“Out Of My League: A Rookie’s Survival In The Bigs”

I first met Dirk Hayhurst after The Bullpen Gospels had already been a hit on the New York Times best-seller list.  In fact, that’s why I reached out to him—he was a big league pitcher who also had the ability to write, two things I admire and respect.  I found Dirk to be engaging, open and hilarious and we hit it off right off the bat (pun intended).  He’s as down-to-earth a guy as you’ll ever meet and there’s little if any pretentiousness about him.  That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I opened his latest book— Out Of My League: A Rookie’s Survival In The Bigs —and found him laying bare the complexity of his relationship with his family.  Hayhurst uses his quick wit and sharp tongue to get through difficult situations, which isn’t to say he’s incapable of being serious or profound, and that makes for a better read.

We learn immediately about Hayhurst’s grandmother, who Dirk suspects of “crawling beneath my car punching holes in the gas tank to spite me,” while he’s off playing Double A ball in 2007.  “She doubled as my landlord during the off-season and used some Gestapo-style tactics to get me to do her bidding, threatening me with everything from eviction to prosecution,” Hayhurst writes.  We come to find out later on just what a piece of work she really is, especially as it pertains to Dirk’s new love interest, Bonnie, who eventually becomes his wife.  It’s in these passages that we find out what a saint Bonnie is and I found myself rooting for her almost as much as Dirk, who was still trying to break into the big leagues with the San Diego Padres.

She endures a verbal assault from Dirk’s grandmother that would make George Carlin blush, then meets Dirk’s father who is sitting in his underwear and smoking a cigarette when she and Dirk walk in, and who we eventually learn is bipolar.  Not fazed in the least, she greets him with, “So, you’re a Hanes man, huh?”  It’s easy to see why Dirk fell in love.  We eventually meet Dirk’s brother—“All my father wanted was for the firstborn to grow up, act his age, and leave him alone as the seconds of his own life ticked away”—and as the book continues, the dysfunction of the entire family starts to stain each page.  Frankly, it reminded me a lot of my own childhood and I appreciated that despite some sour memories.

Finally we get to meet Dirk’s teammates and this is where the fun begins (for the most part).  There’s “Slappy” and “Maddog” selling porn DVDs out of shoe boxes for $4 a pop; there’s Dalton who’s special talent is called “spidermanning” (read the book to find out what that means); there’s Rosco, Aden, Frenchy, Ox, Hundo, and “Reek,” and Hayhurt’s chief nemesis, Dallas, another hurler who once punched Dirk in the mouth for waking him up the night before a start.  “Big bonuses and power arms barked loud,” writes Hayhurst.  “That, and Dallas wasn’t afraid to bite.”

Hayhurst makes the Triple A roster, which had me especially excited considering the Portland Beavers played close to where I live.  I just wish I had known Dirk back then; my wife and I could have cooked him a decent meal every once in a while.  Absent that, however, Dirk lands in a cramped apartment in downtown Portland with two roommates, Luke and Chip, filled with “furniture” left behind by former players—an ironing board that substitutes for a dining room table and lawn chairs.  Such is the life of a minor leaguer.

The rest of the book bounces back and forth between Dirk’s relationship and pending nuptials with Bonnie, conversations with his parents, and baseball, especially Dirk’s quest to make the major league roster, which he eventually does.  The baseball is often hilarious though frustrating, as Dirk begins to wonder if he’ll ever be called up to “The Show,” but there are also poignant moments throughout that really allow us a glimpse into Dirk’s soul:

[My dad] reached back into the bucket, took a new ball, mashed it into his stretched fingers, and repeated the motion.  The ball tumbled through the air, crossing the thick grass that swallowed my father’s velcro-fastened shoes, and landed with a soft thud a few feet from the target.  Over and over he did this, each throw landing in an unpredictable nature until, finally, one ball flew from his hand, crossed the landscape, and thudded into white paint.  Nature stopped around my father.  He stood motionless, crooked from the damage to his body yet sturdy like some statue of marble and majesty.

I didn’t realize it at the time. but I’d just witnessed a truly beautiful moment.  My dad, robbed of a childhood joy because of a harrowing accident, had just reclaimed a lost piece of himself, a part thought dead when it was he who had tumbled through the air and landed on the ground, not in a soft thud but in a cacophonous blast that accompanied the destruction of life as he knew it.

But it’s when he finally makes it to the bigs that we get to read his thoughts about life in the majors, and this is where the book really shines.  He doesn’t regale us with tales of heroism; instead Hayhurst admits his anxiety, fears and doubts—“Anxiety started to take over, and soon I was pacing, hyperanalyzing, looking for omens, searching for signs,” he writes about the night before his first start.  “What if I was a huge, embarrassing failure tomorrow?”  When he toes a major league slab for the first time, we’re allowed into his head again, “I was naked and scared, stranded atop that patch of red dirt like an orphaned child.”

Unlike biographies written about or by superstars, there are very few baseball moments to be celebrated at the end of Out Of My League .  Hayhurst’s time with the Padres was relatively disastrous—he pitched to a 9.72 ERA in 16 2/3 innings.  But the book as a whole, his ascent to the major leagues and his new life with Bonnie are fantastic reminders of what’s truly important and what isn’t.  Hayhurst achieved something that most of us can only dream of and came out the other side a better man than when he went in.  We should all be so lucky.

Out Of My League: A Rookie’s Survival In The Bigs is as funny, poignant, humble and real a baseball book as you’ll ever read.

Disclaimer: I was provided with a free copy of the book being reviewed by the publisher, but received no payment or other consideration for this review.