Dirk Hayhurst always wanted to become a famous baseball player.
As his new book, Out of My League, details, Hayhurst reached the majors in 2008 with the San Diego Padres but quickly found out life as a big-league ballplayer was much different than he had imagined.
On his personal web site you can read sample chapters from Out of My League.
He was a baseball player alright, just not a famous one. Hayhurst managed to attain fame however, as an author, thanks to his debut book, 2010’s The Bullpen Gospels; Major league dreams of a minor league veteran.
The 30-year-old recently sat down with sportsnet.ca for an extensive interview in which he talked about the genesis of his writing career, baseball players as role models and why his next book — focusing the time he spent with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2009 and 2010 — will have a much darker and serious tone than his first two works…
Where did your interest in communications come from?
I did speech and debate in high school. Let’s start there. I was asked to do it by a teacher that thought it would be good for me. I got to do humourous interpretation, which is like stand-up comedy and I really enjoyed it. I got to get up in front of people and compete verbally, I had to be quick-witted and memorize all these character voices.
I fell in love with the adrenaline of getting in front of a crowd, and that fed into the baseball. The confidence from performing fed into the confidence on the mound.
There were very few people doing speech and debate that were also athletes because the creative mindset culture and the athletic mindset culture were very different mentally and here I was crossing both.
I wanted to go to college to do professional speaking. Baseball has been and will always be a what-have-you-done-lately kind of job. You’ve got to live right in the moment of it and base your worth on statistical perfection. People don’t really know you; they just know the uniform and the numbers attached to it. But in the speech and debate world, it’s a tight group and family and you’ve got their support when you’re nervous because you’re going out there alone and you’re cheering for each other. And there’s a lot of cute girls involved with it – which is cool.
It was a really gratifying because the team culture is different. They were creative minds and they knew everybody needs encouragement. At the end of every competition, you’d get called up on stage and you’d win an award. It was such a unique cultural fit for me.
Do you think you might have found baseball more rewarding if you hadn’t had the experience of enjoying the stage so much frist, and possibly comparing the two cultures?
That’s a good question. That’s one I never thought of before. You look at lot of athletes today and they’ve only ever done their sport. It is their whole life and their identity is wrapped up in the sport. To compete at the highlest level, that’s an asset. But then it eventually ends for everybody and there’s a lot of horror stories of guys who have only ever been athletes, only ever thought about athleticism and then when it goes…their identity goes with it.
So maybe if I had kept strictly in sports, I would have been more of a Type A, athletic guy. But on the other hand, I want to say, "I don’t know," because I don’t know when those traits started manifesting themselves. I’ve always been a ‘ask the big questions, look at the big picture kind of guy,’ and that’s never really fit well in the baseball world.
Did the stage fulfill you in ways that baseball didn’t?
Yeah, I think it did. I think the difference is that you get to take something and interpret it in speech and debate or whether you do communications.
You take a comedy concept and you make it uniquely your own and it’s in your control the entire time; the whole production, the whole buildup, the camaraderie around it. It’s just different.
In the baseball spectrum, so much of it happens when it’s out of your control. As soon as I let go of the ball, I can’t control what will happen. I can’t control the scorekeeper’s discretion. It’s true I can’t control how people are going to review my books either, but I know that if I write something and don’t like it, I can change it. I can delete it until it is what I want. It’s an authentic expression of me, every time. Whereas in baseball, the result dictates what I am.
How did the stage translate into the writing?
I started writing when I was failing a lot at baseball. Five years into the game I thought I was going to be out of the game. I felt like a failure. My identity was the game.
One of the big things was, nobody was writing about me. I wasn’t popular to anyone anymore, I wasn’t in print, I wasn’t a story. I just wasn’t relevant anymore. And that’s a hard thing for an athlete; when you’re not relevant to the culture, that’s it.
So I decided that this year was going to be my last, and since I was probably going to get released anyway in 2007, I might as well write about the experiences and maybe sell those experiences to somebody.
So it was this grandiose dream that I could write everything down and if people would buy it…I would be relevant again. What I found out was, by taking it and recording the events, and dissecting them, it gave me this chance to own it and put a new spin on what was happening to me, maybe not on the field, but what was happening in my life.
Have any players told you that you have changed their perception of the game?
I’ve had guys come up to me – a lot guys in the minors – older guys not so much. When you’re in the big leagues, you’re worried about authoring your own history so younger guys, guys in the minors have come up to me and said, ‘I’m glad you wrote this.’ I still have people write me and tell me that to this day. That’s great and I hope I get those letters well into the future. That’s who I wrote it for.
Do you feel a responsibility to share the lessons you learned?
I feel like I had an angst to do it. I wanted people to know that it really wasn’t always about dumb clichés and who was popular, there are other people that exist in this game, that we sell our souls to it and it doesn’t pan out.
Has your experience as an author changed your relationship with baseball?
I still love the game from this standpoint: it brings people to a situation where they can make an amazing impact on the world. There’s no other industry like sports; it can turn people into almost super-human figures and you can do so much positive with that.
It’s an industry that creates these people, it’s an entertainment-driven industry, but it is an industry. At this level it’s not just a game, it’s definitely a business.
From analyzing the whole process now, I burden the player with taking that responsibility seriously and making a positive impact because that’s your legacy.
On role models and Albert Pujols:
It depends on what we define a role model as. Anybody can be a role model and I don’t think you get to choose whether to be a role model or not. Somebody asked me the other day how could anybody relate to someone like Albert Pujols?
Well, he’s only above us because we live in a culture where fame, money and power are the ultimate goals in life and he possesses all three and therefore he’s better, he’ll never know hardship.
But that’s not true. His daughter has special needs. I’m sure he would give up that fortune, for his daughter not to be afflicted.
Life is going to be easier for them because they’ve made a lot of money, but, at the end of the day, cancer’s not going to say, oh you’re rich, I’m not going to bother you. We tend to think of money and fame and power as this shield that deflects all these problems that life can throw at us away.
Which players have earned their iconic status for all the right reasons?
I think there are guys who do a lot with what they’ve been given.
I’ve always been fascinated with Roy Halladay. He just knows what he is and he’s cool with it. He enjoys his money and God bless him, he’s earned it. At the same time, he also gives a lot of it back. All athletes of that stature are under a lot of scrutiny to be perfect, and he tried to stay out of it as much as possible.
He just goes about doing his job and that’s what I respect. You’ll never see a guy outwork him. He’s dedicated to his craft. He speaks sparingly because he realizes it’s not really important, what he does on the field is important. He gives a lot of money away to good causes and that’s cool.
I think there are guys in sports that are doing a very good job and then there are guys who think, ‘I’m the shit, man,’ and they can do whatever they want because they’re at the top of the heap.
Hayhurst is currently working on his third book, which will revolve around his time with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2009 and 2010 when he was recovering from a shoulder injury.
The still-untitled book will be released sometime in 2013. And as he told sportsnet.ca, the tone of the book will be much darker than anything else he has previously written…
What did you make of Jose Bautista’s 10-home run September 2009:
The thing about Jose was his athletic ability and you saw that immediately.
I think everybody scrutinizes him because (his rise) was just so abrupt. But to me, it wasn’t because you saw flashes of it. There was explosive power in him. He just wasn’t playing that much. When you’re playing that infrequently, you’re afraid to make a mistake and as an athlete they tell you not to play scared.
So I think when he found out he was going to be out there no matter what, he started to relax, let his swing go, and it started working.
Maybe he didn’t know how much talent he had because he didn’t have a chance to showcase it, but I think once he found whatever it was inside of him, he just started putting it together. I can’t speak for him, but it didn’t look like a fluke to me.
On what the next book will cover:
I hate being told what to write about. I think what you’ve got understand is the books that I’ve written, they’re not about going into the team and talking about what this guy or that guy is doing every day. I don’t do that stuff. I’ve never done it and I won’t do it in this one.
I do talk about Alex Anthopoulos calling me up in the off-season during the regime change and he was calling to make sure everybody knew, "hey, I’m in the new guy and I just want you to know I like you and care about you guys."
He was making friends with us because he was now our direct boss.
There’s things like that, like how Roy Halladay – and I’ve already written this chapter so I’ll just tell you – I’m in the weight room at a local gym when I learn of the Roy Halladay trade and what nobody is talking about is who is going to replace this guy?
Everybody’s talking about what he’s going to mean to Philadelphia because honestly, Toronto gets hardly any attention in America. But I know to all the guys on (the Jays), I know it’s going to suck because it meant we had a night off in the bullpen every time he pitched.
You didn’t want to go out to relieve him of his game. He might kill us! He’s that locked in. But on the other side of that, this superstar just left and we realized now somebody’s got to step up and fill the void and who’s it going to be? Aaron Hill? Lind?
Who’s going to be the face of the Jays? If you’re a player in the Jays organization, you know that somebody is going to be it because they have to manufacture greatness. Every team does.
Everybody knows who the Gods of the organization are, and I go into that a lot.
B.J. Ryan was one of the oldest guys on the team, if not the oldest when I was there and he wasn’t the friendliest of persons and that’s a nice way of saying it. But he was the Lord of the Clubhouse; he made the rules and we did what we were told. In the clubhouse, the things that matter the most are time, seniority, performance and money. So for the bullpen guys, you do not piss him off. He makes all the rules.
Fictitious example: if Halladay wanted to walk in on his start day and tell everyone, ‘I don’t want anyone in this clubhouse,’ a lot of the younger guys would definitely do what they were told.
On the relevance of team chemistry:
Look, we’re a culture that wants to quantify things, whether it’s the stock market, or Yahoo! fantasy baseball. We tend not to trust things we can’t quantify. The thing is, not everybody on the team has the same, ‘I want to go out there and kill everybody personality.’
You have guys with severe confidence issues, now more than you ever. Guys trying to perform at the top and hold it together while doing it. You know what I want to cover in the Jays book is this: everything’s going to get framed around the fact that once you get into that system, any baseball system, there’s an expectation to perform.
If you don’t perform, for some, it starts this chain of negative events. Guys can’t come to another guy and say, "oh my gosh, I’m devastated, I’m so hurt, my soul is wounded, my dream is crippled, let me cry on your shoulder, brother."
What happens is, ‘Let’s go out to the bar, tie one on, bust that slump with a chick.’
For me, I get up there, I get hurt, people are paranoid of me for writing. Part of my survival with the Jays became sleeping pills.
I couldn’t turn my brain off with all of this anxiety of trying to perform in the big leagues every night. I know there were guys leery of me because of my writing and I’m still finishing the book so I was up late until 3 or 4 in the morning. I’ve got deadlines to meet and I was having trouble keeping it together because I’m doing two jobs at once and I’m afraid one is going to ruin the other.
So I started to get this habit with sleeping pills and soon I can’t go to sleep without them. Then I get injured, super depressed, guys are upset with me because they think the book was more important to me than baseball, I go to (injury) rehab for three hours a day and then I go back to my hotel room by myself for the rest of it. No one wants to hang out because no one wants to be written about. I became isolated.
It was really dark. There were times when I’d sleep 18 hours a day.
Did you go to the Blue Jays with your struggles?
I did and here’s the kicker: for the longest time I tried to just fight it and when the sleeping pills weren’t doing enough, I started doing it with alcohol.
As soon as I started doing that, I knew it was dangerous. I think it was a week of doing that (in 2010). So it wasn’t crazy crazy, but I knew it could become a bigger problem.
The thing is, there’s more than just the Jays I want to cover (in the book). There’s this thing that happens to guys. Baseball is not structured to deal with mentally broken guys because of its culture.
Emotional things are not quantifiable. Depression is scary to baseball players.
When you are sensitive, damaged goods, you can tell that at that point, the team is going to start closing off to you because they don’t know how to handle you.
I was aware of it happening because I’ve seen it happen to other guys. Any kind of psychological issue tends to make other people uncomfortable and guys don’t want to deal with that. You start to get excluded. In the isolation, you turn to a lot of destructive behaviour. Eventually it gets so destructive they have to get help because they’ve done, or are about to do, something really stupid.
When these struggles become public, it brands you.
How does baseball deal with players suffering from mental health issues?
They have team psychological advisors and you go to them and a lot of guys use them, but they don’t tell anyone. It’s really kind of hush-hush. There are some things you can talk to a buddy about, like "I’m angry or I’m pissed.’
What you don’t say is, ‘I feel like killing myself.’
I think baseball as a whole tries to do as much as anybody else would, it’s just the environment they’re working in is different. The problem with baseball is this: you’re playing a sport everybody in the world wants to play. You’re living a dream. You should be happy. So for you to tell anybody that you’re not for reasons as ridiculous as, ‘I can’t tell you why I feel bad,’… do you know what kind of reaction you’re going to get for that?
It was hard for me. It was a struggle and while a lot of people would look back on it as the best time of their life, it was one of the hardest times of my life. I never thought about wanting to hurt myself until (2010). I did have guys on the team that were angry at me for expressing myself at all.
On Twitter:
I was in the Blue Jays lockeroom when somebody was impersonating Roy Halladay on Twitter and we had like a big security meeting about it, and I remember thinking "what’s the big deal?"
Twitter was a god-send. I didn’t have to beg a media guys to talk about my book, I could just talk about it, boom – cut out the middle man. I still did, but I didn’t have to. But then the code of baseball sets in: you don’t talk about what happens outside of baseball. You saw the old guard of baseball colliding with technology and it was a bloody collision. Twitter was a huge ‘no’ with some teams, especially with the Jays. That wasn’t decided by the management, it was decided by the clubhouse structure, unwritten.
And then there were some teams like the Rays, who were pushing their players to do it with young guys who were engaging… it had a positive result. (Laughs) now-look at the Jays; they’re all over (Twitter).
That’s the thing: these hard things happened while I was with the Jays. People are like, well, why don’t you write about the ’09 season when so many interesting things happened? Anybody can write a book about the good times. I could sell a book about the great times, but what I want to do with this book is what I’ve always wanted to do with all my books and that’s show fans another side of the game and maybe help players when I write it.
What did you mean when you said you might not be so nice about this next book?
Now that I’m writing it, it’s got a lot of dark humour, like writing about the time I overflowed the Phillies toilet by accident and Carlson was ready to kill me because he had to take a crap in the middle of a game.
The tone is different because it covers subject matter that is hard to hear. I hope it’s an eye-opener and I also hope for players they’ll be like, "thank god someone expressed this or, I’m not alone, or I don’t have to go down this road alone."
There are no books that express how an athlete can have everything or be a role model or an icon and still feel like there’s nothing to live for, and not understand why and struggle with that.
Look man, I don’t want to ever feel like that or go through that again. But when it gets so bad that you need some kind of destructive habit to distract you from your life, because if you don’t you want to live anymore… (the book) will be cathartic for me, and I hope helpful to others and eye-opening to fans, but I think what you want to know is…will I be going after players in the book?
So…will you be going after players in the book?
No, I probably won’t. Yeah, I say probably because I have thought about it, and the reason being is, there’s a great deal of anger about it looking back. How anybody can be as narrow-minded as to say, "hey look, I know you want to kill yourself, but that would be better than you writing about your life."
These guys knew what I was up against. You’re at an all-time low and all they’re concerned about is, "you need to stop Twittering because you’re making us uncomfortable."
I remember just being crushed by that. I was a grown man and I went home and I wept over what I had gotten myself into and it was really difficult.
Look, I don’t mean to say the whole Jays team was like this, because they weren’t. It wasn’t like that at all. There were just a few guys here, in the wrong places and the worst times. I was struggling with my view of life as I knew and they viewed their entire existence through a relationship to baseball.
But I’m angry at someone’s ignorance, really. Because until you walk down that road, you won’t understand what someone’s going through. And that’s why I really wanted to write this, because I want people to know, you do not get super-human strength with a super-human title
Are you happy now?
I am happy now. I remember telling my wife I wanted to work on this concept of sustainable happiness. And she was like, "well what does that mean for you?"
Well, I’ll tell you what it means. It means I don’t care how much I make as long we as long we wake up everyday and we enjoying it. If want to work at something, we will. If we don’t, we don’t. We were smart with our baseball money. We invested it, we paid off our house.
So I thought about maybe becoming a photographer or becoming a sports psychologist, or maybe I’d go play in Italy… I have so many side projects in my head. I really want to travel more.
How many books do you think you have in you?
As many as they’ll pay me to write (laughs). I recorded my entire year with Bull Durham-and there are guys who are terrified at this point that I’ll write about that too. Obviously whatever I do in Europe I want to write that down as well.
