Salon: Kaufman: Not just a box score

The King sits down with San Diego Padres farmhand Dirk Hayhurst…

-- you wonder, as the minor league guy, you’re sitting there and you’re wondering, I’m not putting up the numbers so no one cares about me, but I’ve got a lot of good stories that are valid. You know, these things really happened. I really did experience this in the minor leagues and this guy didn’t. He was sheltered from it. He’s been the chosen one ever since he’s got here. Someone put a lot of money on his head and expected him to pan out.

I’ve got friends and family who call me and ask me what’s going on and say that they’ve read box scores and reduced me to—either I’m a failure or I’m a winner based on what somebody read about me. That’s hard, and so I thought, there’s more to baseball than just that accumulation of numbers and stats, and you can’t reduce a person to those things. That’s something we struggle with a lot, that we’re always reduced to whatever the box score says. If we blow it, we’re losers.

So it was kind of an act of defiance? Saying, “I’m not the next big thing, but I’m still something”?

It was kind of an act of defiance, but the only way you can be defiant is to deprecate yourself. If I was to throw the finger at the media then I’d be the jerk. I don’t want to do that. I respect the business of it. It’s cool. There’s absolutely a place for it. But at the same time, all the rest of us guys that, statistically, probably won’t make it, we’re people too. What about us?

So I thought, I’m going to write the Non Prospect Diaries, about what it’s like to be a real person in the minor leagues. It’s not about “Uh, I hit a double today. I miss my mom. I love this game, I’m going to be a big leaguer someday and it’s going to be awesome. I always wanted to be one.” Like no one else ever grew up always wanting to be something.