The Bullpen Gospels: A Non-Prospect's Pursuit of the Major Leagues and the Meaning of Life - Softcover

Hayhurst, Dirk

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806531436 ISBN 13: 9780806531434

Publisher: Citadel, 2010

Synopsis

"After many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years spent in the bullpen, I can verify that this is a true picture of baseball."--Tim McCarver   "There are great truths within, of the kind usually unspoken. And as he expresses them, Dirk Hayhurst describes himself as 'a real person who moonlights as a baseball player.' In much the same manner, while The Bullpen Gospels chronicles how all of us face the impact when we learn reality is both far meaner and far richer than our dreams--it also moonlights as one of the best baseball books ever written."--Keith Olbermann   "A bit of Jim Bouton, a bit of Jim Brosnan, a bit of Pat Jordan, a bit of crash Davis, and a whole lot of Dirk Hayhurst. Often hilarious, sometimes poignant. This is a really enjoyable baseball read."--Bob Costas   "Fascinating. . .a perspective that fans rarely see."--Trevor Hoffman, pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers   "The Bullpen Gospels is a rollicking good bus ride of a book. Hayhurst illuminates a baseball life not only with wit and humor, but also with thought-provoking introspection."--Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated  "Dirk Hayhurst has written a fascinating, funny and honest account on life in the minor leagues. I loved it. Writers can't play baseball, but in this case, a player sure can write."--Tim Kurkjian, Senior Writer, ESPN The Magazine, analyst/reporter ESPN television  "Bull Durham meets Ball Four in Dirk Hayhurst's hilarious and moving account of life in baseball's glamour-free bush leagues."--Rob Neyer, ESPN.com 
"If Holden Caulfield could dial up his fastball to 90 mph, he might have written this funny, touching memoir about a ballplayer at a career--and life--crossroads. He might have called it 'Pitcher in the Rye.' Instead, he left it to Dirk Hayhurst, the only writer in the business who can make you laugh, make you cry and strike out Ryan Howard."--King Kaufman, Salon  "The Bullpen Gospels is a funny bone-tickling, tear duct-stimulating, feel-good story that will leave die-hard baseball fans--and die-hard human beings, for that matter--well, feeling good."--Bob Mitchell, author of Once Upon a Fastball

About this title

From the Author:

Best Baseball Autobiography Since Bouton?

Dirk Hayhurst's description of himself for the author's ID in his upcoming book The Bullpen Gospels reads in part, "Dirk is a former member of the San Diego Padres, and after this book gets printed, a former member of the Toronto Blue Jays."

I'm not sure he's correct. In fact, I'm not sure that in these times when so many fans feel like they're constantly having the wool pulled over their eyes by athletes ill-equipped for the attempt, if Hayhurst's constant honesty, his remarkable candor, his drumbeat of unadorned confessed self-doubt, and his seamless writing, won't resonate through the sport like the first true wonderful day of spring when the game and the weather finally reassure you that winter has been beaten back, at least for a season.

In fact, I'm not sure that he hasn't written the best baseball autobiography since Jim Bouton's Ball Four. For Hayhurst, who bombed as a starter for the Padres in 2008 and then showed promise out of the Jays' bullpen the season past, has written what Bouton wrote, and what a decade before Bouton, what Jim Brosnan wrote - a book that is seemingly about baseball but which, as you read further and further into it, is obviously much bigger than that. These are books about life: struggle, confusion, purpose, purposelessness, and the startling realization that achievement and failure are nearly-identical twins, one which gnaws and deadens, the other which just as often produces not elation but a tinny, empty sound.

Brosnan's achievement, in The Long Season and Pennant Race, was to introduce to a world which previously had no information of any kind on the subject, the concept of athlete as human being. What did he have to do when demoted, or traded? What happened when management changed? Was there a Mrs. Athlete, and could they share a martini now and again? (answer: You bet). 

Bouton's breakthrough was to show the concept of athlete as flawed human being. Too many martinis, some of them shared with women other than Mrs. Athlete. Athletes who might not have been geniuses on the field or off, but who seemed invariably managed and coached by men even less intelligent. The struggle to self-start as one's team sank from optimism, to contention, to inconsistency, to irrelevance, to embarrassment. And yet, were they enjoying themselves, did their lives change for the better, was being an athlete fun? (answer: You bet).

And now here is Hayhurst, who may single-handedly steer baseball away from the two decades-long vise grip of Sport-As-Skill-Development. Since my own childhood, we have ever-increasingly devalued every major leaguer but the superstar. Late in the last century we began to devalue every minor leaguer but the top draft choice. If you don't make it into somebody's Top Prospects list, you might as well not exist. Dirk Hayhurst is writing of his days, his months, his years, as far away from the Top Prospects lists as imaginable. He is, in The Bullpen Gospels, often the last man on an A-ball pitching staff, and trying to answer a series of successively worsening questions cascading from the simplest of them: Why?

This, of course, is why the book transcends the game. It's not just Dirk Hayhurst's existential doubt about whether he'll reach the majors or why he's still trying or if he shouldn't be helping the homeless instead of worrying about getting the last out of a seven-run inning. He is experiencing the crisis of reality through which we all pass, often daily: when our dreams about life crash head first into its realities, what the hell are we supposed to do then?

Thus The Bullpen Gospels is a baseball book the way "Is That All There Is?" is a Leiber-Stoller pop song by Peggy Lee from 1969. It is the primordial battle of hope and faith and inspiration versus disillusionment and rust and inertia.

Sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? But of course therein lies the delightful twist: like Brosnan and Bouton before him, Hayhurst repeatedly rediscovers the absurd hilarity of it all, and the book is consistently laugh-out-loud funny. And like all great artists, he pulls back curtains we never thought to investigate: from how assiduously minor leaguers debate which "Come-out songs" they will choose or which numbers they will wear, to the pecking order of seat locations on the ever-infamous bush league bus trip.

My favorite is probably the mechanics of something the average reader will have never heard of before, let alone have contemplated. It's "the host family" - the living arrangements by which the non-first-rounders survive their seasons in the minors. Hayhurst hilariously defines such temporary homes as ranging from Wackford Squeers' Dotheboys Hall, to the visitations from In Cold Blood.

It doesn't hurt that Hayhurst is a fluid and gifted writer, whose prose can take off like a jet and compel you to read for half an hour more than you have. He populates the pages of The Bullpen Gospels with teammates, some identified, some amalgamated, some under aliases - and if the book takes off, ripping the Hayhurstian masks off the more colorful ones may become a low-key hobby after the book is published on March 30th.

The reaction will be fascinating to see. In 1970, my father endured my clamoring and bought Ball Four and read it himself before handing it to me: "I know you know all these words. Just don't use them around the house. Read this carefully, there's a lot of truth in here." But ever since, we fans have been bombarded for decades by altered versions of truth, all of them writ large and desperately trying to impress us with their essential-ness. Baseball books have tended to focus only on the big, and to try to make it bigger still. We've gone from the unlikely accuracy of Jose Canseco's slimy indictment of the steroid era, through the analyze-all-the-damn-fun-out-of-the-game-why-don't-you tone of Moneyball and its imitators, through what may in retrospect be seen as a Hayhurst-precursor in Matt McCarthy's fraudulent Odd Man Out, through dozens of historical works insisting everything that has ever happened in baseball has re-shaped the nation - Jackie Robinson (yes), the 1951 N.L. pennant race (very possibly), the 1912 World Series (no way).

Here, instead, will be a modest book by a modest relief pitcher who has appeared in the modest total of 25 major league games presenting what the modest author thinks (incorrectly) is only modest truth. He has yet to get his own major league baseball card and as I write this there are exactly two of his souvenirs available on eBay and one of them is a photo for $6.99 ("Or Best Offer"). His preface warns you if you seek scandal or steroids, look elsewhere, and the only bold face name in the whole 340 pages, Trevor Hoffman, comes across as a low-key gentleman.

And yet there in the prologue Hayhurst offers a key to what he has written and why, self-guidance to which he sticks pretty neatly: "I also believe there is more to the game than just baseball. For all the great things baseball is, there are some things it is absolutely not. And that is what this story is all about."

Of course, just as Bouton's exposure of the real flaws of the real men who played baseball in 1969 made them even more appealing than the phony deities into which they'd been transformed, the great things are made somehow greater by how well Hayhurst contextualizes them, how honestly he tells his story, and how vividly he takes us inside his world.

-- Keith Olbermann 

(edited by author)

From the Back Cover:

Dirk Hayhurst is not a superstar. "Top Prospect" is also not a label that attached itself to his name as he toiled away in the Minor Leagues over the years. In the game of baseball, if you don't fit in either of those categories, it  can almost be as if you don't exist.

In his upcoming book, "The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran," Hayhurst tackles this issue head-on, the issue of labels and identity and the problems that come along with them. For a struggling non-prospect, it can become a mind game that quickly affects on-field events, summoning Hayhurst's dreaded "Baseball Reaper."

It is a battle waged by many Minor Leaguers like Hayhurst.

"My dream has made me into a commodity, a product, only as valuable as the string of numbers attached to my name -- like some printout stuck in the window of a used car. The reality of my professional baseball player's life is that most people have no idea who I am, nor do they care."

After "The Bullpen Gospels," people will know exactly who Hayhurst is and they should see ballplayers as more than just numbers on the backs of jerseys. Much like Hayhurst and others spend careers fighting labels, it is too simple to call "The Bullpen Gospels" a baseball book. It is so much more. It is a book about life, with baseball as the backdrop.

Like Jim Bouton before him, Hayhurst shows that a ballplayer can be so much more than the average fan realizes. Hayhurst's tome is worthy of being compared to Bouton's "Ball Four" -- considered to be one of the best baseball books written. Bouton and Hayhurst both show the humanity of ballplayers. They are flawed, just like you and me, whether we want to believe it or not.

The pedestal is emphatically removed, but Hayhurst does not take anyone down with it. He avoids using "The Bullpen Gospels" as a platform to shed light on the ugly side of the game that has been stealing the headlines for the past few years. The book can be crude and it does go deep behind the scenes, but Hayhurst does more good than harm.

In that vein, Hayhurst let's it be known on the book's very first page that his tale strays from the recent trend.

"This book's purpose is to entertain, not to name names; pull the covers off the bare *** of drug use; show cheaters, adulterers, or  tax dodgers; or do any other whistle-blowing. If you are looking for someone's dirty laundry, you won't find it here."

The only dirty laundry is probably that stinking pile belonging to Hayhurst's Minor League roommate.

With his unique style and perspective, Hayhurst takes the reader into the grimy corners of baseball that fans rarely ponder. He turns the spotlight on life in the Minor Leagues, stripping away the myth of ballplayers as superheroes and instead revealing them as humans who deal with the same life issues faced by the people in the stands.

That is why this book resonates.

"Baseball is a lot of things, but it's not everything," he writes. "It can't make your brother sober. It can't make your family stop fighting. It can't make peace or win wars or cure cancer. It makes or breaks a lot of people, like many jobs where the folks who do it find their identity. I don't know if it should be as valuable as it is, or maybe baseball is valuable, and we players just don't use it the right way. I guess that's what I want to figure out in the book."

One of Hayhurst's main issues is self-doubt. It's a problem he deals with throughout the book, which chronicles his 2007 season spent in the Padres' farm system. It opens with him pitching to high schoolers in a run-down machine shop over the offseason, bribing them with sports drinks to convince them to stand in the batter's box.

From there, Hayhurst weaves a tale that includes plenty of moments that will have you laughing as you breeze through pages, as well as serious turns that will have you tearing up. It is not always a feel-good story, but that was never Hayhurst's intent. He was close to walking away from his career and constantly tries to understand why he hasn't already.

On the mound, things make more sense. Off the field, things are more complex, and often confusing and combative.

"The nice thing about pitching, I decided, was while I was doing it, I always knew what the goal was. Get an out; get a couple of outs. Life, on the other hand, wasn't so clear. The trouble was baseball was my life. The two were connected somehow, that much I knew. Yet I didn't know the proper formula and was tired of the explosive result they yielded when mixed."

Hayhurst's brand of comedy is on full display as he brings the reader along for long bus rides, takes them into bad hotels and cramped clubhouses, shows the many ways pitchers pass the time in the bullpen, details things like the host family system in the Minors and Spring Training protocol, and explains the art of picking rooms, roommates, jersey numbers and, perhaps most important, the come-out music used throughout a season.

"Come-out songs are selected in a much more metaphysical way. Guys will skulk around with their headphones on, iPods cranked, trying to gauge the "power" of favored songs. Then they'll turn to their teammates. "Listen to this. Which one do you think sounds more bad***?" The headphones will get passed, the music replayed, the headphones passed back. "I don't know; they're both good." Very few players have one sone they favor over all others, and it usually comes down to the wire.

"Country boys will choose country songs -- tunes about their homeland, their heritage, and their pickup truck. The prima donna with the flashy car and the jet-setter wardrobe will select a hip-hop ballad declaring what a stunner Pimp, or Baller he is. The hard-edged guy with the short temper and addiction to Red Bull will require a rock song that makes him feel like Bruce Banner on the verge of becoming the Incredible Hulk. All these choices are safe, but the ones that make for the best are those that stray from the beaten path. Some guys may like the path they're on just fine, but personally, I believe a little originality makes a player and his tune memorable. This year I decided that if I didn't pitch well, at least I would be remembered for my song. I picked "Give It to Me Baby" by Rick James."

It's these lighter moments that help break up the harsh reality of roster cuts, demotions, searching for identity, or even poor offseason living conditions. During one memorable stretch of pages, Hayhurst describes life with his gun-wielding grandma. His Minor League salary does not allow for better arrangements. Unfortunate for Hayhurst. Great for the reader.

"She provided a roof over my head, and for that I'm thankful, but my life with her is far from fantasy. She'll tell you she treats me like a prince. She'll tell you a lot of things. Like how she saved Einstein from the Nazis or the stretch of Underground Railroad beneath the house. What she won't tell you is how she keeps me in the sewing room, on an air mattress, with nothing but a card table and a suitcase."

Hayhurst has said that it was during this time of his life that he began contemplating this book. He was so close to hanging up his spikes and figured a writing career might be a better option. As it turns out, Hayhurst wound up compiling his book during the best season of his Minor League career -- one that helped lead to his first taste of The Show.

To date, Hayhurst has 25 games in the big leagues under his belt. Not that many people have noticed.

"The vast majority of people who love this game care only for big-time players with big-time numbers," he writes. "I wasn't one of those, but I was faking it as best I could."

Well, Hayhurst has written a big-time book. That much is clear.

--Jordan Bastian - mlb.com (edited by author)

About this edition

• Publisher: Citadel
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0806531436
• ISBN 13: 9780806531434
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352