Chasing The Game
Why I quit baseball so that I would never have to give it up.
I pound the inside of my worn, brown leather glove with a balled fist. Rub my knuckles into the faded Air Show Elite logo on the palm of the mitt and then bend the webbing down into itself.
POP.
Grab the ball that Connor (who’s been my throwing partner throughout high school and is also our ace pitcher) has just thrown to me for what must be the thousandth time this year. Fire it back and repeat. It’s become a habit over the past 17 years of my life, and as a senior in high school it’s basically second nature. Everything about this simple warmup of playing catch is an addictive repetition for me.
It’s different from football where the practices are grueling and you’re counting down the drills, just waiting to get off the field, shed the pads and go home. At least it’s different for me.
Out on the diamond each catch, each throw, each ping of the bat, each fungo taken on the dirt and each fly ball chased down in the grass is another moment of blissful ignorance of the world outside the fences.
But that fantasy is coming to a close.
I’m hitting leadoff and playing center field for the Cavs. Solid for my team, maybe, but certainly not playing for elite showcase teams or listening to Division 1 coaches tell me about how great their program is on my phone. I’ve got one offer from a small, Division 3 school called Methodist, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. If you had told my seventh-grade-bench-riding-middle-school-playing-self that a college would actually want me to come play baseball for them, I would have told you that you were crazy.
And if you then told me that I would turn down the opportunity, I probably would have jumped into a wormhole just so I could go sucker-punch my future self right in the face.
POP.
But I had to quit playing the game that I’d grown to love. That’s the only way I’d be able to hold onto it forever.
I guess I got a little bit ahead of myself there.
Before realizing how hard it is to give up something that’s arguably the most important thing in your life, it’s probably important to find out how that one thing became (arguably) the most important thing in your life.
I don’t remember when I first started playing. Probably because I was like three or four years old, trying to avoid embarrassing myself by not completely whiffing a stationary white baseball on a stationary black tee. What I do know is that my dad was my first coach, my first position was first base…
(I like to think it’s because I was the best at not dropping the ball.)
…and my first number was 1.
(I like to think it’s because I intelligently made the connection between “first base” and the “first number.”)
Irregardless, this was the start of my full-time, childhood obsession, which culminated in my rejecting all other sports available to me — thankfully, this was especially true of soccer. Something about the game just hooked me. Maybe it was the fact that it was a team sport, but built around many different opportunities for individual success or failure. Maybe it was the unique skill-set required for it. Maybe it was just the fact that my dad played it and so I was going to play it too.
Every spring I’d sign up for little league. Every summer I’d briefly forget about my love of baseball and remember my love of pools. Every fall I’d remember my true meaning in life and sign up for fall ball. Then every winter I’d do my best Rogers Hornsby impression and stare out the window waiting for spring again.
(lol, just kidding I would play in the snow and get hype for Christmas like every other kid.)
My throwing mechanics look just like that to this day.
All of my best friends played baseball with me growing up. Actually, until high school I think it’s pretty safe to say that the only kids cool enough for me to have sleepovers with were guys I met on the baseball field. (We didn’t have “sleepovers” in high school, we “chilled.”)
The nickname that sticks with me to this day (Los) was minted on the baseball field. It was the season Ryan (my first “best friend” who introduced me to baseball cards and Pokémon and minibikes) and Aaron (master of the right-handed drag bunt) and I were all on the same team. We routed the 9- and 10-year-old competition that year thanks to a healthy mix of running rampant on the bases, hitting with wooden bats, and doubling down on Big League Chew.
In between games we’d play wall ball and nerf football while simultaneously mooching money from our parents or our friends’ parents to buy hotdogs and cheeseballs and Mellow Yellow.
A few years later and I was playing on my first travel ball team (shoutout Carolina Hammers) with Alex, who was the first kid I acknowledged was faster than me and became my throwing partner and friendly rival and friend. This was back before travel ball was every 14-year-old’s shot to impress college and Major League scouts, mind you. We weren’t worried about the velo we clocked on the mound, or even the velo our helicopter fathers made up to impress our teammate’s helicopter father.
What we cared about was showcasing our dominance over one another in Texas Hold’em in between games. About coming up with the best Chuck Norris jokes on the spot to roast each other. About rubbing tubes and tubes of BENGAY on each others’ shoulders and elbows because a little arm fatigue wasn’t about to keep us on the bench. About toasting opposing outfielders, embarrassing other teams’ catchers on the bases, and making the dirtiest web-gem catch of each game.
Playing for the Hammers for just two summers was easily the most fun I’ve ever had playing baseball.
A few years later and I’m playing baseball for my high school, Southern Lee. It’s much more serious than Northview and the Hammers, obviously. Practices are serious. We’re not out here to have fun, we’re out here to win. But naturally we’re still having fun. My sophomore year I played with my older brother for the first time in my life (we’re two years apart, which always kept us in different leagues growing up) during his senior year. That year we took a trip to Tennessee for a spring break tournament, played FIFA in the hotel room, watched Friday Night Lights on the bus and had a pizza eating contest at Ci-Ci’s Pizza — Connor and I “won.”
We lost the first round of state playoffs that year, and after the game I sat in the outfield and saw my brother and his closest friends — my brother and my brothers — break down on the field and start crying. I knew that was going to happen when the season finally ended. I couldn’t imagine playing my last game, and I wasn’t prepared to handle people so close to me going through it either. I’d never seen my brother break down to that extent, and with him and all these other guys that I had looked up to for years sitting in the grass, bawling their eyes out, naturally, I joined them. That was a really shitty night. I guess everyone’s last game feels like that.
Mine came two years later.
Me and Connor and Mitchell were the seniors on Southern’s team in 2012. Mitch patrolled right field while I handled center; Connor was the ace pitcher. Naturally he started the last game we played. We were on the road in the third round of the state playoffs.
(A little aside: that was the first time our school had gotten that deep into the playoffs, with a team that was very young and wasn’t as talented as some of the others we had during my time at Southern. To this day that’s still the furthest Southern has gone in the playoffs, which is certainly a point of pride between me, Connor, Mitchell and I’m sure that entire team. Anyways, back to the story…)
We were leading the game in the bottom of the seventh inning and up trots some dude we all figured should have been ejected earlier in the game for running over our first baseman, Caleb. I’m pretty sure Connor tried to run off the bench after giving us five solid innings on the mound and start a brawl with the guy.
Somehow nothing crazy happened, and the hitter stayed in the game only to step back into the batter’s box at this moment. He connected with the ball at the plate, and Mitch and I broke on contact and started running back towards deep, right-center field. I still have dreams about this specific play to this day, four years later.
We both knew it was gone on contact, but we ran as hard and as fast and as far as we could, regardless. Climbed up the fence and reached for it too, but at that point we were chasing a game that had already left us behind. We had lost. We were done. And we were never going to play again.
Now it was our turn to break down in tears with our brothers. In the outfield grass of a field that didn’t mean a thing to us, we tried to come to grips with how we were done, forever, with a game that meant everything to us.
But anyways, back to that whole quitting thing we started out with.
At the end of one random practice during senior year of high school, I remember having a conversation with Coach Miller and Connor. Both of us were good enough to play at smaller schools at the next level. I had no problem with it at the time: more baseball just meant more baseball.
At some point in the conversation, Coach Miller said something to us to that extent: “Division-3 just means another four years playing baseball.”
And that resonated with me.
Probably not in the way he intended, sure, but it left an impact nonetheless, and I’m extremely grateful for that to this day. When Miller said, “Division-3 just means another four years playing baseball” what went into my ears was “Hope you have fun without baseball in your life after the next four years, bro.”
Yeah right.
That wasn’t going to fly. I wasn’t about to let all those tubes of BENGAY go to waste. I wasn’t about to play four more years and then go on my merry way with some normal job after I graduated, with only these memories to look back on and obsess over.
But I was also pretty realistic about how good I was, and how far I could go playing the game. Four more years was really it. If I couldn’t play forever, like Ichiro is seemingly doing, I’d just have to find some other way to keep myself around the game.
So instead of going to Methodist and playing baseball, I went to the University of North Carolina and wrote.
Four years after that conversation with Connor and Coach Miller on my high school baseball field, I’ve graduated from UNC and now I’m sitting here writing from the press box of the best ballpark in Major League Baseball.
Is that braggy? I don’t mean it to be braggy.
I’ve been extremely lucky, and helped out by plenty of people who are more talented than I’ll ever be, but here I am watching baseball every day and getting paid to do it.
I wouldn’t be in this position if I had kept playing baseball for four more years, as amazing it would would have been to keep playing. I’m sure I would have made a ton of memories like the ones I shared with you above, that resonate with me and haunt me every day.
Still, I had to quit. I know the ball’s going over the fence, but I’m still planning on chasing this game for a long time.
Me, Mitchell and Connor after our last game, when we really didn’t feel like smiling.
This piece was a saved draft from 2018 on my old Medium account. I never published it. I'm not sure why. I resisted the urge to edit my old writing when I stumbled upon it today—September 15, 2026—and published it on this website.