Ryan O’Hearn is better at baseball than most of us will ever be at anything in our lives. It earned him a few million dollars and retirement in his 30s if he wanted it. His baseball career has been, by most reasonable measures, a wild success, and he has enviable stories to tell friends and family for the rest of his life.
But Major League Baseball does not often abide by “reasonable measures.” Professional baseball is a high-stakes pressure cooker where simply being one of the best thousand or so workers in their craft isn’t enough. The difference between the top 100 players and the next 900 players is the difference between nine-digit contracts and a nomadic life where younger, faster, hungry talent marches ever closer as the seconds tick, tick, tick.