YETI Presents Offseason

It's always just been baseball for me. 22 years of my life, like it's never faded. It's never not been there. That's my passion. That's my love. I went from the highs of making the team out of spring training to the lows of getting sent down to AAA and then I had the worst numbers in the minor leagues. As a pitcher, you know, that stuff sticks with you and all the work I put in just didn't really pan out. I've been blessed with a good left arm and I wanted to have success with it. Baseball's a fickle game. Sometimes it'll reward you and sometimes it'll humble you. Being in the major leagues, if you go out there and have a bad game, it's under one of the biggest magnifying glasses out there. Everybody wants to be a number one. So once you're there, everybody's shooting for you. Your whole career relies on how you perform and the work that you put in. For me, it's all about preparation. During the season, you're so constrained to time frames and the clock on the wall. The off-season when I'm traveling around in the van and I don't even have self-service. Traveling in Shaggy, I can get that sense of solitude. Being on the road, you know, you're alone and you can just sit there and think and not have to talk to anybody and find peace from what we've been given in the air. You know, I just lay down and wake up the next day and I'm not really sure what the next day brings. Kind of out of nowhere, they told me I had to start going in to see doctors to do tests on something they found on an MRI. Once people found out that I had cancer, it's easy for that to get lost in the mix of who you are as a baseball player. I was down on myself for being in Triple-A and then it was like, you know, I'm just glad to be playing baseball. No matter if it's big leagues, Triple-A or Little League, there's something that I have to lean on whether it's faith or baseball, you know. I think that was God talking to me saying, hey, like, don't be so hard on yourself. Just go out there and have fun. The off-season is a time to get away and relax a little bit. Enjoy the outdoors, you know, something that I grew up in. It kind of keeps me grounded in that sense. You can never be in a hurry driving one of these old Volkswagen's. You're going nowhere fast. All these people are flying by at 75, 80 miles an hour and I'm just sitting there cruising at 55 in the right lane and not really worrying about what time I get there. There's a lot that goes into getting from one place to the next. It's kind of funny to look back on, but at that time, it's a bummer. And it's just frustrating. You know, you want to expedite that process. I want to hurry up and get off the DL. I want to hurry up and get a shaggy fixed. It'll happen in its own time. And that's the hardest thing to kind of grasp is like, I have no control over this. I'm always in search of balance in my life. Staying in that happy medium is important to me. When you're paddling out, trying to catch that next wave. That sense of peace that you get is incredible. The only thing that I can really compare with it is being alone on the mound. You're out there and you literally don't hear anything. It's just you and the ball, the guy trying to hit it. All I can think about is executing that next pitch to make that guy swing and miss. I've always dreamed of this. I knew it would happen one day, but I always told myself to just, you know, be who you are and never change. There's an undeniable passion for the game that makes everything OK. You can't fake it, you can't just make it up. You know, build on your passion and keep the fire burning.