Penn Murfee once considered abandoning baseball entirely and going to work in Silicon Valley, putting his graduate degree in business analytics to use.
He had planned to spend the first half of this off-season on a ranch in Wyoming, driving fence posts and helping birth calves, and the second half of the off-season living out of an RV on a beach in SoCal.
Instead, today Penn Murfee stood on a mound in the Tokyo Dome in front of 28,000 fans, the majority of whom were there to support Team Japan and armed with banners and songs, as the starting pitcher for Team USA in international play.