It was about a year ago I read something that stopped me in my tracks. 

I read it in Tom Verducci’s book The Cubs Way – a behind the scenes look at how the 2016 Chicago Cubs finally won it all, breaking their infamous 108-year World Series drought. Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon are two people in baseball I’ve admired for a long time. Not just for what they accomplished, but how they accomplished it – progressive thinking, unrelenting transparency, and a high level of empathy those around them. Verducci’s book had been on my wish list for a while, but most especially after I had gone through his first book: The Yankee Years.

The early to mid 2000s is the period of my life where I can first remember falling in love with the game of baseball. My summers as a kid included annual trips to see my mother’s parents in Long Island, NY. My father enjoyed baseball. He casually followed along with the Red Sox, but he was more interested in the games I played in. My grandfather, on the other hand, loved baseball. He enjoyed nothing more than watching David Wright, José Reyes, Mike Piazza, Tom Glavine, and the rest of his beloved New York Mets. It was during those summers he shared his passion for baseball with me, but not quite for the Mets.

The team my grandfather truly loved had left the city four decades ago. The Brooklyn Dodgers, New York’s Boys of Summer, littered the walls of his home. He owned posters, team photos, and signed baseballs from those teams of the 40s and 50s. He watched Jackie Robinson break the color barrier in person. He lived what we read about in history books today – and he’d do anything to live it again. Baseball wasn’t just a game. It was a part of his life. With his help, it started to become a bigger part of mine.

The 2004 New York Yankees were my Brooklyn Dodgers. Those pinstripes under the lights of the old Yankee Stadium had a different look to them. You didn’t have to describe it to know. You could just feel it. When you watched Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Sheffield (my grandfather loved his swing), and Bernie Williams suit up on the same field together, you knew you were watching a different brand of baseball. They were baseball royalty – and they knew it. 

Growing up in Pennsylvania, my opportunities to watch the Yankees were limited to when they played the Orioles or on ESPN. On Long Island, I could watch them as often as they played. Every evening, my grandfather and I would flip between YES Network for my Yankees and SNY for his Mets. We’d watch every single game. I started to learn lineups, who played each position, the starting rotation, and who came out of the bullpen. The next morning, we’d go through the papers and look at the box scores from the night before. Every day we’d check the standings to see where our respective Yankees and Mets stood in their division.

The Yankees, coming off a World Series run in 2003, commanded the top of the AL East most of the season and were poised to make a run back to the World Series. Little did they know, there was only one team in Major League Baseball that didn’t feel their aura. They were destined for a collision course that would forever change the game of baseball, as we know it.

Not to mention, my involvement in it twenty years later.

…

What made the 2004 Yankees memorable wasn’t just the team itself. It was their bitter foe from the heart of New England: Boston’s beloved Red Sox. The mastermind behind the 2004 Red Sox was a young, brilliant baseball executive with a Yale degree and journalism background. He was born in Manhattan, NY, but raised in Brookline, MA – a suburb of Boston. At 29 years old, he became the youngest General Manager in MLB history after Billy Beane – the inspiration behind Michael Lewis’ best-selling book Moneyball – turned the Boston job down. His name is Theo Epstein. 

After watching Boston fall apart in game seven of the 2003 ALCS – reminiscent of the heartbreak he felt as a fan in ’86 – Epstein was back for revenge in year two. The team he assembled as every bit as good as Joe Torre’s Yankees. Managed by Terry Francona, Boston matched New York across the board with Cooperstown bound talent – Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez, Jason Varitek, Jonathan Paplebon, Trot Nixon, Kevin Youkillis. 

Boston and New York didn’t like each other, and it wasn’t just visible. You could feel it through the TV. When I think back to those early mid 2000s matchups, I instantly remember A-Rod getting a face full of Varitek’s mitt or Pedro Martinez shoving Don Zimmer to the ground after Roger Clemens threw a heater a little too high and tight for Manny Ramirez’s liking. The brand of baseball being played today is the best baseball that’s ever existed, but I don’t think I’ll ever find a period of baseball that will recreate how I felt as a kid when New York and Boston squared off. There wasn’t a matchup in baseball that could fill the stadium the way those two teams did. 

While the ’04 Yankees were memorable in more ways than won (aha), they made me fall in love with a game that has given me everything. A game that’s dragged me coast to coast, introduced me to people I’ve built life long relationships with, and has filled my heart with a sense of pride and joy I don’t think I could ever recreate in another profession.

But the person I really need to thank the most is the architect behind my childhood nightmare. Because when I stumbled across the humble origins of Epstein’s ’04 Red Sox, I saw my future for the first time in crystal clear detail.

It happened going through Verducci’s book.

…

In the spring of 2004, Theo Epstein rented a house for him and a few other colleagues for the duration of Spring Training. It was located just outside Boston’s training facility in Cape Coral, FL. The house, unofficially named Phi Signa Playa, was littered with laptops, pizza boxes, beer, and poker chips. 

The men who lived in that house, along with their current position, are as follows:

• Jed Hoyer, President of Baseball Operations, Chicago Cubs
• Ben Cherington, General Manager, Pittsburgh Pirates
• Peter Woodfork, MLB Senior VP MiLB Operations & Development
• Amiel Sawdaye, Senior VP & Assistant GM, Arizona Diamondbacks
• Craig Shipley, Special Assistant to GM, Arizona Diamondbacks 
• Galen Carr, VP Player Personnel, Los Angeles Dodgers 
• Brian O’Halloran, Executive Vice President Baseball Operations, Boston Red Sox

Shipley, at the time, was the oldest in the house (40). No one else was older than 32. Epstein, in his second year as General Manager of Boston, was 30 years old. This wasn’t a group of season veterans with years of big league experience. It was a group of kids. The same group of kids that helped Boston break an 86-year World Series drought seven months later.

All of these years, I knew in my heart baseball was what I wanted to do. I just didn’t know where it was going to take me. And then I read about that house and what those young men were able to accomplish going through The Cubs Way. What Epstein assembled back in 2004 spoke to me in a way no other book ever had before.

I knew in that moment that Cape Coral house was where I belonged. 

To be in a room full of young, forward thinking minds who possessed an unrelenting obsession for the game of baseball. To be a bedroom wall away from the first three people you need to talk to when you finally connect the dots on an idea you’ve been mulling over for days. The ones who are happy to spend their Saturday nights talking through rabbit holes that take twists, turns, and eventually morph into a completely different conversation than the one that first started it – but all the more engaging. The passionate, imaginative, curious, and creative. The originals, innovators, and trailblazers. The people who leave a mark, but not because they desired to leave their mark. They only wanted to leave no stone unturned.

Those are the people I want to be around. Those are the rooms I want to be in. Which is why I am unbelievably excited to have the opportunity to meet those kinds of people and be in those kinds of rooms as a complex hitting coach in the Minnesota Twins organization. 

…

I’ve spent a lot of time envisioning what I would say at the conclusion of my time at the ARMory. That day will come one week from today. If I were to sum up how I’m feeling in one word, I think there’s only one that does it justice: Bittersweet.

Bitter, because I have to say goodbye to something that’s grown near and dear to my heart. I can remember the days I spent as a broke college student devouring blogs, emails, and any kind of free advice I could gather as it pertained to training baseball players. One of the resources I always seemed to come across was this guy from a place called the Florida Baseball Ranch. If Randy wrote it, I read it. I was 19 years old when I read the towel drill e-book, only to later do towel drills with my college team and get yelled at because I wasn’t getting full “extension.” Shut down periods, icing, weighted balls – you name it. Randy didn’t have to explain these things to me when I first walked through the door. I had already read his thoughts on them a long time ago. 

When I got a chance to meet Randy in person back in the winter of 2021, I knew I had to find a way to spend more time around him. I wanted to be around the absolute best, and I really believed Randy was one of those people. The past two and a half years have only confirmed that, and it starts at the top. No one at the ARMory works harder or has sacrificed more than Randy has. We have the opportunity to do this today because he left a comfortable career, chased a dream, wore the arrows, challenged conventional thinking, and put his heart and soul into something that had no guarantee it would ever work out. Randy sacrificed everything to turn this place into what it is today. We wouldn’t be here talking about it if he did not.  

Amy was one of the few people who didn’t just see Randy’s dream, but encouraged him to chase it. She’s just as important to the place as he is. In the private space, there’s a lot of work to do and not a lot of people to do it. We all have to juggle hats on a daily basis. But for the first time in my life, I was able to really hone in on my craft because Amy gladly wore a lot of those hats. We could all focus on the baseball stuff because she took care of the business. When things got difficult, she was always supportive. When things were out of order, she stepped in and took charge. Randy had a dream, but Amy was the person he needed to bring it to life. The ARMory will always be in great hands as long as they are both involved.

To my co-workers, past and present – Alan, Dom, Zack, Ari, Luke, Willy, Dave, and all the rest – thank you. In the best of times and the worst, you all have been people I could rely on, share an idea with, or have a couple beers (sometimes more than). My experience here was so much fun not just because of what we did at work, but because we had so much fun outside of it. I’ll miss Friday night fish fry at Glory Days, Swan BOGO, Linkster’s Monday night trivia, and three putting for a double at the Heights. For everything that will change going forward, just know I’ll always be a text or a call away. That will never change. 

While I won’t be around anymore, this place will always be my family. That feeling hasn’t changed from day one. I have no doubt this place will continue to grow and have a positive impact on the people that walk through its doors going forward. I couldn’t be more proud to have been a small part of it. 

Like I said, bittersweet – but more sweet than bitter. 

…

When I thought about my vision for what I wanted in my next professional opportunity, I always came back to the people. I wanted to find and surround myself with people I felt tremendous alignment with. Not in the sense that they had to think like me, but I wanted to work with people who possessed a creative spirit, obsession to innovate, and could look at new information with an open mind while maintaining a healthy dose of skepticism. People who weren’t okay with doing things just for the sake of how they’ve always been done. People who were willing to challenge status quo, rethink what most of us take for granted, and encourage input from everyone involved. People who valued the things I valued, possessed unique skills that complemented mine, and would help me grow in ways I would never be able to on my own. 

I believe I have found that with the Minnesota Twins.

From the first conversation on, it became very clear to me these were my kinds of people. The dialogue was fluid. The “interviews” never felt like interviews. They were only conversations about something all of us have spent a lifetime obsessing over. When you find and connect with people who share your same passion, you can just feel it. You bounce around from idea to idea, knowing you’d prefer the conversation to last for hours rather than a half hour. Not caring about the initial question that was asked, but only trying to keep up with the plethora of ideas that emerged from that initial question. When you can get off the phone after 45 minutes and feel like it was only 15, you know you’re talking to the right person. 

I know I have much to learn. I know what lies ahead is going to be difficult, demanding, and challenge me on levels I have never experienced before. That doesn’t worry me, because I’ve found a place with tremendous alignment, a clear vision for where we want to go, and the desire to constantly find ways to bring the best out of our people and our process. There is no satisfaction in what has already been done – only a desire to continue to make it even better.

These are the kinds of people I’m going to create my own Cape Coral experience with.

…

To Alex Hassan, Drew MacPhail, Bryce Berg, Carlos Lara, Ryan Smith, Rayden Sierra, and the many more people I will soon call colleagues – thank you for believing in me and giving me the opportunity of a lifetime. You turned my dreams into reality. As long as I am a part of this organization, you will get nothing but my best. I will not let you down. 

To the people who paved the way for me – coaches, players, former and past – thank you. Thank you for investing into me. For your trust. For relationships that will last a lifetime. For giving me opportunities to learn, perfect my craft, and find my voice. This isn’t just my journey. It is our journey. We all did this together.  

To my family – Mom, Dad, and Colin – thank you for always being in my corner. For everything you did to help me chase my dream. This is our story – and I am proud to share it with the most important people I know. This is everything I have ever worked for, and it wouldn’t mean the same if I couldn’t share it with you guys.

Now enough talking, it’s time to start doing.

Minnesota – let’s get to work.