Baseball is ticket to traveling the world
Published online on Saturday, Jul. 11, 2009
By Matt James / The Fresno Bee
For 50,000 rupiah, you can eat as if you're on death row: shrimp, lobster, beers until the bartender suffers carpal tunnel syndrome.
Rupiah is how you buy things in Indonesia, and 50,000 rupiah is worth about $5. You can feast for five bucks, and go nowhere near a Dollar Menu. Financially speaking, if you could commute cheaply from your current job to a home in Indonesia, you would be in much better shape.
Whitney Pierce went to Southeast Asia with a few hundred bucks and, well, he didn't live like a king, but he made it quite a while. For $2 a day, he slept in a hut on a beach in Thailand. He surfed in Bali. He caught a ride on an elephant.
Pretty much everyone who dreams of making it big in professional sports has to wake up eventually. "It's a numbers game," as Pierce says, and he's right. For every guy who made it, there are 1,000 who didn't because of a bad knee or bad luck or a bad attitude.
And lets face it, somebody has to be not quite good enough, right?
Pierce was a dreamer. He still is, though baseball reality long ago slapped him across the face. He graduated from Clovis West High in 2000 and went to Cuesta College to play catcher. He was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the 32nd round and then turned down a scholarship from Lewis-Clark College to turn pro. (The Orioles promised him $10,000 for tuition down the road.)
It went like a lot of minor league baseball stories go, three years of playing in towns in Florida and West Virginia and Maryland, until the Orioles released him in 2005. The Chicago Cubs organization picked him up for two months, then Pierce injured his hamstring and headed for independent baseball, the Gateway Grizzles of the Frontier League and the Chico Outlaws of the Golden League.
And when it came time to move on, when his mind and gut told him he would never make the big leagues, that it was time to do "real-life stuff," Pierce instead got another chance. This time, baseball would show him the world.
After the 2006 season, he already had gotten a couple of jobs in San Diego, one at a gym, another doing part-time construction. He'd never had a job before, never done anything but baseball. It felt pretty suffocating.
It was about that time, Pierce got an e-mail from a baseball team in Switzerland. They wanted to fly him to Europe, give him an apartment, pay his living expenses and give him travel money. And all he had to do was play baseball and do a little coaching now and then.
It seems there was a man putting the profiles of out-of-work American baseball players on his global scouting Web site. The guy even called Pierce to ask if he could represent him.
Pierce is certainly not your average young person, let alone baseball player, massive curly hair and a lot more free spirit than most. His parents are that way, too. His dad, Greg Pierce, is a teacher at Roosevelt High. His mother, Randy Robinson, is a psychologist. (Of his mother's job, Pierce says, "That's why I'm so normal and have such good people-talking skills.") They had dubbed him "Whitney" before they knew whether he was a boy or a girl, named for Mt. Whitney. When asked why parents would name a baby after a mountain, the normally outgoing and hysterical Pierce quickly gets quiet and says, "No comment." Ah, got it.
Before Switzerland ever e-mailed, Pierce already had traveled all over Southeast Asia by himself, backpacking and camping, eating the mysterious, living on a few hundred bucks. So, of course, he said yes, even if the Swiss baseball and the pay were equally terrible.
After that season in Europe, he got to thinking, if there's bad baseball here, there has to be bad baseball other places. And then he was playing in Germany for a season and then Australia for a season and then he was picked up by a team in the Netherlands. He hit in the lineup alongside a garbage man and a student from the Czech Republic.
"I've had baseball buy my plane tickets to six different countries," he says.
At age 27, his passport says he's visited more countries than most Americans have visited states. Luxembourg was No. 23. France was No. 24.
Some parents would be lecturing about education and responsibility and getting a job that pays, but his tell him how lucky he is.
"If it wasn't for my family," Pierce says, "I would have been in San Diego doing regular jobs. They've just said, Go do this. Go do this while you can."
He's been to the Eiffel Tower, hiked the Swiss Alps, visited Angkor Wat, the famous temples in Cambodia. Sure, he could do all this later, but the question is a good one: Would he?
"Is anyone really going to do that now that they've got a job and a kid and a wife?" he asks.
He could do this forever. There will always be another team and another league and another country. He could drag his guitar all over the world to play ball. A Division 3 team in Holland offered to put him in a hut above a beer factory in a league that uses aluminum bats once a week.
A lot of kids go to college and supposedly get ready for life. Whitney Pierce went to life and got ready for college. He might play ball another season or two, but he's ready to go back to school.
"The first time I went, I didn't really want to be there," he says. "I wanted to play baseball. I wanted to talk to girls and party. This gap in my life has me ready for school."
I'm convinced Pierce was in school all along. A really great field trip.
