PHOENIX — The big lefty stepped out of the clubhouse and into the morning sunlight one Sunday last March. His spikes clacked on concrete at the San Francisco Giants’ minor league complex. His mitt, a black Rawlings with “Hakuna matata” inscribed on the back, hung from his right paw. And, as you come to expect from Big John Gavin, he had a smile spread across his face.
Advertisement
It was the first day of what should have been the happiest week of his life.
There was an engagement ring in the center console of Gavin’s white Toyota RAV4. He planned to propose to his girlfriend, Katie Werner, on Friday night, then fly out Saturday to start the minor league season where he’d ended the last one, at Double-A Richmond. Two phone calls away from the majors.
A Bay Area kid, Gavin was six when he caught a line drive in his first T-ball game and felt a new world open up. “It was like, this is what I’m addicted to now,” Gavin says. He acted out his Giants debut in his family’s San Jose backyard, throwing tennis balls at the brick chimney. Now that he’d grown into a 6-foot-6 reliever, that boyhood dream was in sight.
That’s why Matt Yourkin, the Giants’ rehab coordinator, couldn’t find the right moment to pull Gavin aside that Sunday morning. Yourkin lingered for a while during the workout. He chose his words. Then, finally, he said, “John, you’re with me.” Yourkin told Gavin he wasn’t going back to Double A but to High-A Eugene, a level he first reached back in 2018, when he was 23.
Gavin’s smile disappeared. He was 27. He had planned to use the 2023 season as a reality check. Here was his answer.
Gavin walked into Giants farm director Kyle Haines’ office. He had made it a point to never ask Haines about his place in the pecking order. “I wanted him to shoot me straight when that day came,” Gavin says. The day had come. Haines shot straight. He didn’t see Gavin making the majors in 2023. There were a lot of guys ahead of him. Gavin could go to Eugene, be released or retire.
Turning to leave, Gavin said, “I think I’m going to get a head start on life.”
There have been, across the span of baseball history, a little more than 23,000 major leaguers. Bring them all to Oracle Park, the stadium on the bay in San Francisco, and they’d only fill it halfway. A big leaguer is in the club forever. There’s a new story almost every season of a player like Drew Maggi getting a cup of coffee in the majors after toiling more than a decade in the minors.
Advertisement
But for every Drew Maggi, there are many more John Gavins. They eventually stop chasing their major league dream and must learn how to leave it behind.
Those players are left with existential questions. Who are they without baseball? How do they recreate the camaraderie of a clubhouse? How can they satisfy their competitive drive? And what types of work are they qualified for if their previous place of employment was the Amarillo Sod Poodles bullpen?
Millions have picked up a baseball and harbored hopes of making the majors. All but the 23,000 have a day their dream died. Gavin’s ended when he signed retirement papers one year ago this week.
Gavin spent summer afternoons in high school taking a train into San Francisco with his best friend and teammate, Kris Kutch. They sat in the nosebleed seats at Giants games and imagined being among the big leaguers below. “I confronted the mortality of that dream pretty early,” Kutch says. Gavin didn’t. The Giants drafted him in the eighth round in 2018, his junior season at Cal State Fullerton. Gavin screamed when he saw the news. He raced across his bedroom — past the Giants quilt, the Willie Mays Plaza flag, the framed front page from the 2012 World Series win — and got his Madison Bumgarner jersey from the closet. He wore it the rest of the day.
“That was for the 6-year-old who caught the line drive,” Gavin says.
On Gavin’s first day of rookie ball, after he signed for $125,000, Bumgarner strode into the clubhouse ahead of a rehab start. Gobsmacked, Gavin mustered the courage to shake Bumgarner’s hand and thank him for everything. Bumgarner wished him luck. The boys in the nosebleeds hadn’t dared to imagine all of this. Gavin had a 1.55 ERA across his first calendar year in pro ball. He was floating, sleeping on an air mattress and making a thousand bucks a month.
Advertisement
After a 2018 season in which Gavin pitched in a Low-A all-star game, he worked at a Lululemon store. During a training session, new hires were asked to close their eyes for 10 minutes and live out their dream day. Gavin visualized his Giants debut. Walking from the players’ parking lot to the home clubhouse. Seeing his name above his locker. Bear-hugging Buster Posey. Meeting with manager Bruce Bochy. Then taking the mound. The first batter walked on four pitches. “Jitters,” Gavin says. He retired the next three hitters in order. Only two faces in the crowd were clear: mom and dad. Gavin imagined embracing them. When he opened his eyes, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
That vision pushed Gavin through his worst days in baseball. He kept a bottle of wine with him when he had a 6 ERA at High-A in 2019, so he could share a glass with the coaches if the Giants released him. Gavin could have quit after the elbow surgeries, in 2020 and 2021. Instead, after rehabbing for 26 months total, he returned to the lowest rung of the minor league ladder in 2022 and climbed from rookie ball to Double A. “To see him go through all of that and stay John Gavin, that genuine and charismatic guy who lifts everybody up,” says Giants pitcher Sean Hjelle, one of Gavin’s closest friends, “that dude’s an inspiration for me.” The results were encouraging, but one thought tugged at Gavin: Am I better than these guys? Or am I just older?
Last spring, the Giants rostered Gavin as an extra minor league arm for some Cactus League games. The bullpen phone rang for him only once — a road game against the Texas Rangers, three weeks before he would retire. Bochy was there, in the other dugout. Gavin entered with one out and two runners in the fifth inning. He toed the rubber thinking, Finally, and then fired. The first batter walked on four pitches: “Jitters.” He retired the next two and left the bases loaded. It wasn’t the Lululemon dream, exactly. But it was the closest he would come.
When Gavin signed retirement papers, Yourkin waited outside the farm director’s office, tears welling in his eyes. Yourkin was a Bay Area kid, too, a forever Giants fan who pitched in their system but never made it past Triple A. Gavin walked out, buried his head in Yourkin’s shoulder and sobbed.
That Friday night, Gavin retrieved the ring from his car’s center console and carried it in his back pocket as he trailed Werner up the walkway at the pizzeria Cibo.
It had been a little more than three years since their first date at Cibo. They met on a dating app. Werner was a Yale graduate, a former college basketball player, a physician’s assistant and a homeowner. Gavin threw 94 mph from the left side and made $11,000 that season. Despite having 20-20 vision, he wore blue-light glasses he thought made him look smarter. (Those were slowly phased out.) They sat on the patio talking until Cibo emptied and closed. Gavin saved two things from that night: the receipt — now framed on their bedroom wall — and a screenshot of his Apple Watch activity, which assumed, based on the three hours of a 155 beats-per-minute average heart rate, he’d just run a marathon.
Back at Cibo last March, Werner heard the opening strains of Nate Smith’s “Under My Skin”. Their song. It wasn’t until that moment, as a door swung open to a back patio lined with rose petals, that Werner knew what was coming.
Advertisement
“That was the last thing on my mind,” she said later, laughing.
The secret to a successful surprise engagement: sudden unemployment.
View this post on Instagram
The first few weeks were nice, almost like an extended vacation. Gavin wasn’t leaving for the season. Werner tossed the master schedule she’d drafted — color coded for each affiliate — to figure out when she would visit him each month. Being freed from the baseball schedule felt foreign to Gavin, but soon their nights and weekends were occupied by wedding planning and activities they couldn’t do during a baseball season, like an April getaway to Hawaii.
On that trip, Gavin took Werner to a restaurant on the water in Kailua-Kona where his parents had met. “How they met made me believe in true love,” Gavin says. Jim Gavin and Lauren Livermore lived 30 minutes apart in the Bay Area, but didn’t cross paths until they were seated on opposite sides of this restaurant in Hawaii, where an elderly couple approached and said, “Why don’t you sit together at our table?” Now, Gavin sat in the same restaurant, watching the sun set over the ocean with his fiancée.
Back from Hawaii, it was time for Gavin to find work.
Gavin is a big-hearted optimist — “the most genuine human being I’ve ever met,” Hjelle said. He figured he’d fit in almost any sector. Why not? He was gregarious and kind, a hard worker and a good teammate. He refurbished his resume: a communications degree, six years of minor league baseball and offseason jobs at Spirit Halloween, Lululemon and a PGA Tour Superstore. He left off driving Uber and bartending. “Those won’t help when I’m applying to American Express or Deloitte,” he said.
Some players retire knowing what they’ll do next. Not Gavin. He scanned LinkedIn for inspiration and researched typical career paths for former athletes: life insurance, real estate, sales, construction, grad school and, of course, coaching. Coaching would make Gavin happy, but it was hard to break into, paid poorly and, like playing, required spending the summer on the road. Gavin ruled it out for now.
Advertisement
He filed his first few applications and then waited.
“Hopefully June or July will roll around and I’ll have a steady job and will know the work drama,” Gavin said. “Instead of guys not getting playing time, it’s the wrong flavor of bagels in the break room.”
The panic attacks started in May.
Instead of spending his days in minor league ballparks, Gavin was hunched over his laptop at home, where his companion was Werner’s cat, Georgia (or Georgie, or Georgia Peach). He averaged 10 applications a day for a while. Gavin tried to stay busy — doing laundry, getting groceries, going to the gym — but still felt overwhelmed. Some days, when his anxiety spiked, he sensed his body shutting down. Heart pounding. Mind racing. Knot tightening in his chest. He’d lie on the couch and play Candy Crush to relax, then feel guilty about playing a game while unemployed, and snowball all over again.
“Who is this person?” Gavin said one day, over coffee. “I’m not the happy-go-lucky guy I was. Am I who people want anymore? Am I this person I grew up believing I’d be?”
His identity crisis centered on another question he had not yet answered: “How do I stay the same person while doing something completely different with my life?”
One night last summer, Gavin and Werner were tucked into a back booth at The Macintosh, one of their favorite date spots. They had just picked a wedding date, Oct. 26, 2024, a faraway Saturday the thought of which both thrilled and terrified the unemployed former minor leaguer at the table. He was chatty and upbeat. When they spent time together he saw glimpses of his old carefree self, but still worried the guy Werner fell in love with wouldn’t fully come back.
The transition out of baseball had been harder than either had expected.
At dinner that night in early June, Werner turned to Gavin. “Some of us choose our profession early and go through the steps to get there, then you’re done,” she said. “I admire you for pursuing your dreams. Not all of us have the courage to do that. But it’s hard when that dream ends.”
Advertisement
Gavin nodded. In an alternate universe where he kept playing, he’d have bused to Vancouver that day to open a three-week road trip with High-A Eugene. He might be no closer to the majors, but at least he’d have a job instead of dread.
“That would’ve just postponed the inevitable,” Werner said. “I respect you a lot for making that decision and not just pushing it off. You certainly could have. If we weren’t together, you probably would have.”
“Probably,” Gavin agreed.
He was hit here and there with pangs of nostalgia, aftershocks from his baseball life. When the Giants played a series in Phoenix in May, Gavin went with Werner and spent time with his former teammate Tristan Beck. It was strange seeing the game go on without him. Still, he was sure of his decision. He could have chased his dream until he caught it, or broke trying. If he’d made it, his story of perseverance would have been in every newspaper back home. But at what cost? And what if that was all? Gavin knows guys who got a couple days in the majors and never made it back. Guys like Maggi, who after 13 years in the minors got to play just three games for the Pirates — before being demoted, and later released.
“Just because you realize that dream,” Werner said as dinner wrapped up, “doesn’t mean you get to continue living it.”
During his playing days, Gavin hadn’t prepared for not making it. Every decision was made with baseball in mind. Gavin slept on his right side for 10 years to avoid waking with a sore left elbow. Letting his mind drift to life after baseball felt like giving up. “Hope can push you through a lot,” he says, “but it can also drive you mad.”
Now Gavin’s runway was shrinking. He initially applied to mid-level jobs, thinking he’d at least get a call. Then he lowered his sights. He interviewed with companies selling house-flipping programs, mental health educational software, commercial security systems and financial health services. An internet provider offered him a door-to-door sales job, starting that day, in 100 degree heat.
Advertisement
Gavin was choosey, at first. He was learning a new language. Instead of saying he’s a talker, he listed “oral communications” as a skill. When an interviewer asked if he’d ever disagreed with a manager, Gavin thought, More times than you can count. He was self-conscious that all his examples involved baseball.
In a final interview for a logistics sales position, the hiring manager asked Gavin what motivated him. Gavin talked about being a team player. Later, he got a rejection email and some feedback: “I’m a little concerned you’re not in this for the money.”
Gavin talked to his dad, a recently retired salesman, and made a mental note that it was OK to say he wanted to make a lot of money. But it still doesn’t make sense to his baseball brain. “Imagine if Elly De La Cruz in his rookie season was like, ‘Legacy is cool, but I’m in this to make $400 million,’” Gavin said. “Everybody would be irate that this kid is worried about all the wrong things.”
Weeks turned into months, spring to summer. Gavin learned minor league baseball doesn’t mean much on a resume. He wondered if more hiring managers would return his emails if he’d made the majors. He told Werner he was a couple weeks from driving Uber again. He was tired of facing the same hurdle every day, tired of falling short, tired of being told it would be all right.
“I’m ready for it to be all right,” he said.
In the middle of a June lunch rush at a taqueria in downtown Phoenix, Gavin sat by a window and put in an order for a short rib machaha, guacamole and charred onion cheese crisp. He was worn down from a morning of filling out applications. He knew it wasn’t good for him to go all day without talking to anyone, so sometimes that meant getting out of the house for lunch.
Gavin was picking over what remained on his plate when he realized his old college teammate, Connor Seabold, was scheduled to start the next day for the Rockies a few blocks away at Chase Field.
Advertisement
At Fullerton, Gavin and Seabold were roommates their first summer and the team’s only freshman pitchers. They were so competitive with each other that one day an argument led to a wrestling match in front of their teammates.
“I got folded,” Seabold says, laughing.
“Joke’s on me now,” says Gavin, who had four inches and 100 pounds on Seabold. “He’s in the big leagues, and I’m getting a story written about my life after baseball.”
Gavin looked at tickets for Seabold’s start, then realized he had a conflict.
His first softball game.
Upon retiring, Gavin knew he’d need a competitive outlet beyond board games at home. (Settlers of Catan was shelved at one point last spring because Werner blocked a road and tensions ran hot.) For years, Gavin had told Jeff Osgood, the Giants’ Arizona clubhouse manager, he’d be a ringer for Osgood’s softball team. Before leaving the Giants facility for the last time, Gavin stopped by Osgood’s office and said, “I’m retired. If you need someone, I’m here.”
A couple weeks later, Osgood texted: I need you.
The softball squad, Team Prime Time, is a smattering of 30-somethings who smash softballs and stack wins without taking themselves terribly seriously. Gavin hadn’t hit since early in high school but learned to yank line drives to left field. He mostly played left-center field, delighting in uncorking laser-beam throws to cut down runners on the bases.
Softball scratched an itch for Gavin. What he missed most about baseball was the guys, and now, for a couple hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, it felt like he was back in the clubhouse. It was even better when there were old friends in the stands. Giants prospect Will Bednar came by Field 6 at Chaparral Park — three miles from the Giants spring training stadium in Scottsdale — to watch Gavin win a softball title last summer.
Advertisement
Recently, another Giant, the 6-foot-11 Hjelle, brought his family to one of Gavin’s games. Hjelle’s two young sons chased each other, spewing gravel and cheering for Uncle John. Between innings, Gavin rolled in the grass with the boys and hoisted them upon his shoulders. Gavin had a scab on his shin from a game-winning diving catch the week before. Werner reminded him not to dive again. Gavin swore he wouldn’t, but his smile said: Whatever it takes to win.
In the second week of September, High-A Eugene was playing its last series of the season, and Gavin was in an operating room. He was observing a hip replacement. It was his first day on the job in orthopedic sales.
The opportunity arose through a Bay Area buddy. Gavin was at his wit’s end, not just willing to accept an independent contract position with no benefits but elated to do so. The role required roving Arizona — from Phoenix to Tucson to Flagstaff — speaking with surgeons about orthopedic products and ferrying equipment between hospitals. When he was hired, Gavin wondered why colleagues kept cautioning, “It’s like drinking out of a fire hose at first.”
“That really is the best analogy,” Gavin said after a few weeks on the job. “There’s so much information to learn that it’s a little overwhelming to figure out where to start. You’re confused about what you’re confused about.”
When Gavin had a bad day in baseball, he leaned on muscle memory to get through it. He didn’t yet know how to turn around a hard day in sales.
One night after the holidays, driving home from Flagstaff, Gavin again considered coaching. His mind rarely wandered far from baseball. “I’m still in a never-say-never mode,” he said. But he had quit playing to find work that helped lay a stable foundation for their family, and spending eight months of the year away from home, working seven days a week, felt like a step backward.
By then, Gavin had come to see his orthopedic sales job as a short-term solution. The work was isolating; he missed being part of a team. His working hours fluctuated, some days starting as early as 4:30 a.m. and lasting until 9 p.m. “Who knows,” he said. “Maybe by March I’ll find something different, and you’ll have a small editor’s note: John has now moved on to a different job.”
Advertisement
The editor’s note instead: Gavin was laid off in February. He’d just gotten out of surgery and shed his scrubs one afternoon when a superior sat him down outside the operating room. He told Gavin the company couldn’t afford him.
That was a bad week. Baseball had conditioned Gavin to tie his identity to results. “When I don’t have a job …” Gavin’s voice trailed off.
Around the time Gavin lost his job, he sensed a shift in his mentality. Maybe it was his bachelor party in January. Gavin and his best man Kutch had started bachelor party planning in high school. (Gavin has written and rehearsed his speech for Kutch’s wedding. Kutch is single.) Gavin always wanted to go to Napa, Calif., for his bachelor party, so that’s where they went. Friends from every stage of his baseball life flew in. Hjelle was there, Beck, even Yourkin.
“Guys moving mountains just to hang out,” Gavin said.
They golfed, played cards and grilled steaks. That weekend together, staying up late and telling stories, unlocked something for Gavin. The optimist returned.
“I wasn’t that guy last summer,” he said. “I feel like I’ve been that guy recently.”
Gavin is a Golden State Warriors fan. This month, 21-year-old Warriors guard Moses Moody remarked when asked about being buried on the depth chart, “All my friends are in that space where they’re leaving college, trying to figure out life. Everybody’s going through different adversities. Who am I to think I should have an easy road to whatever I want?” That resonated with Gavin. He’s like anyone starting a new career, weathering highs and lows. He just happens to have a richer backstory and better changeup than the average sales applicant.
It’s been a year since Gavin retired from baseball. He doesn’t have a job. But now he pages through job boards with a clearer sense of what he wants next. He had a final interview this week with a software company. He’s hopeful, but cautiously so.
Advertisement
Big John Gavin will be okay. The anxiety has subsided, but he still plans to try talk therapy. He has a supportive family. He has a loving fiancée with a steady job. The two of them flew to Atlanta recently to see family, and Gavin found himself in the backyard setting up T-ball batting practice for one of Werner’s nieces, showing her how to alligator chomp with her glove, teaching her to squash the bug as she swung. Gavin and Werner’s wedding is seven months away, and they’ve talked about wanting to start a family soon after.
“I’ve always wanted to be a dad,” Gavin said, “and I see moments every day that show me Katie is going to make such a good mom.”
On a shelf in the garage of Gavin’s home, there sits a black Rawlings mitt. Hakuna matata. It arrived in his Giants locker the day Gavin retired. He found it there after he circled the clubhouse hugging teammates and coaches, crying, saying goodbyes. It was supposed to be Gavin’s glove for that season, the one he’d wear when he finally made the majors.
Now, Gavin passes that mitt each time he gets in his car, as he heads to an interview, toward whatever is next. One day, he says, he will take that mitt off the shelf, slip it on and feel the rush of the game return.
Then he will step out into the Arizona sun and play catch with his kids.
(Top image: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Patrick Breen for The Athletic)
