The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As A

Professional Baseball Player

Crap--You want to be a professional ball player? I HATE baseball. Oh right, you're the kid that got kicked off the school team when your dad beat up that umpire in the exhibition game against the special needs school--Hmm--I guess I can come up with something...

You obviously won't want to waste your time playing ball for some nothing college in the middle of nowhere when you can wander from town to town trying out for semipro ball teams in the middle of nowhere. You've got a decent bat, and you can cover some ground in the outfield, so you'll get picked up on a ten day contract by some podunk town in the midwest somewhere. That's where you'll meet Sparky--the old has-been manager who claims he once worked as a base coach for the Oakland A's in the mid-70s. When your team has a layover in a town which actually has a library with internet access, you'll check out his story and confirm that he's full of crap. Still, he'll teach you some important lessons.

First he'll show you how to wear baggy shirts to increase your chance of getting hit by a pitch--then he'll teach you the art of spitting your chewing tobacco juice on rival teams' mascots. You'll be kind of sad to lose his folksy wisdom when you get picked up by a semi-respectable double-A club, but you'll be a little relieved, since he kept offering to come to your room and give you a rubdown after games.

Your learning will continue at this new level, and you'll be introduced to the wonder of steroids. It's only natural that a league with most of its teams in farm country has access to some of the best horse hormones anywhere. Soon you're bulking up, and you find yourself enjoying a little alfalfa each morning on your wheaties.

At 21, you're offered a contract by a major league team, and they send you to their Triple-A affiliate. It's a better class of hotel and bus; and sometimes you even fly to road games. Here they really prepare you for the big games--they warn you that the league is serious about cracking down on steroids and illegal bats, and then their trainers show you a new, undetectable hormone that can only be extracted from the pituitary gland of adolescent males. It's only on a dark layover in Topeka that you find out that the adolescent males are south american street kids who are killed to provide you with your extra hitting boost. Out of guilt, you start secretly dedicating your home runs to their memory.

You also take advantage of the next generation of corked bats, which have a special transmitter inside that broadcasts a fake image of wood to throw off X-ray machines.

At 25, you crack the big leagues, though you don't get a lot of playing time, and just when you get your big break and a regular spot as a left fielder, you are diagnosed with jaw cancer from years of tobacco chewing.

Fortunately, by this time, you are aware that the secret signs of the base coaches have nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with relaying information about secret hormone shipments between teams. You signal back your problem, and within ten days, a replacement jaw is shipped to you in an unmarked cooler--it's almost the same size as yours and after the surgery you hit 20 home runs that season that you dedicate to the memory of "Guillermo".

By the way, don't tell your dad you came here, okay?

The rest of the Cynical Career Counsellor posts can be found here.