SOE: Minor League Manhood - A first-hand account of masculine sports culture run amok.

Manhood. It’s a competition. Has been since the first grunting, snorting, finger-sniffing Neanderthal scratched out whatever he felt defined it on the wall of his cave. Battle, power, money, looks—they all have their place in the contest, but the one thing that’s been a true indicator of Manhood, since the days when men huddled around flame adorned in animals pelts, is Woman.

Dirk Hayhurst’s Minor League Survival Manual

The GM Game is the prediction of the moves that will be made around the organization if YOU were the man in charge. It can look different depending on where you stand and how much information you have, but the above is how it looks if you’re a player.

Don’t play it.

The reason is, if you start trying to figure out why someone else got promoted and you didn’t, you’ll start to get bitter. Professional baseball, for all the joy associated with playing it, can be a very bitter place. That’s thanks in large part to just how crappy minor league life is, and how badly players want to make it to the top. But when you play GM, you start to assign value to your teammates, to yourself, and to your career that might not be accurate. You’ll expect to get promoted based on what little you know, and when it doesn’t happen, you’ll get angry at the situation, your employer, or even your teammates.

Twice Rejected, Third Time Was the Charm in Painful Road to MLB Draftee

Everyone on the team expected me to go pro. In fact, they wanted to me to. I was obsessed with the draft to the point my teammates couldn’t associate with me after my starts. It got so bad that a teammate called my apartment answering machine in a fake voice and left a message: “Hello Dirk, this is Harry Rosinbag with the Kansas City Royals. I was just calling to talk to you about our interest in you for this year’s draft. We’re thinking of taking you in the first round and wanted to know if you’re interested in becoming a Royal, and if you’d take a flat $1 million to sign?”