside this
Chipotle and you're gonna order yourself a burrito we're gonna be a big boy today
but you know for being a big strong man it's best explained what was happening
through the lens of who I was I was a little kid I went through two surgeries
and then I eventually became this grown man still playing the same little kids
game and through all that the thing that I think made it hardest for me to leave
the game was that I had this idea that I was always building up to something and
I got better every year I was an all-star my second to last season and
and things were always building but at the end when I just realized I couldn't
physically do it anymore it was the first time that I came back and said you
know what this fairy tale that I thought I had just isn't isn't reality
and so at that point you know with the door really shut
behind me all of us athletes we kind of get used up and we're just kicked out
and it's see ya and and moving on at that point is the only thing you can do
and it's a difficult process and I've been learning about the process and
trying to find some strategies for myself and to help others in the future
navigate this better and so one person I came across we got a little messed up
here but Nancy lost Berg her research at the University of Maryland was all about
transitions and she developed this this main theory and this very practical
guide of the four s's that she believes are very central to everyone's
transition whether you're a mother and you've an empty nest for the first time
you're laid off from your job you're retiring you're divorced
whatever it is these major transitions that we go through can all be explained
through these four s's and they're different for everybody so we're gonna
go through those a little bit today as they relate to me and as they relate to
you so the first one is the situation and this can be vastly different so you
could retire to a huge nest egg a beautiful home and you're ready to go
and you've plenty of time to play golf and everything's lined up
you could also retire because you're forced out early and you don't have
enough money saved up and now you're in a very uncertain stressful time so two
people are both retiring but one has a very different situation than the other
which is gonna change the stress all these different things these factors
that are gonna affect how you feel about it and how easy it is to move on so for
me the one thing that I really gathered from baseball with all athletes and you
know I worked with kids for a long time I still do through YouTube a lot of
different means now but parents always want to make their kids
multi-dimensional do other things play the violin you can play baseball too and
play volleyball and soccer and and that's great but for many of us and
myself included we often find a passion and we just dive all into it and it was
impossible for me to be truly multi-dimensional because I just loved
what I was doing so much and I'm sure there's a lot of us in this room we're
in that same way and when you look back you could say man if I had done all
these other things it might have been easier and that's probably true
but I also don't think it's wrong to be all in to be really committed to your
your spouse to your job to the life that you have
knowing that it'll maybe one day make it harder to leave you know we all you've a
pet you have a dog I had iguanas and frogs growing up you
don't love them any less knowing that they'll one day pass on but nonetheless
it does make it difficult so the next one is self and this is who you are
everyone deals with stress differently you know you'd have a soldier goes
overseas comes back with a lot of post traumatic stress disorder another one
could come back and be adjusted very quickly so we all have our individual
factors that are gonna change how we approach a transition in life so for me
one thing that I learned that was really integral to not only what I'm doing
today is I'm changing not only my baseball career is a couple years in the
in the rearview but I'm also transitioning to a new in speaking and
to writing I'm a freelancer I'm working for myself which is what I did but I
have a lot of a lot of things have happened in the last couple years with
me not just baseball but also career moves a geographic move I lived in
Illinois just six weeks ago I lived near DC today and what I what I learned what
I think is most central to me is best illustrated through story so in my
rookie season I was trying to stay on the ballclub as my dad eluded it's very
cutthroat an independent baseball they don't have to develop you to be a major
leaguer they just need you to pitch well so they can put fans in the seats and if
a guy has a string of bad starts they have a line out the door of players who
are calling to replace him and so you feel this as a player you feel like okay
I've had a one bad start now I have two bad starts that's a pattern three in a
row is a really bad place to be so I was
early in my career my first two starts were okay my third one I gave up four or
five runs in the first inning and this was oh man I'm sitting on the bench
thinking I'm gonna get pulled from the game I'm also thinking that my er a is
rapidly climbing and I know that to keep my team in the game and to help my own
numbers calm down I need to put like five or six zeros up if I stay in this
game how can I pitch six scoreless innings
today that's a really large task just the same as today I'm thinking I want to
be this person in the future one of you might want to be CEO or CFO or you want
to start your own company and see it be
profitable in a year those are really big tasks that you can't manage today
but what I did that day and what I learned was is central to being a good
pitcher good golfer good hitter is taking a one inning at a time I could
put up one zero and then I could also get this batter out and I could also
just make this one good pitch and if you make this one good pitch and then you
make the next good pitch sooner or later you look back five
innings later you say well I made 87 pretty darn good pitches today and I
turn into good outing and that's what I did that day I gave I think I gave a one
run for the rest of the game and pitched five four or five good innings and kept
my team in the game and gave us a chance to win which is a really valuable thing
so in these transitions it can seem like oh man I have to change careers how am I
ever gonna get back to where I was you still have to kind of figure out what
your central focus is and it's still just a one-day one pitch at a time
approach number three is support and obviously this is gonna vary from person
as a person as well and one of the big things that I figured
out is that being tough doesn't mean keeping quiet and suffering in silence
what I figured out in the years since I retired is that no athletes are educated
it seems like on their transition on how to leave the game what it's going to be
like and we also don't tend to talk about it at all you know I see my
teammates it's like hey man how you doing you know what are you up to now
I'm doing this and that substitute teaching spending a lot of time the
family oh how you doing I'm good I'm good like a lot of us are not good but
as tough macho athletes we don't feel like we can talk about it and this was a
common theme during my playing career when you're slumping when things are
going really rough and you're pretty torn up about it you're worried about
getting released you're feeling all the pressure it's very helpful to be an
event to someone but you had a lot of times if you vent to your teammates they
view you as weak your coaching staff views you is weak your coaching staff
knows you're thinking about how poorly you're playing and so you end up just
clamming shut and so when I retired I didn't think I had a lot of people in my
immediate circle that I could relate to but that actually was very
wrong you know my mom left a she was the director of Habitat for Humanity for ten
years and she left that job and she felt the same way that I did that this was
her identity and it wasn't anymore and she had a coming to terms of that over
the next year or two lots of us have our own journeys in this and if we allow
ourselves to be a little bit vulnerable and talk about it it eases the
transition significantly as I started to open up to my teammates about how I was
feeling and how lost I was for a while they quickly opened up with the same
stories lastly strategies so all these are not it's not a linear motion from
situation to strategy but they're all intertwined and so we can try to modify
the situation for me there was no modifying the fact that I was done
playing baseball I couldn't get back in but sometimes we can and a lot of times
it's just about moving on and one of my friends actually said this as he and I
were talking and he started to open up about his own career and he said man I
just felt like in the two years that passed it was more work it was harder
for me to just find one thing that I liked doing one thing that I was
passionate about it was harder for me to figure out one thing to do it was way
harder than it was to be good at baseball in the first place and I found
that to be a very profound and also very accurate thing that when we find
something that we love so much and then it's gone
a lot of times it's it's just a mountain of work to find the next thing that
we're really interested in passionate about and so again this is why having
support having our families and also being introspective and taking it one
day at a time trying to dig up and uncover our next thing can be really
really valuable so again the four s is I think this is something that you should
keep in your back pocket because all of you whether it's retirement whether it's
a new job whether it's a relationship that changes whether it's your pet
iguana passes and passes on these are helpful to think about how your
situation yourself your support system and your strategies from moving forward
can make your transition easier because I know everyone's different your
situation will never be the same as someone else is you'll process it
differently and your whole life experience
is gonna lead you to new change and often they can be very very positive if
we let them be that way and the last thing I'm gonna leave you with is a
quote and this was passed along to me by a professor in college when I was facing
my first Tommy John surgery and I explained how I didn't know what the
future held I was gonna miss the MLB Draft that year and he said you know
what a resolute man will find a way and if you're introspective and willing to
do the work and dig and take it one day at a time
whatever transition you face in the future in your own life if you're
resolute and continue to move forward you'll find a way thank you for having
me Oh be around so my I never had shoulder problems my whole life I was
always good my shoulder always had elbow problems since I was 15 but at the end
it was bicep tendonitis and they said basically that my bicep tendon was so
inflamed that it was like permanently thickened and it basically slides
through a groove and when it's too thick to fit through that groove anymore
you're just in constant pain so it took me after I had just realized you know I
I used to throw 91 to 94 and my chain was 84 to 86 the light one night when I
quit it was just I was exhausted trying to throw 80 and that was when I just
knew I actually one night I I was throwing a bullpen when my Academy was
open I owned a baseball academy Illinois and I had a lesson with a 15 year old
right after he was a really good really good pitcher and I was just struggling I
he was like 78 and I was exactly I was exhausted and then I watched this kid as
I'm taking off my cleats and he's warming up and it's 70 72 75 78 79 82
and I'm like it's time the young buck he's 18 years or 15 years younger than
me and does look like you know I can't do anymore I mean his my fast my
fastball was slower than my changeup at that point so and it took two years for
it to heal where I could pick up a backpack and it's it's mostly okay now
but I wasn't going surgery I was too old I was thirty 31 or
32 so I played it in six teams in seven years yeah I started in the front so the
independent leagues follow a similar structure the Meyer leagues where
there's a sort of nebulous group of teams that are the pea guys like 200
bucks a month they're not really real leagues the frontier league is like a
very well-established to get they have good stadiums good crowds like they're
financially stable I did a year in the frontier league then I was traded to the
this newly called the North American League they were like a conglomerate of
leagues halfway through that second season they folded financially so I
signed with fargo-moorhead and the North or the American Association finished
that year did terrible got released at the end of that season went back to the
frontier league played for Evansville blew my elbow out halfway through that
year missed all of next season played for Camden for two straight years I was
my only sort of continuity and then the next year I moved to Long Island and
that was part where my career ended so it was a fun journey I mean I loved
playing different ballparks seeing the country those are the fun parts to me I
loved being on the bus it's like a down time to like I'm going somewhere I want
to go I don't have to drive myself like I don't have to work hard like I'm a
little piece of heaven where I can just be here for 12 hours and when I get
there I get there so it was a good ride
made my first paycheck was 255 10 so they took 45 bucks out of my 600 per
month paycheck I ascended to 1800 my last year so so when they talk about my
daily pay in there and they're working actually to improve that now that's a
very real thing I mean people wife and a kid I don't know how you make that work
you know I was very frugal had my car paid off and I left my apartment every
year so I drove Alfa no rent no car payment it's a cell phone bill ate a lot
of peanut butter and jellies and yeah my first year I was the host family and
that was great because they fed me and very stable place to live my second year
I we were on the road actually for seven weeks and the team voted and then Fargo
Idaho's family evansville I was in a shared studio apartment with three guys
and then in Camden that was the fun year they did a very poor job and the
Atlantic League is a much older league that's the one that's pretty local here
with Southern Maryland blue crabs and Camden most players are 28 to 30 plus so
they usually do have a spouse and so the teams that provides stability get better
players because like hey my wife and my two year old daughter is gonna come like
they need a legitimate place to live Camden didn't do any of that and so
you've got they've got less talent but so anyway so I joined the team I had
three days paid in the hotel and then I had to find my own place so I split a
hotel room by the team rate which was 65 a night with a teammate for about three
weeks so we go on the road we'd move out we'd come back we'd be in the hotel and
then they open up the Rutgers Camden dorms to us so I stay in the dorm for
like $400 a month for about six or eight weeks but between those two times
between the hotel and the dorm opening there was a gap of about maybe 10 days
or two weeks and we slept in the clubhouse so not as nice of a ballpark a
lot older ballpark at this the fluorescent lights buzz all night they
don't really turn off I actually I actually and a lot of the Dominican
players will not just Dominican Latin players who they never sending money
home they had usually maybe like larger
families and some of us they slept there the entire year
and that wouldn't fly most places but they let it happen there and it was so
they had like their they'd sleep in the coach's office placed a little darker so
the place that I I've tried to get where I could get a little bit of Darkness and
be out of the the main great room was the training room but early on I didn't
realize that the ice machine was on all night so every 90 minutes I hear this
like crash and I jumped out of bed is a whole new thing of ice fell down and
then I started turning that off but then I got chewed out by the trainer who's
like why do we have no ice today so I I found the balance of turning the ice
machine off and then turning it back on when I woke up early so produce enough
ice for the game but looking back those are like the fun times I mean that was
that was those are the stories that you tell to your grandkids and all that so
if it's all smooth sailing and beautiful ballparks and it's I don't know cuz it
was a fun time so thank you for having me again