• Archive: Minor League Baseball from a Mom’s Perspective
Kathy Deikroeger’s “I Should Have Quit This Morning” is a mix of ethnography, research, instruction, and just good writing.
Jun 4, 2021
When my niece was in high school, she was one of the best setters in the state of Wyoming. That is, I realize, a minor accolade in the grand scheme of things, but it had two effects that are relevant here. First, for six years, my family participated in a community of athletes and sports families. It was not always an especially functional group, but we had been brought together by a shared commitment to a group of girls playing a sport. We came to know each other fairly well during that time though the community largely disbanded after the girls graduated.
Second, because my niece was a talented setter, she wanted to see how far she could go. That led to her parents doing a lot of research and talking with recruiters and coaches about options. It was a lot. My family has always been academics oriented, and given the treatment of women’s sports, my niece and her parents had to balance the big picture with a desire to be confident that my niece’s volleyball potential had been fully explored.
I am telling you this because those memories came back to me when I read Kathy Diekroeger’s self-published 2019 book, I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball.
Diekroeger is the mother of Danny Diekroeger and Kenny Diekroeger, both members of the Stanford baseball teams in 2011 and 2012. Their teammates include players such as Mark Appel, Alex Blandino, Tommy Edman, Stephen Piscotty, Cal Quantrill, Austin Slater, and others you’ve probably never heard of because most players, even the really good ones, don’t make it far in a highly competitive sport.
I Should Have Quit This Morning is an important book; it’s an ethnography, a research study, a set of instructions, and a very baseball story that should be required reading for fans everywhere.
To give you a sense of Diekroeger’s voice, here’s an early passage from I Should Have Quit This Morning:
Notice how this passage balances Diekroeger’s experience as a parent with the players’ stories. The book itself is strictly third person, with a focus on the players and guiding the reader through the labyrinth of Minor League Baseball, but the introduction indicates the author’s relationship to the material, and her empathy emerges in the stories she shares.
Diekroeger explains how baseball works, beginning with the complexities of the draft and concluding with players who get called up to the Major Leagues — and she includes the stories of those who left the game. She clearly explains the processes involved and provides research to support assertions she’s making. For example, each year, over 140,000 players are eligible for the MLB draft; in 2018, 1214 were drafted; a first rounder has a 69% chance of making it the Major Leagues whereas a second rounder has a 51% chance; and the numbers decline steadily after that.
On one hand, Diekroeger is using data to prove a point about the challenges of becoming a professional baseball player, but in the subtext of all that research is a mother doing her homework to help her sons make informed decisions.
Because Diekroeger was a baseball mom for years and because she knew the Standford players so well, they were candid in their answers to her questions. Although Diekroeger has created a narrative architecture that rests on navigating MiLB, the actual bricks are the stories the players themselves tell. They are smart, funny, insightful, and sometimes heartbreaking — and they are rendered in the players’ own words, giving them narrative heft.
Moreover, their stories aren’t being mediated by, say, a sports writer or someone telling a PR story about a team; rather, they come through Diekroeger’s perspective, which is that of a mom watching players she’s grown to care for, two of whom happen to be her sons. To be clear, all of that was subtext I read into I Should Have Quit This Morning based on my own sports-related experience, but I found Diekroeger’s account to be refreshing and important. It was the kind of information my family was desperate to find when my niece was making her decisions. (Baseball publishers, more perspectives like this, please.)
Two notes are in order.
Diekroeger’s book appeared before the 2020 contraction of MiLB. I’ve been a critic of that decision, but Diekroeger’s book changed my thinking. First, she made a clear case for too many Minor League players resulting in too few opportunists and resources. (Whether teams can pay for more is a subject for another day.) Moreover, her descriptions of the Pioneer League, the closest league to where I live, rang true. In one section, a player describes the team bus hitting a deer en route to Helena, Montana. If you’ve lived out here, this kind of thing is not uncommon. But given all the other stresses Minor League players face, long bus trips to Helena and Billings seems a bit unnecessary given that a majority of those players will never play Major League ball, and game attendance there was not very good. (Diekroeger provides the numbers. In 2018, the Helena Brewers averaged 840 attendees per game.)
Then there are the conditions in which the (mostly underpaid) players find themselves. For every 2021 story about the Baltimore Orioles and Houston Astros providing housing for their MiLB players — and good for them because Diekroeger’s stories about players finding housing are nightmarish — is a competing account of players being forced to sleep in the stadium locker room and not getting adequate food.1Diekroeger’s book gives credence to those kinds of accounts and personalizes them because some of these players, we already know professionally, and because of Diekroeger’s telling, we know them much more personally. It is a significant narrative accomplishment.
Second, students who play college baseball at Stanford are, necessarily, not your typical baseball player. Those who left baseball have, in many cases, taken jobs in some area of finance. So the group Diekroeger describes values education and understands the worth of a Stanford Degree.
I first learned about Diekroeger’s book last February on Twitter:
Danny Diekroeger @dannydiekroeger
My mom is dying of pancreatic cancer She recently self-published a book of hilarious stories about Minor League Baseball Would be pretty neat if we made it go viral to give her a thrill while she’s still around 🙏🏽❤️amazon.com/Should-Have-Qu…
amazon.comI Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball: Diekroeger, Kathy: 9781093282610: Amazon.com: BooksI Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball [Diekroeger, Kathy] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. I Should Have Quit This Morning: Adventures in Minor League Baseball8:04 PM ∙ Feb 26, 2021
Kathy Diekroeger passed away in March. You can read her obituary here, and her Instagram gives a nice sense of the person she was. I Should Have Quit This Morning is an important book. It’s a gift to her sons and their teammates and to baseball fans everywhere.
Share Rockies Pitch: A Newsletter about Baseball & Fandom
Accolades
- This is very cool!
Sarah Langs @SlangsOnSports
Read Nick Groke’s story about Geib here.
Resources
- One of my favorite Twitter feeds is UmpScorecards, which provides morning-after grades of umpires. Here’s what a scorecard looks like:
Ump Scorecard for Rangers-Rockies Game
Ump Score Card has started a searchable database of umpires, and the potential here is significant. Go to umpirescorecards.com and see for yourself.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening To
- Jay Jaffe’s “As If the Rockies Needed More Trouble, Trevor Story Is Injured”(FanGraphs) — Jaffe explores the options.
- Mark Simon’s “Who Is May’s Defensive Player of the Month?” (actasports.com) — That would be Ryan McMahon.
- Mario DeGenz’s “Antonio Senzatela Has a Chase Problem” (Purple Row) — DeGenz analyzes what’s not happening for Senzatela in 2021.
- Kevin Henry’s “Jon Gray Hears the Rumors But Wants to Stay at Coors Field” (Rox Pile) — Please, Rockies, make this happen.
- Chet Gutwein’s “Is Ryan McMahon Finally Breaking Out?” (FanGraphs) — Yes, it appears he is.
- Kevin Goldstein’s “The Time for ‘Reach Out” Calls Is Here” (FanGraphs) — A former front-office person, Goldstein is giving baseball fans a sense of what happens as the trade season begins.
- Ron Counts’ “The Program Was Cut, and Boise State Baseball Players Scattered. 6 Signed with the Hawks” (Idaho Statesman) — Boise State eliminated its baseball team last summer, so some of the players signed with the former-Rockies-affiliate Boise Hawks.
Weekend Walk-off
Okay, it’s a wild-pitch walk-off, which is less fun than a true walk-off, but a win’s a win.
RoxGifsVids @RoxGifsVidsROCKIES WALK-OFF! Ryan McMahon scores on a wild pitch!
The Rockies will absolutely take it.
Thanks for reading —
Renee