51s’ Dirk Hayhurst: A real-life story behind the numbers

By Ron Kantowski

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Dirk Hayhurst recalls looking back at the 2006 baseball season, how he had climbed three levels up the San Diego Padres’ professional ladder as if they were molehills instead of mountains, and starting to think he just might be pretty good at pitching a baseball after all.

“When you are young and you make it to Triple-A and you jump three levels in one season, you think you have done something to put yourself on the map,” he says. “But it was injuries more than anything else.

“I would discover — well, I guess I knew the truth — that I really hadn’t done anything.”

Although he would briefly pitch for the Padres before the end of the 2008 season, Hayhurst remembers thinking his chances of making it to the big leagues were awfully slim; that the chances of anybody, even guys drafted in the higher rounds who throw more heat than Thor, the Norse god of Thunder, are pretty slim.

He began looking at his life, and wondering how much longer he should put it on hold while chasing a dream that probably wasn’t going to pan out.

He was sleeping on his grandmother’s floor, waiting for the 2007 season to begin, when he started having these thoughts and others deeper than these; some of them, in fact, deeper than the center-field fence at the old Polo Grounds.

“No matter how hard you wring the fabric of the uniform, the greatness isn’t going to come out unless people are willing to accept it for the right reason,” he says. “It was hard for me to quit — not because I was infatuated with the dream, but because I had identified myself as a baseball player for so long. In a world obsessed with titles and jobs and stations and what kind of uniform you wear, if I didn’t have baseball, then what would I have?”

That’s what he was thinking.

And then he thought he should start writing it all down.

So he did. It wasn’t long before he had a blog. Then a journal. Then a writing assignment for Baseball America.

Then he got a publisher.

Now he has a deadline. He has about four more weeks to write 50 more pages.

Then he’ll have a book.

Kensington Press plans to release “Bullpen Gospels” around Opening Day of 2010.

The thoughts described in the above paragraphs are the first chapter.

“There’s no mention of steroids,” Hayhurst, 28, and now a long reliever for the 51s, said after the team’s 9-1 victory Sunday against Sacramento at Cashman Field. “It’s more introspective. But the ‘Bull Durham’ stuff is definitely in there.”

Although the quality of his writing suggests otherwise, Hayhurst said he never considered himself much of a wordsmith.

“I went to Kent Read, Kent Write, Kent State,” joked the native Ohioan, who grew up in Canton. “I hated writing but I loved hearing myself talk. I was a speech-debate guy. So this could be a colossal failure. But if it gets across what I wanted to get across, it will have been a success.

“Besides, if Jose Canseco can do it, for God’s sake, I can do it.”

Hayhurst said being a professional ballplayer is about more than going out for a protein shake, hitting a double and knocking in a couple of runs, hanging out with your baseball buds after the game and counting the days before you can go home because you can’t wait to go fishing and miss your girlfriend.

Well, maybe it’s like that for some guys. But not for him. And not for many of the guys he was playing with during the 2007 season, when he began writing the book.

“We all hated that stuff,” he said. “It was like (our lives were) a ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ episode, and in between you play a baseball game.

“What about getting up at 5 in the morning and busing 12 hours to Modesto so you can play in 110-degree heat and the bus smells like urine? That’s what got me started.”

That, and the kid with liver cancer he met in the bullpen.

This is what Hayhurst wrote in his Baseball America column called “Not Every Autograph Request is Created Equal,” which explained his disdain for signing them.

For me, it’s a dead ritual, and doesn’t make sense. Maybe this is because I know who I am. Because every day I see the mistakes and shortcomings I deal with that humanize me. I disagree that I am somehow more valuable because I do this job. Fans, however, see my clean uniform and their boyhood dreams incarnate. When my hand presses a pen to paper, they find it magical. I don’t understand why this works the way it does, but its lack of logic in no way negates the reality of it.

Then he met the mother and the shy little boy holding her hand, and wrote how he stooped low, like a catcher, so he could talk to the little boy on his level. And how the little boy’s mom put her hand in his, whispering that her little boy had terminal liver cancer, and thanks for sharing a minute with him. Hayhurst saw to the little boy getting to sit in the bullpen with the other relief pitchers, sending him home with a wonderful memory and, yes, an autographed baseball.

When we gave the boy that ball, there was no dead ritual involved. Our names were no longer scribbles to be collected, and the ball was no longer a souvenir. That baseball was now a letter, and each signature was a testament of hope, encouragement and joy. I can’t explain to you how much happiness it gave that mother and her son to share those moments with us.

I still can’t explain why people treat us so special for putting on a baseball uniform. But in those few moments together, it didn’t really matter — in those few moments, baseball made perfect sense.

As Hayhurst said earlier, his book isn’t about steroids, or kissing and telling with the bases loaded.

I have a feeling it’s going to be about something much more important, at least to him.

“If all I have to show for this when it’s over is a bunch of numbers beside my name,” he said of a pitching career likely nearing an end, “then I’ve wasted my time.”