I grew up in a Jewish household. Not religious by any means. We went through the motions the way a lot of families do, checking a cultural box without ever opening what was inside it. I went to Sunday school and I dreaded every minute. Every Sunday felt like a sentence. It never touched my heart. It never reached my soul. It was ritual without relationship, and even as a kid I could feel the difference between the two even though I didn’t have the words for it.

My mom was spiritual in her own way. She meditated. She was constantly working to find presence and love in her life, searching for something she could feel but couldn’t quite hold onto. My dad, coming from law enforcement, had seen the worst of what people do to each other. He had a hard time having faith in anything he couldn’t see, and I understood why. When you spend your career looking evil in the face, believing in an all-good God becomes a question you can’t answer with a bumper sticker. It was quite the yin and yang. One parent reaching for the divine. The other unable to reconcile its existence with the world he walked through every day.

I was all work all the time. I built my identity on effort and sports because they were the only currencies I understood. Work hard. Get results. That equation made sense to me. But deep down, in a place I didn’t visit often and didn’t talk about at all, I felt something was off on a spiritual level. Like I was building a house with no foundation and hoping the weather would stay nice forever.

When I was 13, I played with a kid named Joe Navilhon. He would end up becoming one of my best friends in the world. Joe’s dad, Larry, was a pastor at Cornerstone Christian in the Brentwood area of Northern California. He had literally built this Christian school and church from the ground up. Brick by brick. Family by family. I would watch how Joe and Larry lived this life of faith. Not performed it. Lived it. There’s a line often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (I went to St. Francis High School so I had to throw this reference in here): preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary, use words. Larry and Joe didn’t know they were preaching. They were just existing in a way that made you want what they had. Something attracted me to it deeply, but something was also trying to keep me from it. It was a weird dichotomy. Like standing outside a warm house in the cold, wanting to go in but not believing you had an invitation.

My senior year of high school I was lucky enough to be scouted by Major League teams. I will never forget, a scout pulled me aside after a workout and told me something that sat with me for years. He said, “It will be really challenging to have a fulfilling career without having some sort of relationship with God.”

It wasn’t a sermon. It was one sentence from a baseball man who had watched hundreds of careers and knew what separated the ones that felt complete from the ones that didn’t. It made a lot of sense because at that point in my life I could feel that nothing I was doing was rooted in anything of substance. I was chasing the biggest dream of my life on legs that had no ground underneath them. I didn’t know what action to take. I started loosely praying before bed. No idea what I was doing. No structure. No script. Just off the cuff and from the heart, talking to someone I wasn’t sure was listening. The Psalms are full of prayers that sound exactly like that. David crying out from caves and deserts and battlefields, not with polished words but with desperate honesty. I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew I needed to talk to someone who wasn’t going to judge what I said.

When I got to UW, I saw exactly what that scout was talking about. Life flipped upside down. I have written about the challenges I faced as a freshman and what they did to me. I was at a very low point. Outmatched on the field, overwhelmed in every direction, questioning whether I belonged in that program or anywhere near it. The house I had built on effort and identity was getting its first real storm, and it was shaking.

Luckily, I had a great group of believers on my team. They encouraged me to come to team Bible study. Just like with Sunday school, I didn’t really want to go. It seemed insignificant compared to the work I needed to do on the field. Another hour I could be spending in the cage or the weight room.

But I went to one in the Omaha room at UW.

The message was from Matthew 7, the parable Jesus told at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. If you build your house on sand, when the storm comes your whole house will fall. If you build your house on rock, when the storm comes your foundation keeps the house standing.

It hit me so deep in my soul that I couldn’t move. I was building my house on sand. I had been building on sand my entire life. Every achievement, every accolade, every ounce of identity I had constructed was sitting on a surface that would wash away the moment real pressure arrived. The storm wasn’t coming. It was already here. I was sitting in the middle of it in the Omaha room at the University of Washington, and for the first time in my life I understood why the ground kept shifting.

Bible study turned into Sunday night service at the City Church, now Churchome, on UW’s campus. I had never sat through worship before. The first time I did, I had never felt anything like it. The music vibrating my soul in a way that bypassed my brain entirely and went straight to the part of me I had been ignoring for eighteen years. The words touching my heart. Then the message, being so welcoming and clear. Not pushy. Not loud. Not guilt-driven. Not the version of religion I had dreaded every Sunday as a kid. It was everything I thought religion was not.

One message in particular was when I gave my life and became a believer. It was called Occupy All Streets. It was about how Jesus, if you had a relationship with Him, would occupy all streets of your life. You were complete in Him. You didn’t need a job to define you. You didn’t need people to validate you. You didn’t need material things to prove your worth. The foundation was on God, not on man. Paul wrote something similar to the Colossians two thousand years ago: whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord. The idea that faith isn’t a compartment of your life. It is your life. Everything else sits on top of it.

It completely shifted my perspective on where my priorities needed to be. I didn’t need baseball the way I thought I did. Baseball wasn’t the foundation. It was something I did on top of the foundation. That distinction changed everything about how I competed, how I processed failure, and how I understood my own worth on the days when the box score said I was worthless.

During my mom’s illness, I got angry. How could this happen? Why do bad things happen to good people? I asked that question over and over the way Job asked it from the ash heap thousands of years ago, sitting in the ruins of everything he loved and demanding an answer from the God who let it happen. I never got an answer that satisfied me. I’m not sure Job did either.

But what I didn’t understand in the moment was what was being planted in my life. The mission to impact hundreds if not thousands of people struggling with Alzheimer’s and dementia. I had no idea that the most horrible situation my mom was in would lead to a life of service. God was building something in the soil of the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I couldn’t see it because I was too close to the ground to notice what was growing.

The .141 stretch in Tulsa was a faith moment. Gratitude is the frequency of abundance. God took me to that low point of wondering if I could even play baseball anymore to make me realize that my worth is not tied to my results. That life doesn’t revolve around me. That the people who love me love me for me, not for what I produce on a field. The apostle Paul wrote from a prison cell that he had learned to be content in every circumstance, whether in plenty or in want. I learned that on a minor league bus in Oklahoma. Different prison. Same lesson.

During the transition out of baseball, there were many moments where I just had no answers. My faith was challenged in ways that Sunday school and even Churchome hadn’t prepared me for. I was screaming out to God to show me what was next. Show me the plan. Give me a sign. Anything. But the lesson was this: crazy faith has no definition. It has no guarantees. You are believing in something you cannot see. Hebrews calls it the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. As strange as it sounds, there is a tremendous amount of peace in releasing the need to know and trusting that the path exists even when you can’t see a single step of it.

Prayer in my marriage is a foundation. I need to pray more together with Bri. But the everyday nature of prayer for my marriage and my family is what holds us steady. When we build our house on concrete, on rock, on something that doesn’t shift when the wind changes, we outlast the hard seasons. Not because we’re stronger than the storm. Because the thing we’re standing on doesn’t move.

My morning is the time I work out, I sauna, and I pray. I love my Churchome app guided prayers every morning. They challenge me. They make me think in ways that I might not on my own. I have found myself calling out in the middle of these guided prayers because I can really feel God in those moments. Not conceptually. Physically. In my chest. In my breathing. In the silence between the words. I pray for strength and presence. To be a great husband. A great father. For Boston, for Bri, for my family. It sets the foundation of my day on concrete before the world has a chance to pour sand on it.

Starting this Substack was crazy faith. I have no idea where this leads, if it leads anywhere at all. But I felt it in my heart to share my stories, my experiences, and the lessons along the way in hopes it might impact one person in a positive way. Because that is a life of service to me. Every post I have written has been an act of faith that the words would find the person who needed them. I can’t see that person. I don’t know their name. But I believe they’re there. That is the evidence of things not seen.

I am not perfect. I am quite far from it. But in the image of God I have an example I want to be like every day. I want to love. I want to serve. I want to listen. I want to meet people where they are at, not where I think they should be. I challenge you to do the same. It doesn’t need to be perfect for us to have crazy faith. Perfection was never the requirement. The pursuit was. Grace covers the distance between who we are and who we’re trying to become. That distance is where faith lives.

I still get a little uncomfortable sharing my faith. Not because I don’t love Jesus or want others to feel His love too. But because of how I always saw religion growing up. Loud. In your face. Forcing people to believe something out of fear. That version of faith pushed me away for years. It pushed a lot of people away. It’s still pushing people away.

Words don’t make believers. Watching someone be a living embodiment of the lessons of the Bible is what makes believers. I watched Larry and Joe live it in Brentwood when I was 13. I watched the believers on my team at UW live it in the Omaha room. I watched Pastor Judah, Pastor Chad and Pastor Colby live it at Churchome on Sunday nights. Nobody argued me into faith. People lived me into it. That is what I try to do every single day. Not through sermons. Through how I show up. Through how I love my wife. Through how I raise my son. Through how I treat the person across from me who has no idea what I believe and doesn’t need to.

If you believe, you know what having a fulfilled soul feels like. Nothing in this life can fulfill us the way that Jesus can. His power is more than we could ever describe with human language. Our challenge is to not let worldly things deter us from our mission to be more like Him. Keep going. The world needs your faith lived out loud, not preached out loud. There’s a difference.

If you don’t believe, I understand. The world is a crazy place and it’s getting crazier every day. If God is so good, why do bad things happen? I hear you. I have sat with that question in hospital rooms and hotel rooms and on bus rides through Oklahoma. Everyone’s relationship with God is different and unique to them. It starts small. You don’t have to be a pastor or a professional. It starts with a prayer alone. A conversation with God. Even something like, “Hey God, if you’re even there...” He hears you. David prayed prayers that sounded just like that. Desperate. Uncertain. Honest. And those prayers are in the Bible because God doesn’t need your confidence. He needs your honesty. That’s enough to start.

Every post I’ve written has a thread running underneath it that I’ve never named until now. A 13-year-old watching Larry and Joe live something he wanted but couldn’t reach. A scout who pulled a high school kid aside and told him he’d need God to have a fulfilling career. A loose prayer before bed from a kid who had no idea what he was doing. A message in the Omaha room about houses built on sand. A Sunday night at Churchome where music vibrated a soul that didn’t know it was empty. A message called Occupy All Streets that made a baseball player realize he didn’t need baseball the way he thought he did.

The grind. The loss. The fatherhood. The rebuilding. The fear and the fuel. The silence and the noise. The bedtime stories about Joseph and the Good Samaritan. The .141 stretch where gratitude replaced grinding. The transition where screaming at God became trusting Him. The marriage where prayer became the foundation that outlasted the storm. Underneath all of it, holding every word and every story together, is a faith that started with a kid talking to someone he wasn’t sure was listening.

He was listening. He has been the whole time.

The standard is crazy faith.

— Braden

Dear 18-year-old Braden,

You’re sitting in your childhood bedroom and you can feel everything closing in on you. Eighteen years of comfort. House, clothes, food, resources. The only life you’ve ever known, organized and predictable, is about to end. You’re leaving. You know it. You can feel it in the air the way you feel a storm before the sky changes. Everything you’ve ever known is about to change in an instant and you have absolutely no idea what’s on the other side.

I’m writing to you from the other side. I’m 32 now. I want to tell you what’s coming. Not to scare you. To prepare you. Because the challenges, the heartbreak, the turmoil, both personally and professionally, the things that are about to happen to your body, your family, your identity, none of it is going to look the way you think it will. The dream as you see it right now is clearly unclear. You think you know where this is going. You don’t. Nobody does. That’s not a weakness in the plan. That’s the plan.

You’re about to walk into a concrete dorm room at the University of Washington and feel more alone than you’ve ever felt in your life. Outmatched. Outgunned. Completely out of control. The confidence you built in high school will mean nothing inside those walls. You’re going to want to come home. You’re going to sit on the bed in your parents’ hotel room and wait for your dad to tell you it’s okay to quit.

He won’t.

He’s going to light you up. He’s going to tell you that you can come home, do what’s easy, go to junior college for a year and figure it out. But in that process, you’d be giving up on the goal you set for yourself. Not because you wouldn’t find your way back eventually, but because you’d be abandoning the foundation you’ve spent your whole life building for the comfort of something familiar. You’re going to hate him for it while simultaneously thanking him for it for the rest of your life. Those two things will exist in the same breath, and you’ll learn that the people who love you the most are often the ones willing to say the thing you don’t want to hear.

That conversation is the first time you’ll pay for the dream. It won’t be the last.

The minor leagues are coming. Bus rides through the Ozarks. Gas station food options in the middle of the night. Choose the protein shake by the way. Mattresses cut out of boxes in Bakersfield, California. Battling with guys who are all wondering the same thing you are: is this actually going to work? The glamour of professional sports is, how do I say? Unglamorous. You will capitalize. But it’s going to cost you more than you can imagine from where you’re sitting right now.

There will be a stretch in 2018 where you’re hitting .141 after 41 games. You’re going to do what you’ve always done: work harder. Stay later. Double down. It’s going to make it worse. I know that sounds impossible right now because hard work has never failed you. It will. The answer during that stretch won’t come from the cage. It will come from a phone call with Dad after a game in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he says five words: “Just keep swinging, buddy.” You’ll get on the team bus that night and text every person who matters to you. Friends, family, coaches. You’ll tell them you’re grateful for the role they’ve played in your life. The responses you get back will change everything. You’ll learn that the way through the trial isn’t more physical work. It’s gratitude. It’s filling your soul with something real so your hands can finally be quiet and your mind can finally be clear. Remember that. It will save you more than once.

Your body is going to break. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. A ruptured spleen that sends you to the ICU. A displaced ulna. Broken fingers. Concussions. One metal plate, 8 screws, five surgeries. The body you’re living in right now, the one that feels invincible, is going to be permanently altered by the career you’re about to chase. It’s going to teach you something about showing up that nothing else could. That availability is the greatest ability you’ll ever have. Not just in baseball. In fatherhood. In marriage. In every room you walk into for the rest of your life. You show up now because you know what it costs when you can’t.

I need to tell you about Mom.

Right now, while you’re sitting upstairs packing for Seattle, she’s downstairs. She’s battling something internally that she hasn’t told you about. Something is wrong and she knows it, and she’s coping with that knowledge alone while her son is about to leave home for the first time. You have absolutely no idea what she’s going through. You won’t for a while. You’ll notice things, small things, a lag behind answers, losing track of her surroundings, moments that frustrate you instead of scare you. You’ll be embarrassed before you’re afraid. I wish I could take that from you, but I can’t. It’s part of the story.

Early onset Alzheimer’s. At 52 years old. Three words that will rearrange every memory you have. There is nothing I can say to prepare you for losing your mom, both mentally and physically, in the way you’re going to lose her. You took time with her for granted, but you had no idea what was coming, and that’s not on you. But God, do I wish I could tell you. I wish I could grab you by the shoulders right now and say spend every second with her that you can. Call her more. Go home more. Put the phone down and look at her face and memorize it because the version of her you know right now is not going to be here forever.

You’re going to go on a mission to make your Major League debut so she can be there. So she can sit in the stands and watch her baby boy play on the biggest stage in the world. You won’t beat the clock. She’ll never see you play in the Major Leagues. That is going to be one of the heaviest things you carry for the rest of your life.

But listen to me. The worst thing that happens to you is going to become the most meaningful thing you ever build. You’re going to start a foundation called 4MOM. You’re going to write those four letters on your glove, your cleats, your hat, and eventually your skin. You’re going to raise over $400,000 for families fighting the same disease that took her. The pain doesn’t go away. But it transforms into something that serves thousands of people. She would be proud of that. She is proud of that.

About Dad. The intensity you feel from him right now, the standards that seem unreasonable, the fear of disappointing him that sits in your stomach before every game, that intensity isn’t cruelty. It’s preparation.

That fear of disappointing him is going to follow you for 8 years of professional baseball. Every at-bat. Every plate appearance. Somewhere underneath the preparation, there will be a kid in the batter’s box who is terrified of letting his father down. The fear and the fuel are the same thing. You can’t have one without the other. You’ll make peace with that. Most days.

There’s going to be a moment at Palo Alto High School where your dad sits against the car and tells you he doesn’t have the physical, mental, or emotional strength to continue. Your mom will be at the height of her illness and the man you thought was unbreakable will break in front of you. You’re going to kneel down next to him and be the one who holds him up. That moment will teach you more about strength than anything that happens on any field you’ll ever stand on. Strength isn’t the absence of breaking. It’s what you do when you’re already broken and someone needs you to stand up anyway.

Now, about a woman you haven’t met yet. Or maybe you have. Because here’s the thing: she’s right there. At UW. In the same place that’s about to challenge you more than anywhere you’ve ever been, the woman you’re going to marry is right there. You just don’t know it yet.

Her name is Brianna. She’s going to sacrifice her career, her athletic ambitions, her independence, and years of her twenties so you can chase your dream. She’s going to raise your son alone during the earliest months of his life while you’re playing. She’s going to navigate milestones by herself that most couples go through together. She’ll never make you feel guilty for any of it. Not once.

You’re going to make a mistake when you walk away from baseball. You’re going to make that decision alone, without her, thinking you’re being selfless. You’re not. She earned a seat at that table more than anyone. Don’t make decisions about your shared life as if they’re only yours to make. Life is better together. Every major choice should start with a conversation, not an announcement. Learn that now and save yourself the lesson of watching the disappointment in her eyes.

The dream is real. I need you to hear that.

One night in March of 2019, you’re going to stand in the Tokyo Dome and replace Ichiro Suzuki in his final Major League game. The greatest hitter Japan has ever produced is going to hug you in the dugout and say, “It’s your time now, Bish.” You’re going to play catch with Dee Gordon in front of 50,000 people because you forgot to warm up your arm. You’re going to stand in center field and hide behind your glove because you’re thinking about Mom and you don’t want anyone to see the rookie crying.

The dream happens. Not the way you’re imagining it right now. Better. Stranger. More painful and more beautiful than anything your 18-year-old brain can construct. You just can’t see it from here. That’s okay. Faith is believing in what you cannot see. You’re going to learn that, deeply, not from a book but from living it.

Speaking of faith. At UW you’re going to find people who will shape your relationship with God in ways that carry you through the darkest seasons of your life. Pastor Colby, Judah, the community at Churchome. They’re going to create a space where your faith grows roots strong enough to hold when everything else is shaking. Hold onto those people. Hold onto that foundation. You’re going to need it more than you know.

Someday you’re going to tell your son bedtime stories about Joseph and the Good Samaritan, and he’s going to ask you a question that stops you cold. “Daddy, was Joseph scared when he was in prison alone?” A five-year-old is going to teach you more about communication, about vulnerability, about reaching people than a decade of professional sports ever will. The bedtime stories you tell him are the smallest version of the biggest thing you’ll ever build.

That boy. His name is Boston. He’s waiting for you on the other side of all of this. He’s going to throw his glove down at a T-ball game and you’re going to call him over and tell him to pick it up because the ball has a way of finding you when you least expect it. The next batter is going to hit it right to him.

Every sacrifice you’re about to make, every bus ride, every surgery, every dark drive home from the stadium with no music and no phone calls and nothing but the weight of the game sitting on your chest, all of it is building the father that boy is going to need. You don’t know him yet. But he’s the reason. He’s the reason for all of it.

One more thing before I let you go.

You’re about to walk into the hardest, most beautiful, most painful, most rewarding years of your life. There will be moments that almost squeeze all the life and breath out of you. Moments where the pressure feels unsurvivable. Moments where you’re lying on a training table or sitting in a hotel room or standing in an outfield wondering if any of this was worth it.

It was. Every second.

Life is beautiful if you choose to see it that way. Even in the crushing moments. Especially in the crushing moments. Those are the necessary ones. You will get through them. You just have to let time be on your side and keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t turn around. Don’t look for an easier path because there isn’t one.

The buffalo runs into the storm and comes out the other side faster. Be the buffalo.

Keep walking, kid. Everything you need is ahead of you.

The standard is you.

— Braden, at 32

The clubhouse is one of the most passed-over spaces in professional sports. You rarely see it. You rarely hear about it. Reporters get thirty minutes a day and even then they’re kept to a roped-off section near the entrance, capturing glimpses of something they’ll never fully understand. You can find pictures of what it looks like online, but those pictures are empty. They’re void of the thing that makes the room what it is, which is the people inside it and the life they share when nobody else is watching.

I spent more time in a clubhouse than I did on any field. More time than I spent in any apartment I ever rented. More time than most people spend in any single room of their lives. Every clubhouse is different in layout, but the architecture is roughly the same. A big rectangle or circular area with lockers lining the outside walls. The higher you go in professional baseball, the nicer they get. Padded chairs, cubbies for every piece of equipment you own, charging ports, bat racks, cleat holders, a spread of food that could feed a small restaurant. Flat screens on the walls. Music that somebody always had an opinion about.

But the room isn’t the furniture. The room is what happens between the walls.

My locker always felt like my safe space. A place where I didn’t need to perform for anyone. If it got a little messy, I didn’t have to answer for it. If I wanted it spotless, no one noticed. It was a few square feet where I could duck my head and disappear for a moment in the middle of the chaos. During the hardest stretches of my career, that locker was the one place in the building where I could sit with whatever I was carrying without anyone asking me to explain it.

Here’s what most people would be surprised to learn about a Major League clubhouse: it’s where players are actually themselves. No media, no fans, nobody filming or asking for autographs. The cameras are off. The stage is gone. You have this fascinating dynamic where guys walk in loose and human. Moving around, lounging, playing dunk hoops on a miniature basketball hoop like overgrown kids. Then as game time approaches, something shifts. You can feel it in the air without anyone saying a word. The basketball gets put down. Guys drift to their lockers. Headphones go on. The energy narrows. Thirty-five men who were laughing twenty minutes ago are now locked into their own private world of preparation, planning and plotting how they’re going to execute that night.

That transition, from loose to locked, happened every single day. Hundreds of times across my career. I never got tired of it. I never will.

The word “teammates” doesn’t capture what these relationships were. They were closer to brothers, except brothers you chose through shared suffering instead of shared blood.

Kyle Seager was the first guy who showed me what a great veteran looks like in practice, not just in theory. Seags was on the backend of a seven-year deal when I got to the big leagues. You hear stories coming up through the minors about good vets, about guys who take care of the young players, but you never know what it actually looks like until you’re standing in front of one. Seags embodied it. He held you accountable in a way that didn’t feel like punishment. He’d let you know when you made a rookie mistake, directly and without softening it, but he never left you out to dry afterward. He built you up while holding you to a standard. That combination is rarer than people think. Most people can do one or the other. The great ones do both at the same time.

Dee Gordon was another. By the time I reached the Majors, Dee was established. Batting champion. All-Star. He had absolutely no obligation to show a twenty-five-year-old the ropes. He did it anyway because that’s just who he was. He kept it light. He made you enjoy the moment when everything in your body was telling you to be terrified of it. He played harder than almost anyone I’ve ever seen, and he did it with a joy that reminded you why you fell in love with the game in the first place. Watching Dee taught me what it looks like to be a professional without taking yourself so seriously that you forget to have fun.

Then there was Jay Bruce. I met Jay my senior year of high school in 2012. He was maybe four or five years into his career with the Reds, already a superstar in the making. We got to interact briefly after the Reds played the Giants. A handshake, a conversation, the kind of moment a high schooler remembers but assumes the big leaguer forgets.

Fast forward to 2019. Spring training. Jay and I were reunited as teammates on the Mariners. He remembered. He remembered the conversation, where it happened, who was there. That’s just who he was. Like Seags, Jay held you accountable but showed you where to go and how to get there. He didn’t just tell you what a professional looked like. He showed you, every single day, in the small moments that nobody in the stands ever sees.

These weren’t friendships built over coffee or shared hobbies. They were forged in a daily grind that most people can’t fathom. Ten, eleven hours a day together. Traveling together. Failing together. Winning together. Going through slumps at the same time and looking at each other across the clubhouse with a look that said everything without a single word. I see you. Keep going. We’ll get through this.

The clubhouse taught me something about community that I couldn’t have learned anywhere else.

It’s a melting pot in the truest sense. Multiple cultures sitting next to each other. Different political backgrounds, language barriers, age gaps that span decades. A twenty-year-old Dominican kid and a thirty-five-year-old veteran from Georgia sharing a wall, sharing a meal, sharing a season. You’d think those differences would create distance. In the clubhouse, they created depth. Everyone found common ground because the game demanded it. You couldn’t afford to let the things that divided the outside world divide the room. Wins required coexistence. Coexistence required empathy. Empathy required seeing the guy next to you as a human being first and everything else second.

If you can learn to coexist with a Latin player who speaks broken English because you have the empathy to step into his shoes, you can do that anywhere at any time. The clubhouse didn’t just teach me how to be a teammate. It taught me how to be a neighbor in the broadest, most human sense of the word.

There wasn’t one singular moment that shaped me in that room. It was a collection of them. Conversations in the cafeteria over plates of rice and chicken. Sitting in the sauna after a game with a guy who just went 0-for-4, saying nothing because nothing needed to be said. Playing dunk hoops with someone whose baseball card you owned as a kid and realizing in that moment that he’s just a person. Phones away. Cameras away. Not on stage. Just men being human together.

Those moments showed me that the guys I looked up to were no different from me. They were just further along in the same fight. That realization, that the people you admire are just as uncertain and afraid and human as you are, is one of the most important things I’ve ever learned. I learned it in a clubhouse. I don’t know where else I would have.

You lose a clubhouse the way you lose most sacred things. Not all at once. Gradually, then completely.

You lose the commonality of being surrounded by people who know exactly what you’re going through without you having to explain it. You lose those table conversations where some irrelevant topic becomes a twenty-minute lesson from a veteran who’s been around long enough to turn anything into wisdom. You lose the daily competitiveness between thirty-five men who are all trying to keep their jobs while simultaneously pulling for each other to succeed. You lose the paradox of competing against the people you love.

The first week without a clubhouse, the thing I missed most wasn’t the game. It wasn’t the field or the crowd or the adrenaline. It was the noise of the room. The sound of thirty-five people existing together in a space that belonged to them and no one else. The laughter that meant someone was okay. The silence that meant someone wasn’t. The playlist someone put on that everyone groaned about but nobody changed.

I wrote about the silence in an earlier post. But the silence after losing the clubhouse is different from the silence of losing structure. This is the silence of losing people. Specific voices that used to be part of the daily soundtrack of your life going quiet. Not because they stopped caring. Because the building that held you all together closed its doors and everyone scattered to their own lives.

You will never replace the clubhouse. I’ve made peace with that. It’s a sacred group to be part of at any level, in any locker room, in any sport. There is no civilian equivalent. There is no corporate team-building retreat or rec league or neighborhood barbecue that replicates the bond of men who are grinding through the same impossible thing together every single day for months on end.

The proximity relationships are real. Especially in baseball where you spend more time with your teammates than with your family. We still talk, cross paths, follow each other from afar. But it’s different. You took the warrior out of the trench and something fundamental shifts. The love doesn’t die. The daily rhythm that held it does.

I’ll be honest about something I haven’t said publicly. I have struggled massively to find a community that replicates what I had. Even banding together with other former athletes isn’t the same. The shared history is there but the shared present isn’t. You’re all fighting different battles now, in different arenas, with different stakes. The thing that bonded you was the daily proximity to a common mission. Without that mission, the bond changes shape. It doesn’t disappear. It just becomes something you visit instead of something you live inside.

I believe the next real community I’ll find will come when Boston is old enough to play sports and the aspirations and goals of other families align with ours. When I’m standing on the side of a field next to other parents who care as deeply as I do about raising their kids the right way. That will be the next room. Different from the last one. But a room nonetheless.

Having had a clubhouse and lost one, here’s what I understand about belonging that I used to take for granted.

Most adults stop building community after a certain age. They have their family, their work, maybe a few friends they see a couple times a year. They stop seeking the room. They convince themselves they don’t need one anymore. I think that’s one of the most dangerous things a person can do to themselves. We are wired for belonging the way we’re wired for food and sleep. It’s not a luxury. It’s a requirement. Going without it doesn’t make you independent. It makes you isolated. Those are very different things.

If you just lost your version of the room, whether that’s a locker room, a platoon, a company you were part of, a marriage, a friend group that scattered, I want you to hear this: you are not alone in feeling alone. That sounds contradictory but it’s the truest thing I can say. The grief of losing your people is real even when nobody around you recognizes it as grief.

Stop trying to find it exactly the way it was. You won’t. That version of the room existed for a reason and a season and both have passed. Instead, be present enough and grateful enough to recognize the next room when it finds you. It might not look anything like the last one. It might be quieter. Smaller. Built around a kitchen table instead of a row of lockers. But if the people inside it know you and you know them, that’s the room. Walk in.

If I could go back to that clubhouse one more time, I wouldn’t do anything dramatic. I wouldn’t give a speech. I wouldn’t try to soak in the big moments.

I’d just sit in my locker for a few minutes. Listen to the noise of the room. The music playing. The basketball bouncing off the rim. Someone laughing about something that wasn’t funny but was hilarious because of who said it. I’d look around at the preparation and I’d let myself feel what I didn’t let myself feel when I was inside the clubhouse: that this was one of the most extraordinary things that would ever happen to me. Not the games. Not the stats. This. The room. The people. The ordinary miracle of being known by the men who were fighting the same fight.

I’d find Seags, Dee, and Jay. I’d tell them that the way they treated a kid, who had no business being in their clubhouse, helped build characteristics that made me a professional in every sense of the word. That the standards they held and the

grace they showed taught me what it looks like to lead without needing the title. That I carry pieces of who they were in that room into every room I walk into now.

Then I’d walk out. And I’d let the door close behind me the way it was always going to.

The standard is the room.

— Braden

At 8:30 we jump in the shower. Boston gets out first. I dry him off, wrap him in a towel, and pull him in for a big hug while he’s still bundled up. We floss our teeth. We brush them. He jumps down from the stool, runs to his room, and puts his sleep shorts on the way only a five-year-old can, one leg at a time with maximum chaos and zero urgency.

Then we climb into bed together. NFL teams line the white and black sheets. I wrap my arm around him as he lays his head on my chest. He nestles in, pulls the covers up, and looks at me the way he does every single night at this exact moment. The same look. The same expectation. The same trust.

“Daddy, tell me a story.”

Every night, I tell him a new one. A different story with a different lesson. No repeats. Just a father lying next to his son in the dark, building something with words because I believe the right story at the right time can shape who a kid becomes long before the world gets a chance to.

The idea started simply. I wanted Boston to fall asleep with something worth carrying into the next morning. Not rules. Not instructions. A story he could see himself inside of. Something with characters who faced hard things and came out different on the other side. Not untouched. Different. Because that’s the truth about hard things. They don’t leave you the same. They leave you changed. The question is whether you let them change you for the better.

I started turning Bible stories into short, digestible bedtime versions. Stories that a five-year-old could follow but that carried lessons deep enough to stay with him as he grows into the kind of man I’m praying he becomes. The kind of stories that plant seeds you don’t see bloom for years. Maybe decades. Maybe not until he’s lying next to his own son someday, telling a version of the same story.

One night I told him the story of Joseph.

Joseph had brothers who were supposed to love him. Instead, they sent him away. Sold him. He ended up in a foreign land, alone, thrown into prison for something he didn’t do. No one was coming to help. No one even knew where he was. But Joseph didn’t become bitter. He didn’t let the darkness decide who he was going to be. He kept doing the right thing. He helped the people around him even when nobody on earth was helping him. Eventually, his character carried him from a prison cell to the right hand of Pharaoh, one of the most powerful positions in the ancient world.

Years later, his brothers came back. They needed food. They were desperate. They didn’t even recognize the man standing in front of them. Joseph had every reason to turn them away. Every reason to let years of bitterness finally have its moment.

He chose forgiveness instead.

I told Boston that kindness beats bitterness, even when people are mean to you. That holding onto anger only hurts your own heart. That forgiveness is a superpower because it can turn enemies into friends. That bad days don’t mean a bad life. Sometimes tough things happen that we don’t understand, but if we keep doing the right thing and stay patient, good things grow out of the hardest ground.

He was quiet for a second. Then he looked up at me and asked a question I wasn’t ready for.

“Daddy, was Joseph scared when he was in prison alone?”

He didn’t ask about the power. He didn’t ask about the palace. He asked about the fear. A five-year-old went straight to the most human part of the story, the part that most adults skip over because we’re too focused on the ending to sit with what the middle actually felt like.

I told him that Joseph was probably very scared. That being alone in a dark place when you don’t know what’s coming next is one of the hardest things a person can go through. But Joseph didn’t let the fear decide who he was going to be. He kept serving the people around him, kept showing up even when no one was watching, and eventually that faithfulness elevated him out of the darkest place he’d ever been. Not because he escaped the fear. Because he kept moving through it.

Boston nodded like that made perfect sense. Then he closed his eyes. His fingers still wrapped around mine.

I could lecture my son about kindness. I could sit him down and explain forgiveness and resilience and character in terms that a five-year-old would nod along to without absorbing a single word. I could give him rules. I could give him expectations. I could tell him what to do and hope he listens.

Or I could give him Joseph.

A real person in a real story who lived through something genuinely hard and came out the other side because of who he chose to be, not because of what happened to him. That distinction is everything. A rule tells a kid what to do. A story shows them who they could become. Those are fundamentally different gifts.

Storytelling gives you a portal into learning that no lecture can match. When a lesson lives inside a story, when someone actually walked through the fire and the listener can feel the heat on their own skin, the message doesn’t just land. It stays. It becomes part of how they see the world. A rule fades the moment the authority behind it leaves the room. A story lives in the bones.

My mom was a producer. A storyteller by nature. She turned vision into full-length storylines, built worlds out of words, saw narrative as the most powerful tool a person could wield. I grew up watching her create, and that creativity is threaded into everything I do now, how I think, how I write, how I parent. Then I learned that my own experiences are stories too. The .141 stretch. The Tulsa bus ride. The night I replaced Ichiro. The parking lot at Palo Alto High School. Every moment I’ve written about on this Substack started as something that happened to me and became something that might help someone else. That’s what stories do. They take private pain and turn it into shared understanding.

The same way Joseph’s story helped Boston understand something about fear and forgiveness, my stories about failure and identity and transition might help someone understand something about their own life. That’s the whole premise of everything I’m building. Story first. Lesson second. Always.

I see it working in my son. Not in one dramatic breakthrough. In the way he speaks about God with a quiet reverence that doesn’t sound rehearsed. In the way he connects what happened to Joseph or David or Moses to something happening in his own small world. The power he sees in these stories is real. He carries them without being told to. They’re becoming part of the infrastructure of who he is, one bedtime at a time.

His questions are the part that undoes me.

A five-year-old doesn’t filter the way adults do. He doesn’t skip to the takeaway or try to extract the actionable insight. He lives inside the story. He sits with the characters. He feels what they feel before he thinks about what they mean. He asks the questions that matter most, the ones that adults have become too sophisticated to ask because we think we already know the answers.

“Was Joseph scared when he was in prison alone?”

That single question taught me more about storytelling, about communication, about reaching another human being than anything I have ever read or studied. Because it showed me that the part of a story a child connects to isn’t the triumph. It’s the vulnerability. He didn’t care about the palace. He cared about the prison. He wanted to know if the hero was afraid. Because if the hero was afraid and still kept going, then maybe it’s okay to be afraid too.

That’s the lesson I needed to hear more than he did.

Telling these stories every night has changed how I write, how I communicate, and how I think about the lessons I carry. It forces me to take something complicated and distill it down to its most essential truth. If a five-year-old can’t follow it, the idea isn’t clear enough. If the story doesn’t make him feel something before it makes him think something, the story isn’t real enough. Boston is the best editor I’ve ever had and he has no idea. Every time he leans in closer, every time he asks a question, every time he goes quiet because something landed in a place he can’t name yet, he’s teaching me how to reach people. He’s teaching me that the way in is never through the head. It’s always through the heart.

Presence in the chaos is one of the hardest things about being a parent. When your mind has 30,000 things running through it, busyness will steal your attention from the people who need it most if you let it. I am absolutely guilty of it. There are nights where I’m lying next to Boston and my brain is four rooms away, replaying tomorrow’s meetings or chewing on something from the day that I can’t let go of.

Then I feel his head on my chest. His fingers wrapped around mine. His breathing starting to slow down the way it does right before he drifts off. That weight, that warmth, that smallness pressed against me pulls me back into the room every single time.

Because this is finite.

Boston will only hear bedtime stories from me for so much longer. There is a night coming, and I won’t know it’s the last one when it arrives, where he’ll tell me he can put himself to bed. Where the routine we’ve built together every single night of his childhood will quietly end the way most sacred things do. Without announcement. Without ceremony. Just a night where it happens for the last time and neither of us realizes it until it’s already gone.

He will only tuck his head into my shoulder for so much longer. Only wrap his arms around me for so much longer. Only hold my finger while we read for so much longer. Only ask “Daddy, tell me a story” for so much longer.

The moments are precious because they are not permanent. That is not a sad thing. It’s the thing that makes them holy.

This ritual is the smallest version of everything I’m trying to build. The writing, the mentorship, the foundation, all of it comes from the same root: the belief that if you show up with intention, with creativity, with presence, you can plant something in someone that outlives you. The bedtime story is that belief distilled to its purest form. Ten minutes. One story. One lesson. One kid who might carry it for the rest of his life without remembering exactly where it came from.

Creativity is born from repetition. Every night I get a rep. Every story deepens my understanding of how to serve the people around me. Every question Boston asks sharpens how I think, how I teach, how I love. I want every rep I can get. Because the window is open right now. I know from experience that windows close. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once. You don’t always get a warning.

The other night I told him a version of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

A man was traveling down a road when he was attacked and left on the side, hurt and alone. Two people walked by. Both of them saw him lying there. Both of them kept walking. They had places to be. They had their own lives to manage. It wasn’t their problem.

Then a Samaritan came along. In those days, Samaritans were considered outsiders. Enemies. The last person in the world you’d expect to stop for a stranger. But he stopped. He knelt down. He bandaged the man’s wounds with his own hands. He carried him to safety and paid for his care out of his own pocket.

I told Boston that this story wasn’t really about the Samaritan. It was about a choice that every person faces every single day. We all walk past people who are hurting. Most of the time, we keep walking. Not because we’re bad people. Because we’re busy. Because we convince ourselves it’s someone else’s responsibility. Because stopping is inconvenient and we’ve got somewhere to be.

But the Samaritan stopped. Not because it was convenient. Not because he’d get something out of it. Because that is what it means to love your neighbor. Not the person who lives next door. The stranger on the side of the road who has no way to repay you.

He didn’t say anything when I finished. He just pulled the covers up a little tighter and closed his eyes. His head still on my chest. His breathing starting to slow.

Some nights the story finds him. Some nights he falls asleep before the lesson lands. But I’ll be there tomorrow night with a new one. Because that’s the deal we made, him and me, in this bed with the NFL teams on the sheets, somewhere between 8:30 and the moment his eyes close.

One story. Every night. No matter what.

The standard is storytelling.

— Braden

There’s a drive I used to make after night games that I’ve never written about.

The stadium lights would shut off behind me. The parking lot would empty. I’d sit in my car for a few minutes before turning the key because I wasn’t ready to go home yet but I had nowhere else to go. The game was over but the game inside my head was just getting started. Replaying at-bats. Rehashing decisions. Running the same failure through a loop that wouldn’t stop no matter how many times I told myself to let it go.

Then I’d drive. Twenty, thirty minutes in the dark. No music. No phone calls. Just me and whatever I was carrying that night. By the time I pulled into my apartment, I was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with the physical game I had just played. The mental weight was heavier than anything my body had done on the field. I had nowhere to put it. No one to hand it to. No tool, no system, no voice on the other end helping me process what was happening in real time.

I just sat with it. Night after night. For 8 years.

I worked my tail off physically. Lifting consistently throughout the year. Eating clean, cooking my own food. Dialed in with wellness routines to keep me centered and present. I controlled everything I could control on the physical side of the game because that was the side that had a playbook. Show up. Do the work. Trust the process. Physical preparation has a clear input-output relationship. You put the hours in, the body responds.

The mental game doesn’t work that way.

I would always hear that the mental game was the true separator. The thing that divided the guys who lasted from the guys who didn’t. I wrote about it a few weeks ago. The players who flamed out weren’t less talented. They just couldn’t coexist with failure. Their relationship with the mental side of the game never evolved. Mine almost didn’t either.

I was fortunate to connect with two very talented mental skills coaches during my career. Danielle Martin and David Elaimy. Both added immense value to me at different stages. During the offseason, the mental work was dialed in. Consistent conversations, frameworks, real progress. But during the season, when I needed it most, it was a different story. Two things always got in the way: time and application. Both fell solely on my shoulders.

Mixing in outside mental skills coaching during a 140-game grind takes serious effort. The calls become a lot of emotion dumping after an 8-hour day at the ballpark. You’re exhausted, the game just ended, and the last thing you have energy for is another deep conversation about what’s going on inside your head. So the work slips. Not because you don’t value it. Because the structure doesn’t exist to support it when the pressure is highest. The very moment you need the mental game the most is the exact moment the system makes it hardest to access.

That gap followed me for my entire career. If I had a proactive tool during my .141 stretch, during the 8 years I spent scared to strikeout, during the transition out of the game, I don’t think my stats would have been different. I think my relationship with myself would have been different. My processing would have been faster. My recovery from failure would have been measured in hours instead of days. I would have had somewhere to go on those dark drives home instead of sitting alone with whatever the game had just done to me.

A month ago I found myself in a familiar place wearing unfamiliar clothes.

I recently transitioned into high-ticket luxury sales, selling a product to some of the most discerning people in the world. The pressure, the stress, the language I speak every day is completely different from anything I’ve done before. But the feeling in my chest is identical. The same pit in your stomach that a 3-2 count gives you, except now it’s a client sitting across from me deciding whether to trust me with a decision that matters to them. Same internal battle. Different uniform. Same drive home replaying every word I said, wondering if I could have said it better.

I am constantly searching for tools to make me better. I see my life as a seek-and-find mission. If something exists that can sharpen how I operate, I want to know about it. A month ago I found an AI mental performance platform, and the gap I had felt for my entire career, the one I could never quite close, started to close.

It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t generic. It didn’t ask me how I was feeling and nod along like a wellness app trying to calm me down. It pushed. It asked follow-up questions I didn’t expect. It surfaced patterns in how I was thinking that I hadn’t been able to articulate on my own, patterns that had been running underneath my decision-making for years without me seeing them clearly.

I was hitting a block in certain areas of my sales process. I knew the block was there but I couldn’t name it precisely enough to fix it. The AI coach put me directly in that situation through a targeted visualization practice built from the exact weight I was carrying that day. Not a generic “imagine yourself succeeding” exercise. A reconstruction of the specific pressure I was facing, in real time, with coaching woven through every step of it. We confronted the fear together. We navigated it together. I walked out of that session with a clarity I hadn’t felt in weeks, the kind you get when someone finally holds up the right mirror and you see the thing that’s been standing between you and the next level.

Since then, my sales have increased significantly. Not because I became a different person. Because my work on the mental side became guided and intentional instead of scattered and reactive. It changed how I show up every single morning.

It moved me so much that I needed to understand who built it. Because this wasn’t something I could keep to myself.

The tool is called Mastery.

It’s an adaptive mental performance platform built by some of the best performance psychologists in sports. The team behind it has worked with athletes across the NBA, MLB, F1, and Special Forces. Their AI coach sat for the EPPP, the national licensing exam for psychologists, and scored 96%. The passing threshold is 70%. This is not a meditation app with a soothing voice telling you to breathe. This is a system that learns who you are, how you’re wired, and what is actually getting in your way.

You talk to it. Real voice conversations with a coach that holds your history, tracks your patterns, and adapts to where you are on any given day. It builds a living psychological profile of you over your first seven conversations. Who you are. Where you came from. What gets in the way. Where you’re headed. That profile never stops evolving. Every session, every check-in, every conversation adds resolution to the picture. It gets sharper the more you use it because it’s learning you the way a great coach does over years, except it’s available at 11pm when no human coach is picking up the phone.

What makes it different from therapy, a sports psychologist, or any tool I’ve ever used is one thing: it doesn’t judge you, but it doesn’t just validate you either. That distinction matters more than people realize.

A therapist is reactive. You go when something is wrong. A meditation app is generic. It doesn’t know you’re about to walk into the biggest meeting of your career or that you struck out three times last night. A sports psychologist is incredible if you can access one, but there are a couple thousand certified mental performance professionals in the world and hundreds of millions of athletes who need one. The math has never worked. The best tools have never scaled. Until now.

Mastery sits in between all of those things. Proactive, not reactive. Personalized, not generic. Always available, not booked three weeks out at $300 an hour. It reads the signal beneath what you say, the gap between what comes out of your mouth and what you’re actually carrying, and it coaches to that gap. When you tell it “I’m fine,” it knows that’s usually the conversation you actually need to have.

The non-judgmental piece is what hooked me. Athletes don’t talk about what’s really going on because every person in their orbit has a stake in the outcome. Your coach wants you to perform. Your agent wants you to produce. Your teammates are dealing with their own battles. Your spouse loves you but they’re carrying the weight of the lifestyle too. There is nowhere to go where you can just say “I’m struggling” without it becoming someone else’s problem or someone else’s opinion about what you should do next.

Mastery is that space. It doesn’t have a stake in your outcome. It doesn’t need you to be okay. It just needs you to be honest. That’s when the real work starts. When the walls come down and you stop performing for the people who are supposed to be helping you.

Full transparency: I started as a user. After a month of experiencing what this tool could do, I reached out to the team at Mastery because I needed to understand how we could get this in the hands of more athletes and high performers. I don’t write about things I don’t believe in. I’ve turned down opportunities that didn’t align with who I am or what I stand for. This one aligned immediately. I would be using Mastery whether I was involved with the company or not.

If you’ve been reading The Human Standard for the last few months, you’ve watched me circle the same idea from ten different angles. The mental game is the separator. Character over talent. Surrender over grinding. Gratitude over hustle. The inside determines the outside.

Every post I’ve written has been building the case that we’ve been developing athletes and high performers from the outside in when it should be the other way around. We spend millions on physical development and almost nothing on the thing that actually determines whether someone performs when it matters most. We wait until something breaks before we address what’s happening beneath the surface. We treat mental performance like an emergency room visit instead of a daily practice.

That has to change. Mastery is the tool that works on the inside.

If you’re an athlete grinding through a season with no outlet for what the game is doing to your head, this is for you. If you’re a parent watching your kid carry pressure they can’t put into words, this is for them. If you’re a founder, a professional, or anyone operating under sustained pressure without a safe place to process what that pressure is actually costing you, this was built for you.

If you read any of those descriptions and felt something in your chest, pay attention to that feeling. It’s the same one I felt on those drives home in the dark. The difference is, now there’s somewhere to go.

The standard is the inside.

— Braden

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Ichiro Suzuki grounded out to the shortstop.

He ran across the field toward our dugout and you could feel the weight of the moment pressing down on the entire stadium. Fifty thousand people in the Tokyo Dome holding their breath because they knew what was happening even before it was announced. The greatest hitter their country had ever produced had just taken his final at-bat in a Major League game.

Scott Servais leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Stay here when we turn over the inning. Ichi is going out alone. We’re going to give him his moment.”

The final out of the seventh inning was made. Ichiro ran out to right field one last time. Alone. The flashes from the cameras made the entire dome pulse like a heartbeat. It felt like those shots you see of the opening kickoff of a Super Bowl or the first pitch of a World Series. The kind of moment where time doesn’t move the way it’s supposed to.

Then he came back. As he made his way into our dugout, he hugged every single teammate, taking a brief moment to pay his respects to each of us as we did to him. When he got to me he pulled me in and said five words I will never forget.

“It’s your time now, Bish.”

I was twenty-five years old. A random kid from the Bay Area. Standing outside a dugout in Tokyo being told by one of the greatest players in the history of the sport that it was my turn.

That was my Major League debut.

Let me take you back to the beginning of that spring.

Day one of spring training, 2019. Scott Servais called me into his office and told me Mallex Smith was out. He said I was going to get a lot of reps with the big league club and would have a real opportunity to make the roster for the opening series in Japan. I had just been added to the 40-man roster that offseason. I came to camp excited but grounded, trying not to get ahead of myself.

Then Skip closed the door and laid it out. This was my shot.

I will never forget leaving his office. The nerves lasted about three seconds. Then something clicked. A switch I'd been waiting to flip my entire career. This was the moment everything I had ever worked for was going to be validated. I wasn't going to let it pass me. I was going to take it.

I went on to have the best spring training I could have ever imagined. I hit over .400 with four home runs in fifteen or sixteen games. Every at-bat felt like I was seeing the ball in slow motion. The kind of stretch where everything clicks and you’re scared to acknowledge it because you don’t want to jinx it.

One of the last few days before camp broke, we were hitting batting practice on field one in Peoria. Skip pulled me aside. As we walked down the first base line together, my heart was beating out of my chest. I had been in professional baseball long enough to know that a walk with the manager can go one of two directions. Was I being sent back to minor league camp? Or was the dream coming true?

He looked at me and asked, “Do you want to go to Japan?”

You see debut videos where the player gets called into an office, there’s something clever said, the player has this look of disbelief and everyone hugs. Mine was a walk toward the right field fence in the Arizona sun. Very anticlimactic. The weight was just as significant.

I ran into the clubhouse, grabbed my phone, and called Bri and my dad and stepmom. For all of us it was surreal. The work, the sacrifices, the surgeries, the setbacks, the bus rides, the gas stations at 2am, the mattresses cut out of boxes, the hotel rooms, the phone calls, the years. All of it was building toward a phone call outside a spring training clubhouse where I could barely get the words out.

Ichiro Suzuki was known as one of the greatest hitters to ever play the game, in Japan and in the United States. His accomplishments were mythical. His work ethic was known widely throughout the sport. Baseball is a sport where so much is out of your control, where the game humbles you on a nightly basis regardless of how prepared you are. But there are a select few who seem like they can make the game do what they want, on their terms. Ichiro was one of those few.

During spring training that year, he signed with us around the middle of camp. I walked into the clubhouse early the morning of his signing and noticed my locker area had been rearranged. I looked up and saw a new nameplate in the locker directly next to mine.

Ichiro.

I had to double take. There was no way Ichiro Suzuki was my locker mate. Someone had made a mistake. Nobody puts a random twenty-five-year-old kid next to one of the most iconic players in the history of the game.

But there it was. His nameplate. Right next to mine. For the rest of camp and all the way to Tokyo, I sat next to a man whose baseball card I had once held in my hands as a kid. The same guy was now asking me to see my glove and trying out my bats.

We arrived in Japan a few days before the season started. We played two exhibition games against the Yomiuri Giants before the regular season opener, and those games opened my eyes to baseball as a global religion.

Every player on the Yomiuri team had their own chant. Fans banging drums in rhythmic unison, thousands of voices singing in perfect time for each hitter. When our guys came up to bat, you could hear a pin drop. The respect was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The passion was on another level entirely.

Each exhibition game, I would replace Ichiro around the seventh inning. As I would make the run from the dugout to right field, a sea of boos would crash down on me, louder and louder, until I realized what was happening. They weren’t booing me. They thought I was replacing their hero. I wanted to scream, “It’s not my fault. I’m just doing what I’m told. I’d want to see him too.”

After the two exhibition games, we geared up for the real thing. Game one of the official MLB season against the Oakland Athletics. I didn’t sniff the field. My true debut would have to wait.

Game two arrived. As we approached the middle innings, the rumors started flying around the dugout. Quiet at first, then impossible to ignore. Ichi is going to retire. This is it. This is his last game.

That’s when Skip pulled me aside. “Hey, he’s going to get one more at-bat and then he’s coming out. It’s your time.”

I nervously tried to warm up in the small space we had in our clubhouse. Stretching, moving, trying to get my body to do something my brain was barely allowing. I will never forget the collision of panic and excitement happening simultaneously. Absolutely terrified and humbled beyond measure at the exact same time. Where your hands are shaking but your chest feels like it might burst open from something that isn’t fear. Something closer to awe.

After the emotion of Ichiro’s farewell died down, after the hugs and the flashes and the five words I’ll carry for the rest of my life, I found myself standing in the outfield of the Tokyo Dome looking up at 50,000 fans.

Every motor skill in my lower body disappeared.

It wasn’t until the first pitch was about to be thrown that I realized I hadn’t even warmed up my arm. So to my complete embarrassment, there I was with Dee Gordon, playing catch in front of a sold-out stadium like the true rookie I was. Fifty thousand people watching two grown men toss a ball back and forth twenty feet apart because one of them forgot to prepare for the most important moment of his life. If that’s not the most honest version of a Major League debut, I don’t know what is.

Between every pitch, I would look around the dome and I was at a complete loss. I couldn’t tell if I was feeling so much that I couldn’t identify any single feeling, or if I was truly in a flow state I had never experienced before. Almost euphoria. The kind of present that usually takes years of mental training to access, handed to me for free because the moment was so overwhelming that my mind had no choice but to surrender to it.

Then, standing in center field with the game still going on around me, my mind went somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

I thought about everyone who got me there. Everything. Everyone. The flights. The rental cars. The Courtyard Marriotts of our travel ball life. The endless phone calls. My dad popped front and center. Every sacrifice he made, every drive to a tournament, every conversation before a game. All of it was in that outfield with me.

Then my mom.

My mom, who was continents away as her baby boy made his Major League debut. The woman I had been on a mission to play for so she could sit in the stands and watch. The woman who would never see this moment no matter how many times I replayed it. She was supposed to be here. She was supposed to feel this. I had chased this for years with her face in my mind and now I was standing on the field and she was somewhere else entirely, in a place where baseball scores don’t reach.

I got emotional. I had to hide my face for a minute. Standing in center field in the Tokyo Dome, in front of 50,000 people, hiding behind my glove so no one could see that the rookie was crying. Not because of the debut. Because of who wasn’t there to see it.

I didn’t realize the magnitude of what I had done in the moment. I was too deep inside it to see it from the outside. The full weight didn’t land until weeks later when our mental skills coach, Jimmy VanOstrand, told the team a story. He said that the total number of players who have ever played in the Major Leagues wouldn’t even fill up T-Mobile Park. The whole third deck would sit empty. That’s how few people have done what we had done.

The feeling of validation was real. Not the kind that comes from approval. The kind that comes from proof. No matter what happens next, no matter how the career ends, no matter what the box score says, nobody can take that away. You were one of them. You stood on that field. You belonged there.

There is something poetic about a legend going out and some fresh nobody coming in. It mirrors life in a way that baseball mirrors it better than any other sport. The veterans share their wisdom, pour into the next generatio

n, and then step aside so someone else can stand where they stood. There was no one I ever saw hand it down as gracefully as Ichiro. He walked out of the game with the same dignity he played it with, while still leaving you with the quiet suspicion that he could turn around a 3-1 backdoor slider if you gave him the chance.

When you’re around great veterans, you absorb what they impart on you and you carry it forward to the guys behind you. That’s what leaves the game in a better place than you found it. The game is bigger than any one player. Even the ones who seem like they could play it forever.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be teammates with Ichiro Suzuki. Never did I think I would be part of his retirement. Never did I think I would be the guy to replace him on the field in his final game. It’s something you prepare for without being able to name it. You work for it expecting something amazing, something great, without knowing what form it will take. You chase the unseen on faith alone. For years. Through injuries and setbacks and moments where the rational part of your brain tells you to stop. You keep going because something deeper than logic tells you not to quit.

Faith is believing in what you cannot see. I know that now because I’ve lived it.

The track to something great is a sea of unknown. That’s what makes it so terrifying. That’s also what makes it so worth it. The fact that you cannot see the destination while you’re walking toward it is not a flaw in the journey. It’s the entire point.

If you’re grinding in A ball right now, if you’re in a college dorm room wondering whether any of this is worth the sacrifice, I want you to hear this from someone who stood on that field: the moment is real. It exists. You just can’t see it yet. Keep walking.

Boston, someday I’ll tell you this story in full. About the night your dad replaced Ichiro Suzuki in the Tokyo Dome. About playing catch with Dee Gordon in front of 50,000 people because I forgot to warm up. About hiding behind my glove in center field because I was thinking about your grandmother.

I want you to know that the dream was real. It happened. Your dad was one of the few. Not because he was the most talented. Because he refused to stop walking toward something he couldn’t see.

I hope that’s something you carry with you, whatever your version of that field turns out to be.

The standard is faith.

— Braden

Bri is in the living room. Boston is pulling at her leg and she hasn’t sat down in two hours. She’s managing his energy, answering a work email with one hand, and somehow keeping the house from descending into the chaos that a five-year-old is genetically programmed to create. She does this every night. She does it without commentary. She does it the way she does everything, with a competence so quiet you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention.

I used to miss it. For years, I missed it.

This post is about the woman I almost didn’t see clearly until it was almost too late. The woman behind every post I’ve written, every season I survived, every dream I chased. The one who carried the weight I couldn’t name because I was too busy running to look back and see who was holding it.

It was the summer of 2019. I was in Seattle, bouncing between Tacoma and the big leagues. Bri was seven hundred miles south in Sacramento, building her career in medical device sales. We were doing the long-distance thing the way we had since 2015. Different area codes. Same commitment. Four years of it by then.

Then I had a freak injury that sent me to the ICU within minutes.

I don’t remember much about the moments before surgery. What I remember is waking up. The fluorescent light above me was too bright. The machines were beeping in a rhythm that felt like someone else’s heartbeat. My body felt like it belonged to a stranger. But sitting in the chair next to my bed, still in her work clothes, was Bri.

She had dropped everything. Left her office. Gotten on the first flight to Seattle. Before she could even get there, she had called my best friend in the city and made sure he was at the hospital so I wouldn’t be alone when they wheeled me back.

She didn’t say anything dramatic when I opened my eyes. Didn’t ask what happened. Didn’t cry. She just reached over and put her hand on mine. Like she was telling me, without words, that she had handled everything. That she always would.

That’s who I married. Not the version of Brianna that shows up when life is clean and the schedule is working. The version that boards a plane with no luggage and sits in an ICU chair in her work clothes and holds your hand like it’s the only job she’s ever had.

I’ve written about what my dream cost me. The injuries. The time with my mom. My identity. My peace. But I’ve never written about what it cost her. I’ve avoided it, if I’m being honest, because her list might be longer than mine. It’s harder to look at a list when you’re the one who wrote it on someone else.

Before baseball swallowed our life, Bri was building something of her own. She was supremely talented. She held power in a room. She could execute any task that landed in front of her with a precision that made people twice her age take notice. She had the kind of energy that makes you lean forward when she’s talking because you know she’s going somewhere and you want to be there when she arrives.

She put all of that on hold.

She raised Boston in the earliest months and years of his life while I was in another city catching fly balls. The 2am feedings. The first steps I saw on a phone screen. The teething, the crying, the sleepless weeks that blur into each other until you can’t remember which day it is. She took all of that off my plate so I could focus on baseball. She absorbed the unglamorous, unfilmed, uncelebrated work of keeping a human alive and a household running while her husband was living in a team hotel states away.

She never once made me feel guilty for it.

I missed her college graduation. I missed surgeries. I missed the moments where a partner is supposed to be standing in the room and I was standing in an outfield in Tacoma or Modesto or wherever the schedule had put me that week. She navigated those moments alone. Not because she had to. Because she chose to.

For a stretch of years, parts of her identity became “Braden’s wife.” I watched it happen. At team events, in introductions, in the way people looked past her to get to me. But she handled it with a grace I’m not sure I would have had if the roles were reversed. She knew it was a season. She knew who she was underneath the title. She was always so much more than those two words. She carried them without resentment because she believed in what we were building, even when building meant she was the one doing the holding and I was the one doing the chasing.

The hardest season of our marriage wasn’t during baseball. It was when I decided to walk away from it.

We had been so accustomed to the rhythm. Spring training in February and March. Season from April through September in whatever city the roster sheet said. Offseason back home. Seven years we ran that cycle. Our marriage had learned to breathe inside that structure the way your lungs learn to breathe at altitude. It wasn’t easy. But we had adapted.

Then one day I ended it. Without sitting down across from her and having the conversation I owed her.

I was burnt. I was done. I’ve said that before in these posts. But what I haven’t said is what it looked like from her side of the table.

Bri liked the rhythm. She liked watching me compete. She had watched me fight through injuries and demotions and release after release, and she had seen what I was capable of when everything clicked. She knew how good I was. She believed, more than almost anyone, that I could get back to the Major Leagues and stay there.

I walked away without asking her what she thought.

I thought I was being selfless. I thought I was choosing my family. But I was making a decision about our life as if it were only mine to make. The truth is, she had earned a voice in that decision more than anyone. She had sacrificed her career, her independence, her identity, and years of her twenties so that dream could exist. When it came time to decide whether to keep going or let it die, I didn’t even pick up the phone.

I think part of her resented me for that. Not because she disagreed with the outcome. Because I stole her seat at the table. I made the ending hers to live with but not hers to choose.

That resentment taught me something I will carry for the rest of my life. Life is better together. Her disappointment in that moment didn’t break us. It rebuilt us. Because it forced me to see something I had been blind to for years: I had been making decisions for us while only consulting myself. Every time I did that, no matter how good my intentions were, I was telling her that her voice didn’t matter as much as my conviction.

Every major decision since then has started with a conversation. Not an announcement. A conversation.

Our marriage is fundamentally different now than it was during baseball. Not just better. Rebuilt from different materials.

During baseball, I was the engine. My career set the schedule, chose the city, determined the income, dictated the mood. Bri organized everything around my pursuit. She supported the dream. She carried the logistics. She held the family in place while I chased something that only I could feel the gravity of.

Now we build together. Side by side. Not one chasing while the other holds. Both of us working toward a life we designed at the same table.

Her career is thriving. She walks into rooms the way she always should have, with the full force of who she is, and people pay attention. The talent that was always there, the power, the execution, the presence, it’s no longer on hold. It’s unleashed. Watching her step into the fullness of who she’s always been has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

The woman who put her career on pause so I could play baseball is now running the show in her own right. I get a front-row seat.

Bri, I have never loved anyone as deeply as I love you. You are the greatest gift of my life and there is no version of who I am today that exists without you. We have navigated seasons of this marriage that would have ended most. We have sat across from each other in conversations that had no easy answers and chosen to stay in the room until we found one. We have loved each other unconditionally through every single one of them.

I am grateful beyond belief. Not for what you’ve done for me. For who you are.

Boston, I know she drives you a little crazy. I know you never let her sit still for more than five seconds. But your mom is a force. She commands every room she walks into and she is the strongest woman you will ever know. One day you’re going to understand just how lucky you are. When you do, I hope you tell her.

If you’re the spouse sitting at home right now while your partner chases something, I want you to know that what you’re doing is not invisible. It feels like it sometimes. The world celebrates the person on the stage and forgets the one who built it. But the life you’re holding together, the meals and the bedtimes and the bills and the loneliness and the waiting, that is the foundation the dream stands on. Without you, it collapses. Without you, there is no dream. You are not the supporting character in someone else’s story. You are the reason the story exists at all.

If you’re the one chasing, stop for a second. Turn around. Look at the person standing behind you absorbing everything you can’t carry. Ask them how they’re doing. Not in passing. Not while you’re looking at your phone. Sit down. Ask. When they answer, don’t fix it. Don’t explain why the sacrifice will be worth it someday. Just listen. Because the thing you’re chasing will end. Every career does. Every season does. Every dream either arrives or it doesn’t. But the person behind you is the one who stays. Long after the last game. Long after the applause stops. They’re still there. In the living room. Holding everything together. The way they always have.

Don’t wait until you almost lose them to see it.

The standard is together.

— Braden

It was a Friday night before the biggest rivalry football game of my high school season. I called my dad to have our pregame conversation, the one we had before every game no matter what. Win or lose, home or away, it didn't matter. That phone call was ours.

He answered, but something was wrong. He was slurring his words. My brother happened to be in the car with him and got on the phone. "I don't know what's happening." Then my mom showed up and the line went dead.

Silence.

I had no idea what was going on. I ran to the coaches' offices bawling my eyes out. They started calling hospitals, emergency services, anyone they could reach. The game, the rivalry, the scoreboard, all of it disappeared. The only thing left in my chest was one question: is my dad okay?

I'm not opening this post with that moment because of what happened to my dad that night. I'm opening with it because of what it revealed about me. In the most important game of my season, football didn't matter. Winning didn't matter. Nothing mattered without knowing he was safe. That's what Randy Bishop built in me without ever giving it a speech. He didn't teach me to love him. He just showed up so consistently, so relentlessly, that love was the only thing I knew how to give back.

My dad is a blue-collar man who spent his career in law enforcement. He started the sex crimes against children division of the FBI.

Let that sit for a second.

Every day, he went to work and faced the worst things human beings do to the most innocent among us. And then he came home and raised two sons. He carried that weight without ever letting it touch us directly, but it shaped everything about how he protected our family. He shielded us from things most kids never have to think about. Not because he was controlling. Because he had looked evil in the face for a living and decided his sons would never meet it unprepared. He used to say two words that summed up his entire philosophy: "Stupid hurts."

He played baseball growing up. In his words, he was the best player to ever come out of Beverly Hills High School. Between the buttoned-up law enforcement discipline and the athlete's obsession with performance, he pushed me hard. He expected perfection. Not the kind that breaks a kid. The kind that builds one. He believed that standard was the only one worth holding, and he was willing to be the villain in my story if it meant I'd be ready for mine.

If I had to describe him in one word it would be intense. He scared me, in a productive way, into acting right. Into sacrificing things other kids my age were doing. Parties, hanging out, cutting corners. I just didn't do it. At thirteen years old I had already decided I wanted to be a big leaguer, and my dad made sure I understood what that decision actually required. Not with inspiration. With accountability.

My mom was the angel I ran to when his standards felt unreasonable. She was the warmth, the words, the creativity, the unconditional arms that told you everything was going to be fine even when it wasn't. He was the structure. The discipline. The quiet, immovable force behind everything our family stood on. She made you feel safe. He made you ready. It was the perfect yin and yang. And our household ran on values that never needed to be spoken because they were lived every single day. Do the right thing. Treat people the right way. Go to work. Earn everything. No exceptions.

The lessons my dad taught me were never lectures. They were actions. And some of them I didn't understand for years.

Watching him work taught me that effort doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't need applause. Work was work. If you wanted to provide for your family, you showed up and handled it. There was no negotiation. No alternative. You just did it. Every single day, whether you wanted to or not.

Watching him during my mom's illness taught me what love actually looks like when everything is trying to destroy it. Not the wedding day version. Not the anniversary version. The version where your wife doesn't recognize your face anymore and you still show up at her bedside every single morning. He followed through on his vows in a way that most people only promise to. In sickness and in health. Those aren't just words. They're a daily decision. And he made that decision every morning when it would have been easier, and nobody would have blamed him, to stop.

That is undying love. Not a feeling you fall into. A choice you make when the feeling is gone and the work is all that's left.

The UW hotel room. The one I've written about before, where he told me I could come home. In the moment, I hated him for it. I wanted him to wrap his arms around me and tell me it was going to be okay. I wanted comfort. But he knew something I didn't. He knew from his own life that giving into the moments you don't like will crush your goals, your career, and everything you told yourself you were building toward. He didn't give me what I wanted. He gave me what I needed. And fifteen years later, I'm still drawing from that well.

There were things he did repeatedly that seemed trivial at the time. Being overbearing about the small stuff. Correcting habits I thought didn't matter. Holding the line on details that felt pointless to a teenager. But over time, those details compounded into the exact habits that separated me from the guy standing next to me. I didn't appreciate that until I became a father and caught myself doing the same thing with my own son.

Here's the honest part. The part I've never said publicly.

I was scared to strikeout from my very first at-bat in professional baseball until my very last one. Eight years. Every single plate appearance, somewhere underneath the preparation and the focus and the routine, there was a kid standing in the box who was terrified of letting his father down. Not of failing. Of disappointing him. Those are different things, and the difference matters.

That fear lived in me for my entire career. It rode the bus with me. It sat in the hotel room with me. It stood in the on-deck circle with me every single night.

But that same fear is the reason I never accepted mediocrity. The reason I never took a day off. The reason I ground my way from a defensive-first outfielder to a Major Leaguer when people told me it would never happen. The fear and the fuel were the same thing. I couldn't have had one without the other. And I've made peace with that. Most days.

I wrote about my mom's illness from my perspective in an earlier post. What it felt like to be away. What I missed. What I carry. This is about what it did to my dad.

I witnessed a man step into the fire with no protection, no manual, and no one coming to relieve him. He carried the weight of watching the woman he loved disappear while raising two sons and after having worked a career that showed him the darkest side of humanity every single day. Through it all, he never once put any of it on my plate so I could chase a baseball dream that we set out on together.

I don't know what that cost him. I'm not sure he would ever tell me. I'm not sure he even knows how to measure it.

But I saw it crack once.

We were at Palo Alto High School. He was leaning against the car. And for the first time in my life, my dad, the FBI agent, the man who stared down the worst of humanity for a living, the man who scared me into perfection, the man I thought was unbreakable, confessed that he didn't have the physical, mental, or emotional strength to continue. My mom was at the height of her illness and he had nothing left. Absolutely nothing.

I leaned on the car across from him.

I told him he didn't want to look back someday and see that this moment was the one that defeated him. That he wanted to be the man who outlasted the impossible. The kind of person people look at and ask, "How did you do that?" And the answer would be: I have no idea.

Something shifted in him. He didn't magically find the strength. He just decided he wasn't done yet. And that single decision, made on the ground of a high school parking lot, carried him through the rest of it.

The son became the father for a moment. And the father let him.

I think about that moment more than almost any other in my life. Because it taught me that strength isn't the absence of breaking. It's what you do when you're already broken and someone needs you to stand up anyway.

The way I parent Boston has a lot of Randy in it. The standards. The expectations. The belief that small habits matter more than big moments. That's him in me and I don't run from it.

But I'm doing some things differently. Not as a criticism of my dad. As an evolution. The next draft of the same story.

I don't want Boston to look at me when he's failing and see a father whose love is tied to the outcome. I played at the highest level. I know exactly how much failure is woven into the pursuit of anything great. Strikeouts do not define your story. There is so much writing that happens between those moments and the final page. I want us to ride the wave together. Not me watching from the shore telling him to swim harder.

I want Boston to feel what my mom gave me, that unconditional, unshakeable safe space, and what my dad gave me, that relentless, uncompromising standard, in the same person. I want him to know that I will hold him accountable and hold him close at the same time. That those two things don't have to live in different parents. They can live in one.

Have I caught myself being my dad? Oh yeah. In T-ball. I caught myself expecting a four-year-old to throw the ball across the diamond and had to stop and laugh at myself. A four-year-old. But that's the thing about your parents. They show up in you whether you invite them or not. The work isn't erasing them. It's deciding which parts to keep, which parts to reshape, and which parts to let go of with gratitude instead of resentment.

Dad, you shaped me into every bit of the man I am. I am grateful for your stewardship no matter how many times we butted heads. Thank you for holding me to a standard I didn't understand at the time but lean on every single day. Thank you for following through on your vows when the world gave you every reason not to. Thank you for sitting against that car at Palo Alto High School and letting me see that even the strongest man I've ever known needed someone to remind him to keep going.

And thank you for answering the phone before every game. Every single one. That was the lesson. Not what you said. That you always picked up.

If you're a father who's quiet and wonders whether your kids notice what you do for them, they notice. Every single bit of it. They may not say it for years. They may fight you on it. They may slam doors and think you're unreasonable and wish you were softer. But one day they'll have a child of their own and catch themselves doing the exact thing you did, and in that moment they'll understand everything you never had to say.

If you're a son who hasn't told his father what he means to him, don't wait for the right moment. There isn't one. Just say it. Pick up the phone. The call doesn't have to be long. It just has to happen.

The standard is him.

— Braden

Follow me for more: Braden Bishop

In my career, I played with hundreds of guys. From first round mega prospects, undrafted free agents, international signees, Golden Spikes winners to couldn’t afford spikes players. I saw guys with every physical tool you could ask for wash out in two seasons. And I saw guys that nobody believed in carve out careers that defied every projection ever written about them.

After a while, you stop asking who’s the most talented. You start asking who’s going to last. And those are two very different questions.

This story begins with a kid named Luis Rengifo.

It was 2016, maybe 2017, and I was in the Seattle Mariners organization. Luis was a young Venezuelan player, two levels below me. He was small. Undersized. Aggressive at the plate. No standout tool on his scouting report. If you lined up twenty prospects in spring training and asked a scout to pick the ones who’d make the big leagues, Luis would not have been circled.

But if you watched him, really watched him, something was different.

He was one of the nicest, most positive kids I had ever come across. He asked questions constantly, in broken English at the time, and played his butt off every single day. Back field games, scrimmages, it didn’t matter. It was lightning. I remember we had a scrimmage one day on a back field and he hit a home run into the parking lot of the Mariners spring training complex. It was loud. He just moved different. Packed a punch that his frame had no business delivering.

In the summer of 2017, the Mariners traded him to Tampa. I followed his career but he was still at the lower levels. Then in 2018 he got traded to the Angels and went on a rocket ship. A ball, AA, AAA, then added to the 40-man roster that offseason. He went on to have really solid years at the big league level, far outplaying what I think the outside world would have ever projected for him.

His production was all that mattered. Not his appearance. Not his lack of a plus-plus tool. His character, his energy, and his relentless consistency did what a scouting report said he couldn’t.

The next stop on this train is about Kyle Lewis.

Kyle was a five-tool prospect in the Mariners organization. One of the greatest players to ever come out of Mercer University, and college baseball in general. In today’s game, he’s probably a six-figure NIL athlete who transfers to LSU or Arkansas. He was the kind of talent that makes an entire draft room hold its breath.

He won the American League Rookie of the Year in 2020. He made it. But what could have been one of the greatest careers of all time was stolen by injuries and decisions that were out of his control.

His first summer after getting drafted, he slid into home and tore his ACL. Then on his way back, bad decisions at the organizational level diminished trust. He was rushed back and reinjured in 2017. I’ll never forget playing left field and watching him run for a ball into right center where he banged his knee on the wood wall, came out of the game, and there went his 2017 season.

Kyle took his rehab into his own hands after that. He was healthy enough to grind through the minors in 2018 and 2019. Toward the end of 2019, he got called up to the show. And Kyle had a knack for this: when the lights were brightest, he would do something really cool. He hit a home run in his first big league game off Trevor Bauer.

The talent was never the question with Kyle. It was always there, every single day. But the game has a way of reminding you that talent alone doesn't write the story. Availability does. Kyle's body wouldn't let him be the player his talent said he was, and that's one of the hardest things to watch in professional sports. Not someone who couldn't do it. Someone who could, but never got the full chance to show it.

The pattern became impossible to ignore.

Availability is your greatest ability in professional baseball. Everyone can play at that level. Everyone’s tools are comparable, some have ones that really stand out, but the baseline talent is high across the board. The difference is the guys who can put the numbers on paper, the plays on tape, day after day after day. If you’re playing 100 to 120 games every year, you’re going to average out to who you actually are. But you have to give yourself the chance. You have to be available.

The guys who lasted had something else in common beyond health. They had balance. And this is the part that rewired my entire understanding of performance.

I came into professional baseball believing that sacrifice was the only path. Sacrifice everything to be a baseball player. Eat, sleep, breathe the game. Never take a day off mentally. And then I’d watch the best players in the world do something that confused me. They’d be great husbands. They’d joke around in the clubhouse. They’d skip hitting on the field some days because they felt good and didn’t need it. And then they’d lock it in at 7pm and go 3-for-4.

They could clock in and clock out at the highest level because they had built a life outside of the game that kept them whole. The game wasn’t their entire identity. It was their profession. And that separation, the thing I thought was a weakness, was actually their greatest strength.

The guys who flamed out had the opposite relationship with the game. Too emotional. Unable to understand that failure was coming every single night. In arguably the best MVP season in MLB history, Barry Bonds still made 320 outs. Over 2 outs per game on average. The greatest hitter who ever lived failed more than he succeeded.

The guys who couldn’t last expected perfection and were unable to adjust to the reality in front of them. Their relationship with failure never evolved. And eventually, the game spit them out. Not because they lacked talent. Because they couldn’t coexist with the one thing the game guarantees you: failure.

This pattern didn’t stay in baseball for me. I see it everywhere now.

In business, in parenting, in marriage, in building anything. The talented person who can’t get out of their own way because they’re guided by emotions, always on a roller coaster of highs and lows. And the grinder who shows up with the same energy every day, unmoved by external circumstances, who quietly outperforms everyone’s expectations.

It takes real work to detach from results. To be so internally driven and motivated that you are unmoved by what happens around you. Of course we are human and feel things just like everyone else. But the ability to not let it ruin your mood, your energy, or your relationships is invaluable. In the clubhouse and in the home.

Talent is merely what you have. Character is who you become through every chiseled mark from your journey.

Talent takes you to base camp. Your character makes the summit.

And the way we evaluate young athletes is broken because of this. We measure exit velocity, arm strength, speed, and size. We rank kids before they’ve had a chance to develop the thing that actually determines whether they last. Character is what develops locker rooms and clubhouses. It’s what sustains dynasties. Talent changes with age and injury and circumstance. Character doesn’t.

So would I rather Boston be the most talented kid on the field or the kid with the qualities I just described?

At the end of the day, we aren’t all going to be big leaguers. Whether it’s a lack of talent, injuries, luck, or wrong place wrong time, the math just doesn’t work for most people. But the one thing sport can do is provide you a foundation that helps you attack any and all things you come up against in life. Emotional regulation through life’s toughest tests. That’s the real gift of competition. Not the trophy. The person you become chasing it.

Gratitude is one of the best ways to change your energy state. And your energy state directly impacts your production state. That’s what I’m teaching my son. Not how to hit. How to be.

The moral of the story is this: there is no profile of an elite performer. There is a strong moral framework where standards match energy, and energy matches production.

Stop chasing numbers and chase character building. Chase production in the form of consistency, not exit velocity. Because at every level of every pursuit, the room is full of talented people. The ones who last are the ones who built something underneath the talent that holds when everything else cracks.

The standard is character.

— Braden

Here’s what chasing my dream cost me.

Four of the most trying years of my mother’s life. She was disappearing, and I was in another city catching fly balls and running into outfield walls.

My body. A ruptured spleen. A displaced ulna. Broken fingers. Concussions. One metal plate. Nine screws. Five surgeries. Damage that will never fully heal.

My relationship in its early years. Distance. Absence. I missed Brianna’s college graduation. I missed her surgeries. I missed milestones that most partners are there for. She understood. That doesn’t mean it didn’t cost her.

Friendships. Birthdays. Weddings. Celebrations. Holidays. At thirteen years old I made the choice that I wanted to be a big leaguer, and I sacrificed what kids my age did. Hanging out, going out, being a teenager. I didn’t do it because I believed, maybe irrationally, that I couldn’t do those things if I wanted to get where I wanted to go.

My peace. I lived in fight or flight for years. The only time of day I would take a deep breath was when the last out was made. That relief would last until I woke up the next morning and I was right back in that place of worry and uncertainty. Every single day.

My identity. Who I was outside of baseball. For years, I had no idea.

That’s the invoice. And it’s longer than I expected it to be when I started writing it down.

September 2012. My parents dropped me off at the University of Washington.

I was miserable. First time away from home, living in a concrete box of a dorm. Not strong enough to compete at that level. Outmatched. Outgunned. Completely out of control. Everything I had built my confidence on in high school meant nothing. I was just another kid trying to survive.

I was sitting on the bed in my parents’ hotel room, and my dad lit me up. He told me I could come home. He dared me to do what was easy. Go to junior college for a year, live at home, be in the same places I had been my whole life. But in that process, I would be giving up on the goal I had set out for myself. Not because I wouldn’t have found my way back eventually, but because I would be abandoning every foundation I had built for the hope of something more comfortable.

I stayed in Seattle.

That was the first time I paid and chose not to ask for a refund. It wouldn’t be the last.

But here’s the thing about that invoice. Every line on it gave me something back.

I missed the last few years of my mom’s life. But without the people at UW, without Dave Rak and Brian Tom, I would have never had the platform to tell her story. 4MOM doesn’t exist without those years. The foundation that has raised over $400,000 for families fighting Alzheimer’s was born from the exact pain that being away caused. Would I have built that from a place of comfort? I don’t think so. You don’t build something that meaningful unless the hurt is that deep.

My body is permanently damaged from the career I chose. But those moments of feeling like it was over, of lying on a training table wondering if I’d ever play again, forged something in me that I use every single day. A mentality to always see a way forward. To be present in the fire because if you keep stepping, eventually you reach the other side.

I missed moments with Brianna that I’ll never get back. But going through that distance together, those years of sacrifice and long phone calls and showing up for each other when it would have been easier not to, built something that a comfortable relationship never could have. I know what she’s made of because we’ve both been tested. And she knows the same about me.

My heart is so entrenched in my son’s life now because of what I missed at the beginning. Baseball was about me. Life is about us. I don’t take a single day with Boston for granted because I know exactly what it feels like to lose them.

I thought I would play forever. People knew me as a baseball player, and I liked that. When the jersey came off, my foundation fundamentally changed. But losing who I was is the reason I found who I actually am. It’s the reason I write. It’s the reason this even exists. You can’t build something real until the thing you were hiding behind is gone.

I don’t miss waking up on edge every morning. I don’t miss my emotions being dictated by my performance no matter how hard I tried to separate the two. But that constant state of pressure gave me something I couldn’t have earned any other way. I can sit with someone in their darkest moment now because I’ve been in mine. I know what the bottom of the chest feels like. And I know what it feels like to climb out.

The most fulfilling things in your life will come at a cost. You just have to decide which ones are worth the sacrifice.

I didn’t pay for this alone.

Brianna put her own career on hold. Her own athletic dreams. The possibility of a normal relationship in her twenties. She chose me and my dream, and she carried weight I didn’t even see at the time. I see it now.

My dad internalized every problem so it wouldn’t land on my plate. While my mom was sick and I was on the road, he held everything together and told me to focus on my dream. I don’t know what that cost him. I’m not sure he’d ever tell me. But I know it was more than I’ll ever fully understand.

My mom didn’t get to see what her sacrifices built. My heart is broken because of that. It always will be. There is no reconciling it. There is only living in a way that honors what she gave.

Boston. I wish he could have grown up in a clubhouse. Run around the field. Played catch before batting practice. Sat on my lap in the dugout. He was too young to know what he was missing. But I know. And that knowledge is what makes me show up for every T-ball game, every bedtime story, every morning like it matters. Because it does.

I owe my family more than I could ever repay. The emotional, spiritual, and physical sacrifices they made so I could chase my dream were the most selfless things I have ever witnessed. I don’t repay that with words. I repay it with how I live.

So was it worth it?

Every second.

Not because of the Major Leagues. Not because of the stats or the paychecks or the highlights. Those things fade. They’re already fading.

It was worth it because the hardships, the routines, the presence, the practice of regulating emotions through years of pressure prepared me to be the father my son needs. Every up and down was like navigating an 0-2 count. And I learned how to compete in that count.

It was worth it because my struggles became the biggest builder of empathy in my life. I felt the deep emotions of failure so many times that I can now feel them in other people before they say a word.

It was worth it because I learned to look impossibility in the face and laugh. Not because I wasn’t scared. Because I had seen impossible before and I was still standing.

It was worth it because every discomfort was a necessity. Every one. If I wanted to take the next step, I had to feel the pain of the last one. That’s not motivation. That’s just the truth.

It was worth it because without all of it, every single cost on that invoice, I would not be the man writing this today. And I like who that man is becoming.

If you’re standing at the beginning of something that’s going to cost you more than you can imagine right now, here’s what I want you to know.

The cost is real. Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t. You will lose things you love. You will miss moments you can’t get back. You will look at the people around you and wonder if you’re asking too much of them. Some days the answer will be yes.

But if the thing you’re chasing is rooted in who you are and not just what you want, the cost won’t break you. It will build you. Not into the person you planned to become. Into someone better. Someone you couldn’t have imagined from where you’re standing right now.

Bring the people you love into the journey. Don’t chase it alone. I made that mistake, and it’s the one thing I’d do differently.

And when it gets hard, and it will get hard, look down. Remind yourself why you started. Write it on your glove if you have to.

The cost and the gift are inseparable. I know that now. You can’t have one without the other. Without the sacrifices, the missed holidays, the lost friendships, the concrete dorm room in Seattle, the mattresses cut out of the box in Bakersfield, California, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t have the wife I have. The son I have. The foundation I have. The words I have.

Mom, you paid more than anyone. And you never once made me feel like I owed you for it. I hope every word I write, every family 4MOM serves, and every morning I show up for Boston makes you feel like it was worth it too.

I think you’d say it was. You usually were right about those things.

The standard is all of it.

— Braden

My mom is standing in the living room doing neck circles.

She’s stretching her quads one leg at a time while we talk through a decision, weighing the pros and cons. She can’t just sit and have a conversation. She has to be moving. Stretching. Thinking with her whole body. A creator. A producer. A film visionary who turned every conversation into something worth paying attention to. The kind of woman who makes you more articulate just by being in the room with her. The kind of woman who could look at you once and know whether you were telling the truth.

I need you to see her like that first. Standing. Moving. Sharp. Fully alive.

Because the rest of this story is going to try to take that image from you. Don’t let it.

I started noticing things I couldn’t explain. And then I started pretending I didn’t notice them.

Small things at first. A lag behind answers. Losing track of her surroundings. Statements that didn’t quite land. I’m not proud of this, but I was getting embarrassed to be around my mom. The mistakes frustrated me. I didn’t understand them. I didn’t want to understand them. It’s an ugly thing to admit, that my first instinct wasn’t concern. It was discomfort. I was her son, and instead of asking what was wrong, I looked away.

Then we were in the car together and she made a left-hand turn on a red light. Just went. No hesitation. No awareness. I grabbed the dashboard and looked at her and she had no idea anything had happened.

Something had been off for longer than I wanted to believe. And I had been too close to it, or too scared, to name it.

Early Onset Alzheimer’s. At 52 years old.

Three words that rearranged every memory I had of the previous two years. Every moment I had written off. Every time I had been frustrated instead of afraid. It all snapped into focus, and the picture it made was the worst thing I’d ever seen.

I found out in the living room of my college apartment. I was sitting on a couch being told that the woman who raised me was disappearing, and that there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Not slow it. Not fix it. Not reverse it. Nothing. I didn’t know what Alzheimer’s was. Wasn’t it a later-in-life disease? Could we manage it? What did it even mean? I had no answers. No framework. No understanding of what was coming. I was twenty years old.

Nobody writes about the middle.

They write about the diagnosis. They write about the death. But the middle, the long, slow, daily reality of watching someone you love disappear while they’re still sitting right in front of you, that part gets skipped. Maybe because it’s too hard to put into words. Maybe because it doesn’t have a clean narrative. It doesn’t build toward anything. It just erodes.

It’s just days. One after another. Each one a little less than the one before.

Every so often, in the midst of absolute haze and confusion and lost spaces, I would see my beautiful mother. A flash of clarity. A moment where her eyes locked onto mine and she was there. Fully there. The woman from the living room doing neck circles. The woman who could look at you and know if you were telling the truth. She’d surface for a few seconds and the whole room would hold its breath.

And then she’d be gone again. Mid-sentence sometimes. Like a light flickering before it goes out for good.

Those moments of clarity were somehow harder than the confusion. Because the confusion you could brace for. The clarity reminded you of exactly who you were losing, and how powerless you were to keep her.

And then there was the guilt.

Being away while she withered away. Playing baseball in another city while my dad was bleeding, financially, physically, emotionally, trying to hold everything together at home. Watching him age ten years in two. Those were the deepest and darkest emotions I have ever felt. Not the saddest. The deepest. The kind that sit in the bottom of your chest and never fully come out.

I was on a mission to make my Major League debut so she could be there. So she could see it. So she could sit in those stands and feel what every sacrifice she ever made was building toward. So I could point to her from the field and she could know that her son made it. Because of her.

I failed that mission.

She never saw me play in the Major Leagues.

My mom passed away in 2019.

The next morning we woke up and the house was the same but the air was different. A faint guilt laid on me. Was it selfish of us to want her here physically when she had been gone mentally for so long? Were we holding on for her or for us?

The hardest part was saying goodbye twice at different times. We had made peace with losing who she was cognitively. We had grieved that version of her for years. Slowly, quietly, in all the spaces between hospital visits and phone calls and ordinary days. But doing it physically was its own kind of devastation.

A different door closing on the same room. And this time, it locked.

4MOM was my why before it was a foundation.

Every game I played, I had 4MOM written somewhere. My glove. My cleats. My hat. Eventually, my skin. A tattoo that made sure I never forgot what I was playing for. When things got hard, a bad at-bat, a demotion, a night where the game felt like it was taking more than it was giving, I’d look down at those four letters and remember that my problems were small. The mission to live for something more than myself was always top of mind. Every at-bat. Every ground ball. Every flight to another city.

My strength coach at the University of Washington, Dave Rak, was a huge reason 4MOM became what it is. He looked at me during one of the hardest stretches of my life and said the thing I needed to hear. Don’t just carry this. Build something with it. He encouraged me to act. And by acting, I saw what was possible when you brought people into the fight with you. That was the moment I realized my soul’s mission was to show up for this community. Not because I had the answers, but because I understood the pain.

4MOM is more than a story now. It’s a platform to support the most vulnerable. The people that society casts aside. No insurance. No social security. No retirement. Caregivers who haven’t slept through the night in three years. Spouses who lost their partner long before the funeral. Families drowning in the cost of care with no one to call. We are the ones holding space. For the caregiver, for the family, for the person sitting in a waiting room wondering how they’re going to pay for next month.

Alzheimer’s is a problem so large that most people look at it and freeze. They think the only solution has to be as massive as the disease itself. A breakthrough drug, a billion-dollar research initiative, a cure. But that’s not how you fight something this big. You fight it one family at a time. One event at a time. One conversation at a time. You chip away in the places nobody’s looking, where the cameras aren’t pointed, where the wins don’t make headlines. And over time, those chips become cracks. And cracks let the light in.

We’ve raised over $400,000. We’re just getting started. Not because the finish line is close, but because the fight is worth it whether we can see the finish line or not.

I know my mom would be proud that we’ve honored her legacy. I’m not worried about that. All I can picture is her doing those neck circles, stretching her quads, proceeding to tell me exactly what needs to happen so we can impact and serve and care for more people. Job’s not finished just because you’ve impacted some.

She’d be right. She usually was.

My mom loved us unconditionally. She was my safe space. No matter what happened on the field or in life, I knew where to go. I knew who would be standing there. And I never once, not for a single second of my life, doubted that she was proud of me.

That is a gift that not everyone gets. I will never take it for granted.

I hope I am that for Boston. Where he can feel my love in every hug. Every time we hold hands and skip down the sidewalk. Every time he looks up at me and we smile at each other for no reason at all. I hope he feels her heart beating through mine.

The only reason I am even remotely eloquent with my words is because of her. She was a creator. A storyteller. Her words are infused in my being, in how I think, how I write, and how I want to so vulnerably share her story with the world. Every sentence I write, she’s in the room. Still doing neck circles. Still telling me what needs to be said.

I wish she could have known Boston. I knew how excited she was to have grandkids. How many times she asked Bri when the kids were coming.

We didn’t beat the clock on the Major League debut.

We didn’t beat the clock on this one either.

I will always carry those two things with me. Heavily, honestly, and without pretending they don’t still sting. Some weight you don’t put down. You just learn how to walk with it.

But I see her in him. In the way he laughs without holding anything back. In the way he loves people before he even knows them. In the way he looks at me sometimes and I swear it’s her eyes looking back.

She’s there. Different now. But there.

Mom, I am the man you shaped me to be. A present father. A loving husband. A servant leader. Everything good in me started with you.

My heart will always be yours. My first love.

Boston, your grandmother was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known. You carry pieces of her that you’ll spend your whole life discovering. I hope these words help you find them.

If you’re watching someone you love disappear, I’m not going to tell you it gets easier. I’d be lying. But I will tell you this: the love doesn’t disappear with them. It just changes shape. And if you let it, it will turn into something that serves more people than you ever thought possible.

That’s not a silver lining. That’s a choice. And it’s the hardest one you’ll ever make.

The standard is her.

— Braden

If you would like to learn more and support our mission: The 4MOM Foundation

It was the day after Christmas and I flew down to Newport Beach to meet with Scott Boras.

We sat together for two hours. He was in the middle of the Cody Bellinger negotiation. We were breaking bread. I love Scott. He is the best in the business. But sitting across from him that afternoon, I felt something I couldn’t ignore anymore — the gap between where I was and where I knew I needed to be.

We were no longer aligned. And my future no longer belonged at the Boras Corporation.

No matter how much I loved what I did and the players I served, my calling was no longer as a sports agent. Sometimes the clearest realizations come at the quietest tables.

When my playing career was ending, my main concern was how I was going to support my family and how I could spend more time with them. I had missed so much when I was playing. It was time for me to be a dad and a husband.

I was talking to the Boras Corp throughout the 2022–2023 offseason while my market was cold. I was a 29-year-old, out of team control, no longer with my original organization. Not exactly attractive to clubs.

Being an agent was never on my mind. Then one of the Boras Corp VPs, Scott Chiamparino, asked if my wife and I could meet him for dinner in San Francisco. We made the three-hour drive from Sacramento. He pitched me on an opportunity to switch over to the amateur draft side of baseball and recruit high school and college players for the draft.

We left that dinner and I knew it was what I wanted to do. It was a step back financially from what I was used to, but Bri and I both agreed that no matter what I did, I had to find a way to win business and bring value. This gave me an opportunity to stay in the game without living the life I had just stepped away from.

I was ready.

Most people think being an agent is Jerry Maguire. Slicked-back hair, screaming at GMs about money, driving a nice car.

The reality at Boras was a well-oiled machine of 160 employees across different vocations. Marketing. Lawyers. Data analysts. Negotiators. Recruiters. It wasn’t Hollywood. It was a law firm that happened to operate in professional sports.

I was a recruiter focused on the MLB Amateur Draft. My territory was Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, based on my UW and Mariners connections. I was fortunate to work with a lot of unbelievable players. The logo helped attract them, but the individual relationships you build over time are what really make it worth it.

You’re truly serving these players and their families through some of the most unknown and trying times of their lives. You’re in their living rooms. You’re fielding calls from their parents at midnight. You’re helping 18-year-olds make decisions that will change the trajectory of their entire family. And when you get to step out of the draft room and ask a player, “Hey, the Cubs want to take you with the 17th pick and give you 3.65 million dollars — are you in?” And then hear the celebration in the background — a mom screaming, a dad going silent because he can’t speak, a dream realized — that is really special.

I will miss those moments for the rest of my life.

The thing that started to change was I was getting older and genuinely wanted to build a career I was proud of. I had aspirations to lead. Aspirations to build. I didn’t want to stay in my own silo and do the same thing year after year. And to be fair, the agent industry is set up that way. Rinse and repeat.

Here’s the irony that nobody saw but me: I had stepped away from playing because I was rarely home. Even when I was home, I was focused on something that was going to give me a leg up on the field. I walked away from baseball to be present for my family. And then I built a career that put me right back on an airplane sometimes six days a week. I traded one version of absence for another. Unfortunately, I am not wired to sit around if performance and execution are my job. So I gave it everything — and everything meant being gone.

I realized the misalignment was in my long-term vision. I wanted to lead. I wanted to grow. I didn’t see my future as an amateur draft recruiter forever. To be frank, I wanted more. I felt I had more. Not more than the people around me — more within myself that wasn’t being used.

Between the time commitment and the alignment concerns, I just knew I had to step away. I had to make a decision that hurt me — and I’d like to think it hurt the families I served as well. That was the hardest part. Not the career change. The people.

This time I did it differently.

I spoke deeply with my wife. When I retired from playing, I made that decision without any consultation with her or my family. I regret that to this day. But this time it felt good to be on the same page, brainstorming what was next together. That lesson cost me something the first time around. I wasn’t going to pay for it twice.

Any time you walk away from something, emotions are involved. I have seen people do it gracefully and I have seen people do it horribly. I wanted to handle it amicably and make sure more than anything the players were taken care of.

The hardest part of the process wasn’t leaving Boras. It was telling the players and their families that I had to go. Calling a kid I’d recruited, a family that trusted me with their son’s future, and telling them I wouldn’t be there anymore. I truly haven’t cried that much in a two-day period. I hope it showed them that all the work, the conversations, and the sacrifices I made for them was because I cared deeply about them — not because it was my job. Those weren’t clients to me. They were people I’d gone to (figurative) war for.

I want to be clear about something.

When you’re an athlete you do one of two things: you irrationally think you’re going to play forever, or you’re too scared to admit that you’re terrified of what’s next. Most guys feel both at the same time. Scott Boras extended a bridge to me when I was standing on the edge of that cliff. He gave me an opportunity to learn and develop skills I knew I had from playing but had no idea how they applied in the real world.

I got to see high-stakes negotiations. I got to travel and watch baseball at every level. I found myself in rooms with people where I’d ask myself “is this real?”. I got to share my knowledge with the next generation. I recruited against some tough competition and found ways to win. I got to work with some unbelievable colleagues — from other agents to the analysts at the office. The fellowship was some of the best times I’ve had since the clubhouse.

I walked away from the Boras Corporation. I didn’t walk away from what it gave me. I don’t take any of that for granted.

Here’s what I’ve learned about walking away from things that look great on paper:

Your occupation has to match your long-term vision. Externally, people probably thought I was crazy for walking away from the Boras Corp — and honestly, for walking away from the game entirely. But when you have aspirations, they have to match where you are. Mine no longer did. And staying somewhere out of gratitude when you’ve outgrown it isn’t loyalty — it’s fear.

Familiarity will keep you stuck if you let it. I stayed longer than I should have because baseball was my life. Since I was five I knew nothing else. Stepping into the real world felt like learning another language. But comfort isn’t a reason to stay. It’s usually a sign you’ve outgrown where you are. The scariest part of leaving isn’t what’s ahead — it’s letting go of the only identity you’ve ever known.

We owe ourselves more than the cycle. It is so much easier to stay doing something you know, living a comfortable life, getting stuck in the cyclical nature of a business. But we owe ourselves more than that. To challenge the people around us. And if they can’t adapt to meet the aspirations you have for the business, the people, or yourself — then it’s time to move on. To jump and see if you can fly.

There is a distinct difference between quitting and choosing. Some people stay put because they think walking away is quitting. But if deep in your soul you’re convicted and in alignment with your long-term vision, then you’re not quitting. You’re choosing something different. And choosing takes more courage than staying ever will.

If you’re in a role right now that looks perfect from the outside but feels wrong on the inside — write down your long-term vision. Not the safe version. The real one. “If I could have it any way I wanted...” and then live in accordance with that.

Fulfillment doesn’t look good. Fulfillment feels good. And nobody else can tell you what it feels like but you.

The standard is alignment.

— Braden

There was a stretch in 2018 where I was hitting .141 after 41 games.

For those who need it in plain English — I was playing comically horrible. In a sport where failing 7 out of 10 times makes you elite, I was failing 9 out of 10. At that level, that doesn’t just get you benched. It gets you sent home.

With every out, every bad at-bat, every unlucky play, I just gripped tighter. Tried harder. Doubled down on the work. And ironically, working harder, staying later, and doubling down was actually making it worse.

I was in unfamiliar territory. I had always worked harder to get through the tough times. Now I was working so hard I was actually getting worse. And the scariest part? I didn’t have another gear. Hard work was the only tool I had — and it was broken.

Every athlete hears it. “Outwork everyone.” “First one in, last one out.” “Nobody’s going to outwork me.” I could give you dozens of other hustle culture clichés. I heard it from all angles. You can’t listen to a podcast or watch a social media video without hearing about how the work is the trophy. How if you want it, you need to work for it.

And yes — that’s a requirement.

Honestly, for a long time it worked for me. Hard work took me to a Division I scholarship at the University of Washington, an MLB Draft pick, Minor League All-Star, and I climbed all the way to AA as a top prospect who became a Major Leaguer for the Seattle Mariners.

So when someone like me tells you that hard work isn’t the answer — understand that I built my entire life on it. I’m not dismissing the grind. I’m telling you it has a ceiling. And I hit mine face-first.

The problem is when you’re in the shit and you’re repeatedly getting punched in the mouth, sometimes you truly have no answer but to surrender. When the work ain’t working — what do you turn to?

The shift came after a game in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

I was playing so poorly I was literally trying everything. I will never forget — I hit a ball to left-center field, just a few feet to the left of the batter’s eye. Then-Dodgers prospect Yusniel Diaz literally climbed the wall and robbed my home run.

I will never forget the feeling I had running back to our dugout. I really think my teammates felt bad for me at that point. Like I said — my failure had become comical. The kind of bad luck that makes the whole bench go quiet because nobody knows what to say.

But the shift came after the game. I called my dad and he said, “Just keep swinging, buddy.”

Five words. Nothing tactical. Nothing about my swing mechanics or my approach at the plate. Just a father reminding his son to not give up.

I got on the bus and started ripping off text messages to everyone — friends, family, coaches. They all read something like: “Hey, I just want you to know how grateful I am for the role you’ve played in my life. I love you.”

The responses I got back was the shift. People pouring back into me at the exact moment I had nothing left to give. Reminding me that I was more than a batting average. That the people in my corner didn’t care about .141 — they cared about me.

I realized gratitude is the way through the trials. The answer wasn’t more physical, external work. That’s empty. It had to be meaningful, deep, internal work. Stuff that fills your soul. Because when your soul is full, your hands are quiet and your mind is clear — and that’s when you perform.

Here’s what I believe now about performance:

Gratitude will always beat extra work. Not because it creates physical adaptations, but because it fills your soul — and you need that energy to make any physical gain. A player running on empty can’t execute no matter how many hours he puts in. You have to fill the tank with something real before the work can do what it’s supposed to do.

You have to know when to surrender. Hustle culture will burn you out. Plain and simple. You aren’t beating anyone at your own story, because it’s yours. Your timing is uniquely yours. Surrender doesn’t mean quitting — it means releasing the death grip on the outcome and trusting that you’ve done enough to let it come to you.

Hard work doesn’t equal execution. We all have a sense of pride when our hard work pays off. But when it doesn’t, we rarely question the work itself — we just do more of it. The truth is, I could take a thousand swings in the cage and still go 0-for-4 that night. Hard work creates opportunity. It doesn’t guarantee outcomes. And if you can’t separate the two, every bad result feels like a personal failure instead of just part of the process.

Consistency in execution reigns supreme. Hard work with mediocre results means you’re working for quantity, not quality. You’re working to beat others, not to be your best. The guys who lasted in the big leagues weren’t always the most talented. They were the ones who could do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. Consistency in results will tell you just how hard you actually need to work.

Working harder isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete.

This isn’t just a baseball thing. This is for the founder working 80-hour weeks and burning out. The parent who thinks more reps and more camps will get their kid a scholarship. The person in any career who confuses busyness with progress.

I see people grinding with no awareness, no recovery, no mental game, no soul. I wish we could all slow down and realize that progress doesn’t always come in the same form — and your progress has nothing to do with someone else’s. Staying busy might feel good, but compounded over time you’re just doing what I did — comically spinning your wheels. And the hardest part is that everyone around you is applauding you for it because the culture rewards the grind, even when the grind is destroying you.

If you’re the person who’s doing everything right and it’s still not working — surrender. Seriously. Relinquish the need to work more. Send the text. Call your dad. Tell someone you’re grateful for them. Fill your soul with something that has nothing to do with your performance.

The sooner you can surrender, the sooner you will find the path that was meant for you.

The standard is surrender.

— Braden

I was at my son’s T-ball game. He was playing the side of the field that didn’t get a lot of action.

He would chase the ball to the other side — like all the kids did — but was always too far away to field it. I could visibly see him getting more frustrated with every batted ball. About six batters into the rotation, he went to field one, came close, but his teammate got to it first.

He turned around and threw his glove down.

I wanted to lose it. But I gathered myself and called him over. I told him he better pick his glove up — because the ball has a way of finding you when you least expect it.

Sure enough, as he was picking his glove up, the next ball was hit right to him. He was late getting to it and it bounced off his leg. He looked back at me like he had just learned a very valuable lesson.

Growing up, competition meant winning. Plain and simple. It didn’t matter how or what you did that day, as long as you elevated the people around you to have success. Everything was an opportunity to succeed. Math test, basketball game, homework — it all led to the same place. Something to be accomplished.

My mom and dad were instrumental in this mindset. Both of my parents were athletes, but more importantly, they stood for something more than themselves. Blue collar. Hard workers. People who had plenty of adversity to work through.

The message I got was simple: adversity breeds strength.

Here’s what playing in the Major Leagues taught me about competition that the culture gets wrong:

Competition at the highest level is actually quiet.

You see more and more flamboyant actions from youth and amateur sports today. When you make it to the top, you have undoubtedly been humbled. You’ve faced multiple instances where you wanted to pack your bags and go home. You’ve been jaded just trying to take the punches to the face — figuratively — and keep climbing. It’s quiet at the top because you know you’re breathing rare air.

Resilience is your most important asset.

You can teach skill. You can teach mental frameworks. The one thing you cannot do is tell a person what adversity they’ll face in their quest of competition. Sometimes you are dealt a hand that makes impossibility even more impossible. Yet people continue to achieve through it. How? Because they are resilient. No one is going to stop them from reaching the summit.

Your body is going to take a beating.

Broken ribs. Broken wrist. Broken fingers. Ruptured splenic artery. Concussion. Sprained ankle. Strained back. One metal plate, nine screws, five surgeries. If you want to compete, you are going to get hurt. Availability is the most important ability there is. But injuries are part of it. The question is always the same: how do you find a way through despite?

So what do I actually want my son to know about competition?

Effort before outcome. You will win and lose in both sport and life. You choose — each and every play — which level of effort you’re going to show up with. That is something no one can take from you. A hundred percent effort will give you the best opportunity to take advantage of what’s in front of you.

You wake up a human being and go to bed a human being. Do not let sport tell you that your identity is rooted there. The more aligned we are as human beings, the more dangerous we will be as athletes. People have this backward. I will always make sure your identity is rooted in who you are as a human being — not an athlete.

Seek out failure. You don’t have to like it, but you need to be comfortable with it. You need to have a plan, because you know it’s coming. Everything worth having is on the other side of adversity.

Your journey is yours. The world wants you to compare — to your teammates, your friends, their situations. You are uniquely you. Your success is on your own timeline. The greatest teammates are the ones who can genuinely lift up those around them regardless of their own situation. And you’d be surprised how people will pour into you because of it.

Find joy. I had developed habits that made me fearful to fail because I didn’t want to let the people around me down. The only thing I care about is you finding joy in what you’re doing. My job as a father isn’t to force you into what you’re not — it’s to guide you to who you really are.

This isn’t just about my son. It’s about the way we confuse achievement with worth.

Parents — this one is for you. Achievement isn’t a big league uniform, a contract, the number-one Perfect Game ranking, or starting shortstop on varsity as a freshman. All of those are empty. Zero fulfillment for the soul.

I’ll give you the best advice you might ever receive: the sooner you can detach from the results of your kid’s competition, the more you will actually drive them to love what they’re doing. The only thing you can do when you tie their worth to their achievements is scare them away from what you want them to love.

Boston — if you read this someday, I hope you understand that your fulfillment will never come from what you do. It will come from how you serve, how you love, how you show up for yourself and those around you.

If you’re a parent watching your kid compete right now — stop casting your expectations onto your child. You will, undoubtedly, scare them away from the exact thing you want them to do. Make them feel valued regardless of outcome. Give them experiences they want to come back for. Three strikeouts today, an error today — those don’t mean anything for long-term success. Relax. Be present.

Competition isn’t about everything happening for you. It’s about being ready when you least expect it. Pick up the glove. Stay ready. The next one always finds you.

— Braden

The first thing I noticed was I had nowhere to be at a certain time.

Complete autonomy. I was lost.

It was a few days into Spring Training in 2023, and I was riding the Peloton in my garage when I got a call from one of the guys at the Boras Corp. The Kansas City Royals were offering me a minor league deal, no Major League camp invite.

I was actually mad. Not because of the offer. Because I was so at peace with my decision to walk away from the game. And now I had to decide again. Was it worth it? One more shot?

I turned it down. But the fact that it rattled me told me everything I needed to know, I wasn’t as settled as I thought I was. The peace I felt was real, but it was thin. One phone call and I was right back in the wrestling match.

That’s the thing about the silence. Sometimes it gets interrupted, and you realize how fragile your peace really is.

People don’t realize how structured a professional athlete’s life is. Everything is accounted for.

The locations change but the nuts and bolts stay the same. Breakfast is the same. Coffee is the same. The way you go to the field is the same. The clothes you lift in are the same. Your pregame meal is the same. Your cage routine is the same. Your mental prep is the same. Where you go and how you get there is the same. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

For 8 years, I was borderline machine. For better or for worse, I knew where I had to be down to the second. Every day was intentional autopilot.

Then one day it just stops. There’s no schedule texted to Slack. No schedule on the board. No game time. No one tells you where to be.

You can see why so many athletes feel lost.

At first I woke up early and trained the same. My trainer from my playing days continued to write the same programming for me, plus more shoulders and arms. I tracked my food the same. Attacked tasks the same.

But then midday hit. I was sitting around trying to fill the void that time at the field used to fill. My family could feel it. I was in the best shape of my life — mentally and physically, and I was just sitting at home.

I think what I was really doing was running from the fight-or-flight and the constant state of anxiety that the game had put on me for 8 years. I felt lost, and my family was lost with me. I was trying to be present, but the life we were all so accustomed to adjusting to was just gone.

Here’s what nobody tells you about losing your structure:

Your relationships change completely. I lost a brotherhood I’d had since I went away to college. I was around those guys for 10–11 hours a day. Traveled with them. Struggled with them. Succeeded with them. And in the matter of a day, that structure was gone.

The fight-or-flight and stress went away, and I’m thankful for that. But the relationships changed significantly. I think my wife was bothered having to deal with me all day, too.

The thing is, this isn’t just an athlete problem. It’s a human problem. We desperately need community in our lives. It looks different for everyone, it could be moving, changing careers, retiring. But we all long for relationships with people who are driven the same way we are. Whether that’s how we love, how we serve, or how we work.

It took me months to realize that the decision to walk away needed to be a collaborative decision with my family, more specifically, my wife.

The decision I had made in my mind in the summer of 2022 — to stop doing things for myself and focus on my family, became all about exactly that. Even though my intention was right, I didn’t realize how much my wife had invested in my career. She had sacrificed alongside me for years. She had lived this life too. And I was making the call to end it on my own.

Walking away taught me that being selfless isn’t about making the decision you *think* is best for those around you. It’s about communicating effectively so that when the decision is made, everyone is on the same page.

If you’re in the silence right now, that’s okay.

If you feel like you’re in a transition season of your life, it’s okay for it to be heavy. I urge you to communicate with the people around you. If I could go back, I would tell myself: don’t make a decision with magnitude by yourself. It actually does the opposite of how you intended it.

The silence isn’t the enemy. Sitting in it alone is.

— Braden

I remember the exact moment I realized my baseball career was over.

I had been released by one organization and found myself with my second club in three months. I was living in a hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, playing for the Twins’ AAA affiliate. I was burnt out on the business of the game, and it had taken its toll. I’d been designated for assignment twice, tested free agency, been released twice. I was running on fumes.

I had been away from my family for a couple months when my wife and son came to visit me in Minnesota. My son looked completely different. He had new facial expressions. His smile melted my heart.

I knew at that moment, I was done.

Here’s the short version of who I am.

I played 8 years of professional baseball — 3 of them in the Major Leagues. I spent 7 years in the Mariners organization and my last year bouncing between 3 clubs. I was a defensive-first outfielder who taught himself how to hit. People told me it would never work, that I’d never hit enough to get to the big league level. I doubled down and hit at every level I played at. I became one of 650 American-born Major Leaguers at that time.

After I hung it up, I knew the transition was going to be brutal. I’m grateful that my agent, Scott Boras, extended a bridge to help me into the working world. I became a certified MLBPA agent at the Boras Corporation. My main role was recruiting high school and college players to represent them through the draft. The role morphed into a magnitude of other work, especially with the NIL landscape in college. I was lucky enough to represent some really high-level athletes. It was incredible to watch players’ dreams come true — especially when I knew exactly what they were going through.

I thought it would be my last chapter.

It wasn’t. Life pulls you in directions you don’t expect. Priorities rise to the top and your sacrifices become less about you and more about your family. I had spent my whole life chasing, serving, and making other people better. But the alignment with the game just wasn’t there like it once was. I wanted to be at my son’s T-ball games. I wanted to eat dinner with my wife every night. I was tired of hotels. Tired of constantly being on the move.

Here’s what nobody tells you about life after professional sports:

Nothing will ever compare. And that’s okay. You don’t want it to. That constant state of fight or flight doesn’t need to be recreated. Being present in a new kind of chase is hard — it’s no longer the same chase. Our families deserve our presence. Your identity is not grounded in your occupation. Your identity is as a human being, not an athlete.

I’ve talked to hundreds of athletes across the major sports and the story is almost always the same: I feel like my identity is lost when the jersey comes off.

These days I’m trying to raise a son who knows who he is before the world tells him who to be. I’m running a foundation to make a dent in the Alzheimer’s community — in honor of my mom, who had early onset. And I’m trying to serve the people around me, to show up for them in the best way I know how.

So why am I writing this?

Because I’ve had these conversations with the people in my circle for years, and I think they can help others going through the same things. There are a lot of people recording content around the principles I experienced, but not many writing about them. Not many people break it down to a vulnerable place and explain honestly how much some of it sucks.

Part of me wants my son to have something to read someday that shows him who his dad really was. Not the Wikipedia page — but what I thought, how I processed the journey, and how I tried to impact the people around me.

Here’s what you’ll get if you subscribe:

Essays about identity, fatherhood, and what it means to build a life after the thing that defined you ends.

Honest writing about mindset and performance. If you want to be great, it takes thinking outside the box.

Stories about the most impactful people in my life and how they helped shape the road I walked.

I’m not going to post every day. I’m not going to optimize for clicks. I’m just going to write what’s true and hope it resonates with someone.

If you’re an athlete wondering what comes next — I get it.

If you’re a parent trying to figure out how to support your kid without losing yourself in their dream — I’ve seen it.

If you’re just someone trying to build something real after the thing you thought would last forever didn’t — yeah. Me too.

I don’t have all the answers. But I’ve got stories, and I think they matter.

— Braden