It’s been an odd week.
Since I started this website back in November, my mind has been completely transfixed on baseball and pitching. No matter what I was doing, my thought process would invariably return to this journey and my attempt to play professional baseball.
And now it’s over. It’s both disappointing and liberating. Being forced to quit thinking about the game day in and day out for eight months cold turkey is not easy. Also, it feels good because I accomplished, both directly and indirectly, what I wanted to at the start of this quest.
It kind of sounds like I’m retiring from baseball — that’s not the case at all. I want to continue playing the game for as long as I can, but now I can play confident in the knowledge that I achieved the overarching goal I devised back in the fall.
Now that the IBL season is over, it’s time to take stock of my performance and the summer in general. One of the reasons why I trained so hard in the off-season was to counter the inevitable weight and strength loss that would occur due to not being able to train with the same fervour during the season.
Once again, just like last season, I flew too close to the sun at the start of the summer and tried to maintain too high of an intensity during my workouts and that led to a couple of nagging injuries. Luckily, I didn’t let hubris get the best of me and became a lot smarter in the designing of my workouts.
I sit here now at a bodyweight of 192lbs, only three pounds down from the start of the season. Conversely, last year at this time I weighed around 175lbs. My strength numbers are also pretty much where they were at the start of the season which I’m very enthused about. However, I am in terrible cardiovascular shape. I’m like PFC William Santiago in A Few Good Men: I can’t run from here to there without falling down.
Of course, the entire point of maintaining that strength base was so that I’d be fresh to pitch deep into August. Oops.
Statistically, I didn’t throw that well this year. The season started off great with the five shutout innings I tossed on opening day, but quickly unravelled on me due to an illness and a shocking loss of confidence.
As I mentioned before, pitching success depends on confidence. Without it, you will just be a shell of yourself on the mound. The middle part of the season was terrible for me from a performance standpoint — I didn’t know where I was throwing the ball. It’s every pitcher’s worst nightmare.
I managed to claw my way back to respectability at the end of the year with a string of strong performances.
There were two questions I wanted answered and one goal set forth for my future self at the beginning of this journey. Truthfully, they’re all interconnected.
How good of a pitcher am I? How high could I travel up the ladder of professional baseball? The goal was to do my best to answer these two questions so I wouldn’t regret never finding the answer once the prime of my athletic career was over.
Answer #1: a very good amateur pitcher, a decent semi-professional pitcher, a non-existent professional pitcher.
Answer #2: The Intercounty Baseball League is my professional ceiling.
Playing against greater competition this summer and watching a bevy of talented pitchers take the hill over the past few months has really opened my eyes to my own shortcomings. I mean I always knew I didn’t possess otherworldly stuff, but seeing very good pitching most games has reiterated that point.
I’ve always prided myself on preparing myself mentally and physically to pitch by working on my craft and spending hours in the gym. Well, at this level everyone cares that much and works that hard. It’s that much harder to differentiate yourself.
Pitching in front of crowds can be unnerving. I got used to it by the end of the season, but still the crowds IBL teams have to deal with pale in comparison to higher levels of professional baseball. I can unequivocally say that I don’t have the mental strength to pitch in front of 30,000 screaming fans. I couldn’t hack it in affiliated baseball.
Most importantly, I have zero regrets. I’ve got the answers I was searching for. Plain and simple, I am not good enough to play a higher level of baseball. And I’m fine with that. I’d much rather be content in that knowledge than always have that nagging “What if?” at the base of my skull.
Thus, I have no problem deeming this journey a success. Thank you so much to those of you who followed along these past eight months. Now that the faint possibility of a professional baseball career has been extinguished, it’s time to focus on other career aspirations (which may not be hard to figure out after seeing the stories I’ve written and video blogs I’ve posted to this space).
While this is the final Pro Ball or Bust column, I will be unveiling a new website in the next six to eight weeks which will encompass my next big project (hint: it involves both baseball and writing, but doesn’t involve me playing).
Until then, feel free to follow me on my new Twitter account: @MikeGArsenault which will detail any and all career news plus links to articles and videos and perhaps some funny observations (and also a link to my new website). No boring stuff.
Thanks again for reading.
P.S. The title of this blog is I Dream of Long Bus Rides. It took me one road trip to Ottawa
