On Credentials

I’ve got a few responses on a few subjects regarding my mental state and the state of my intellectual capabilities. Realize that I’m mostly kidding when I take jabs at myself, but that these sorts of things do come from somewhere. Job one when I decided to do this blog was to be as honest as I could about myself. The world doesn’t need any more ad-copy.

One of the difficult things I ran up against in baseball (interviewing with the Red Sox, at places like the winter meetings, dinner with Bill James and Rob Neyer and such) was the educational backgrounds and general qualifications of the people I was dealing with compared to my own. Here I was in a thicket of Ivy Leaguers, Berkeley-ites and other people of that ilk, and I was stuck with 6 credit hours short of a Bachelor’s from “We Advertise on TV University.” Part of me realized how silly it was to worry about something like that, but the rest of me felt like the world’s biggest fraud. Folks were expecting some kind of genius and they got one of the Superfans. How am I supposed to pretend I’m on even intellectual footing with guys from Dartmouth and Yale? While they were getting advanced degrees, I was a bicycle messenger.

So whenever some stupid troll starts screaming about me having conned people or being dishonest or being a fraud, it kind of wounds me because that’s precisely how I feel about myself sometimes. I mean, who the hell am I to invent something? The Wizard of Menlo Park I am not.

For the most part though, those moments come few and far between and in general I just consider myself damn fortunate to have had the run I had. I may have seemed small time having dinner with Bill James, but I still had dinner with Bill James. I may be a mere flea to Theo Epstein’s accomplishments, but he still magnanimously called me the smartest guy in the room once (though I’m not sure he actually believed that). I may have random people on the internet hate me for no good reason, but then there’s random people on the internet who like me for no good reason too, and probably more of them.

I’ll get those six credit hours somehow, or maybe I won’t and the next time you go to Starbuck’s I’ll be the guy handing you your half-caf mocha whatever. Either way, it’s pretty much all icing on the cake from here.