TRANSCRIPT Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Pitcher Sean Doolittle of the Washington Nationals

[00:00:00] Music: Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.

[00:00:01] Promo: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

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[00:00:19] Jesse Thorn: It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. You see it around this time every year in baseball. Maybe it’s a post on Instagram or Twitter. A ballplayer posts a picture of themselves, and it says, “Thank you, fans.” And then maybe there’s a screenshot from the Notes app with some heartfelt words. It’s retirement season. Late last month, the pitcher Sean Doolittle announced his. He played a decade in the majors, first as a beloved weirdo and all-star with the Oakland A’s, then as a World Series champion with the Washington Nationals. As he struggled with injuries, he became a vagabond, drifting between Cleveland and Seattle, and then back to DC, where he ended his career thanks to those same injuries.

Sean Doolittle was a very good pitcher. He had a 3.20 career ERA and an extraordinary left-handed fastball. He is also a fun guy, a Star Wars nerd with a great sense of humor, the kind of player you root for even if he’s not on your team. During his time in baseball, Doolittle also served as a voice of conscience for the league. He visited injured veterans, spoke up fervently for the rights of minor leaguers, advocated for the rights of queer and trans people, especially in baseball. I got to talk to Doolittle back in 2017. It was spring training. He was nice enough to follow me on Twitter one day. I was like, “Sean Doolittle from the A’s!?” So, I dropped him a line and invited him on the show.

With the news of his retirement, I figured we’d replay my conversation with him. Let’s get into it. Baseball good guy, Sean Doolittle.

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[00:02:12] Jesse Thorn: Sean Doolittle, welcome to Bullseye. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:02:15] Sean Doolittle: Hey, man, thanks for having me.

[00:02:16] Jesse Thorn: I guess this is a dumb question, but did you always want to be a professional baseball player?

[00:02:22] Sean Doolittle: (Chuckles.) Yeah, I mean, ever since I was a little kid, that’s all I wanted to do. I played all sports growing up. Started with tee ball and played soccer in the fall, a little bit of football, basketball in the winter. But you know, by the time I got to high school, baseball had become my favorite because it came the most natural to me. So, this is definitely a dream come true to be playing in the major leagues.

[00:02:47] Jesse Thorn: Did you ever think when you were 17 or 19 years old about how much of your life you had poured into this thing that basically could disappear? If you, you know, got in a car accident or rolled over your ankle wrong or something like that?

[00:03:07] Sean Doolittle: Yes, definitely. I was really aware of that, especially being a pitcher—just the, you know, inherent volatility of being a pitcher, the occupational hazards that come with being a pitcher, the risk of arm injury and stuff like that. And that’s another reason why it was important for me to go to school. Being able to go to a school like the University of Virginia and start working towards my degree. I left after my junior year, so I have three years of college under my belt, and at some point, I’ll go back and finish. But like you said, to have that safety net in place, to already have a—you know, a head start, a big chunk of college already under my belt—you know, that definitely helps that contingency plan and keep that safety net in place for life after baseball.

[00:03:58] Jesse Thorn: It’s interesting that you say that. You know, I interview a lot of, you know, artists of various kinds. One of the things that some people say is how important it is not to have a contingency plan, because if you don’t have a contingency plan, you can’t quit.

(They chuckle.)

And I wonder how you plan for a life without a thing that is so central to your life. You know what I mean?

[00:04:24] Sean Doolittle: Yeah, I think one of the things that makes it a little bit different than maybe an artist or a musician is that we have a very short window during which we can play this game. You know, there’s physical limitations that will only allow you to play the game for so long, even if you have a track record of staying healthy. So, we realize that we’re going to be former players a lot longer than we are a current player. So, I think for a lot of guys it’s important to have that balance, to have like a contingency plan in place or to have something set up for life after you’re done playing.

[00:05:07] Jesse Thorn: Is it something that you think about now?

[00:05:10] Sean Doolittle: I feel like I do think about it, perhaps more than most guys, because I took such an interesting route to get to the big leagues. I was drafted as a hitter, actually, in 2007 by the A’s. And you know, 2009, I’m in AAA; I’m getting close to getting to the big leagues, and I start having injury issues. I miss all of 2009 and 2010 with a knee injury. I miss 2011 with a wrist injury. At that point, I didn’t play for three full seasons. And I was very close to—I don’t know actually if I was close to retiring, but I was really thinking about going back to school perhaps and continuing to further my education and at least give myself options and keep myself mentally occupied as I stared down another rehab process.

And that’s ultimately—I switched to pitching during that summer of 2011 and made the big leagues by 2012. And I think it gave me a different perspective, and I experienced how quickly this game can be taken away from you. So, it helps me definitely appreciate everything that I have experienced at the big league level that much more, while also being aware of, you know, “Man, what would I do if I wasn’t playing baseball?” It helps me—it really changed the way I think.

[00:06:37] Jesse Thorn: You were a star hitter, not only in college, but in the minor leagues the first few years of your minor league career. You had been added to the A’s 40-man roster, which is the sort of extended roster of the major league team. It meant that you—it meant that you were ticketed for the big leagues at some point, or at least the A’s thought you were. And that’s when you started getting hurt. What was the first injury that happened to you?

[00:07:06] Sean Doolittle: In May of 2009, I was playing right field for our AAA affiliate. We were in Las Vegas, and I moved to catch a fly ball. I was playing the outfield, and the guy hit a fly ball, and when I took a step over to, you know, start to get it, I partially tore my patella tendon. And that began the string of injuries for me. That was a month into the 2009 season, and it took the rest of that year all of 2010 to finally get it healthy again. It took two different surgeries. I had no idea at the time, but that was kind of the beginning of what ultimately led me to pitching and to the big leagues.

[00:07:51] Jesse Thorn: Were you thinking about the consequences when you were walking in, and you knew that you couldn’t do much with your knee?

[00:07:59] Sean Doolittle: No, not really. I still didn’t think it was going to be something that ended up being as serious as it was. They had their team doctor come over and look at it, and he just thought that it was really bad tendinitis, I remember. And we went back to—that was the tail end of a road trip, and we ended up going back to Sacramento a day after that. And I got an MRI, and even then I wasn’t expecting the MRI to show anything serious or show any red flags. And so, about a week after the injury happened when I got the MRI results, I was really surprised that it showed what it did. You know, it started a lengthy rehab process that took, you know, the rest of that summer. We tried to rehab it without surgery. I ended up getting surgery finally in October. You know, I had no idea that it was going to become such a difficult injury to come back from.

[00:09:02] Jesse Thorn: Did you like call your parents or something?

[00:09:05] Sean Doolittle: Yeah, I mean, I called my parents. My parents have always been—they’ve been incredibly supportive ever since I was little. And we talk. I talk to my mom or my dad, or sometimes both, after just about every game. So, they definitely noticed when I was pulled from the game. Yeah, I called them, and I think at the time it was probably something that I was like, “Hey, I don’t think this is a big deal. I think it’s pretty precautionary. I might miss a little bit of time.” But yeah, I really didn’t know how serious it was.

[00:09:38] Jesse Thorn: What made you feel like it was serious? At what point in this process that ended up being years did you think that this might actually be an existential threat to your baseball career?

[00:09:52] Sean Doolittle: That probably came later in the summer, maybe even into the fall. This might be because I was—at the time, I was 22. I’d never experienced an injury before. Maybe it was a little bit naive. I kept, you know, telling myself that I was going to be fine. I was going to bounce back, no problem. So, for the rest of—for the whole summer of 2009 I spent rehabbing it, because we really wanted to avoid surgery. And so, I go through this whole rehab process during 2009, and by, you know, October I’m trying to—I’m starting to play again, and I’m trying to jumpstart my comeback to get ready—to make sure that I’m ready for the beginning part of the next season.

When I was trying to do that, when I was trying to hit, trying to shift my weight onto my left side, it never really felt right. And not having been hurt before, I really didn’t have anything to compare it to, so I wasn’t really sure what was going on, but at that point, after that much time of rehab and having it not bounce back the way I thought, it started to—it really started to raise some red flags.

[00:11:03] Jesse Thorn: Was that scary for you?

[00:11:05] Sean Doolittle: Yeah, a little bit. It was more frustrating than anything else, though. I was putting all this time and effort into this rehab process, and we were trying all these new things these new exercises. Or I would be able to pass some of the tests, and I would start making some progress, and then I would have a little bit of a setback. And I would—you know, and I quickly realized that the most difficult part of a rehab process is the mental side of it. You can get your body to do the exercises that you have to do as part of your rehab program, but you know, a lot of times like you might set goals for yourself. Like, you know, in a knee rehab, I want to be running by this date. And then, that date comes and goes, and you’re not ready to run yet. And it can drag on you mentally and really bring you down, because you spend so much time every day getting to the field early and working with the trainers to try to get your body back to playing.

You know, meanwhile you’re on the table, and of course you’re happy for your friends that they’re out there, and they’re playing, and they’re continuing to, you know, climb the ladder. And you’re getting passed by some of these guys that you know that you can play with, that you feel like you can at least compete on the same level as these guys. And you’re watching them from a training room table, you know, get their shot and accomplish what they’ve been working towards. And that mental rollercoaster can really get to you.

[00:12:33] Jesse Thorn: We have so much more to get into. Stay with us. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun. org and NPR.

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[00:12:45] Jesse Thorn: This is Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. My guest is Sean Doolittle. The two-time all-star relief pitcher just announced his retirement from major league baseball.

By the time you decided to become a pitcher again, you had been in professional baseball for a number of years. You had entered professional baseball as a college player, so you had entered relatively late. And you were almost at the point where you have to decide whether you are going to continue to be a professional baseball player. You know, you had a pretty small window to figure out if pitching was something that was going to work for you. And I wonder if there was a point when you were throwing long toss or when you first started pitching that it occurred to you, “Oh, wait, maybe this actually works.”

[00:13:39] Sean Doolittle: It’s interesting that you said that, because the day before I was approached by Keith Lipman—who asked me if I wanted to start throwing—I had called my agent to see what the process would be like if I wanted to go back to school and start taking classes again. Because mentally the timing of that wrist injury was really tough. I had been given the green light that, you know, two days from then I was going to go back to Sacramento to rejoin the team as a first baseman. So, I was about to be healthy again, and then I had the wrist injury happen. But throughout the summer, I was surprised at the way that I was able to, you know, throw strikes and repeat some of the mechanic aspects of my delivery.

In a way, the wrist injury was a blessing in disguise, because it gave me time. It bought me time. I knew that I wasn’t going to play at all in 2011, so I wasn’t rushing for anything.  I knew we had months to mess around and see if this was going to be something that I could maybe do at some point in my career. And you know, I can remember from the first time I got on the mound, I was able to consistently throw strikes.

[00:14:53] Jesse Thorn: Had that been the case when—five years earlier, when you were in college?

[00:14:57] Sean Doolittle: Yeah, locating—knock on wood—was something that was one of my strengths. But what came this time around was a little bit more velocity. You know, from the time I pitched in college until this point in 2011, I had put on a lot of weight. I had grown up. I had trained for four years as a first baseman. I was trying to hit for power. So, I was adding as much muscle as I could. And so, I think that helped me repeat my delivery, but it also allowed me to throw a little bit harder.

But the weird thing was in the back of my head I don’t ever remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be my ticket to the big leagues. This is my golden ticket.” I was really at a point where didn’t have any expectations for it. I was just looking for a way to get off the disabled list and get back onto the field. And I think—

[00:15:50] Jesse Thorn: You just kind of wanted to do that thing that you like doing, which is playing baseball.

[00:15:55] Sean Doolittle: I missed it! I missed it, and I was willing to do anything that I had to to get back out there. And you know, I didn’t want to look back in 15 or 20 years and say, “Man, like I wish I would have tried that, or I wish I would have thrown myself into that a little bit more.” And the way that I was able to do it that summer, making the switch, was we went all in. I had from Ryan and my coach, Garvin. And remember in Instructional League in the fall of 2011—at this point, I had thrown one professional inning as a pitcher at the very, very end of the 2011 season. And I was throwing 95/97 miles an hour. And it was really weird, because I’d never been put on a radar gun up to that point. I didn’t know how hard I was able to throw.

[00:16:45] Jesse Thorn: It must have been strange when you finally walked into a major league stadium and, you know, the equipment manager handed you a uniform with your name on the back of it, that it came in such a different way than you must have imagined six years previously, or five years previously, when you started playing pro ball.

[00:17:07] Sean Doolittle: (Chuckles.) A little bit. You know, one weird thing about I got the call to go to the big leagues—I was with our AAA team. We were in Tacoma, Washington, and the manager of the AAA team was trying to get in touch with me. He was calling my cell phone, but because it was like nine o’clock in the morning—which for a baseball player, a minor leaguer, it might as well have been like four in the morning.

(Jesse chuckles.)

You know, because after the game, by the time we get home—you know, and then we finally eat, and then we wind down—you know, you’re not going to bed until one or two. So, my roommate woke up, and he was hearing my phone go off. And he woke me up. He said, “Hey, man, Bushy—” Our manager, Darren Bush. He said, “Bushy’s gonna call you. You know, you need—he said you need to answer your phone.” And you know, he called me and told me that I was going to Oakland and that I needed to get changed and get down to the lobby as soon as I could, because they had a game that night, and they were going to need me for the game.

And so, I go downstairs, and by the time I get downstairs it’s like 9:30/10 o’clock. And you know, the traveling—the secretary from the A’s calls me and tells me that my flight’s not ‘til like three o’clock. So, I was just like—I just went to the airport, because I was like, “I don’t want to miss my flight.” You know, and I was that excited about it. And finally getting to the Coliseum in Oakland, it gave me chills. Because when I was a kid, we had season tickets to the A’s. My dad was in the Air Force, and we were stationed at Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, California, which is—it’s now a museum. It’s no longer an active air base, but we had a season ticket package where every weekend we would drive an hour/hour and a half to A’s games. And that was my first experience with baseball, and that’s when I first started to fall in love with the game.

And I mean, I was three, four, and five years old, so I don’t remember a lot of it, but I do remember it. And I have all these pictures of me and my brother decked out in A’s gear at the Coliseum. And you know, here I was 20 years later, getting a chance to put that uniform on and go play on that field. And it gives me goosebumps still thinking about it. You know, the Coliseum, it might not be the nicest, most state-of-the-art venue in the major leagues, but every day that I go out there I can see where we used to sit. So, it has a lot of sentimental value to me. So, the first time that we pulled up, it was a really, really powerful experience.

[00:19:53] Jesse Thorn: Do you take a cab to the stadium, or does someone pick you up?

[00:19:58] Sean Doolittle: (Chuckling.) Yeah, I took a cab. You know, it was really funny, because I got my bags from the airport, and I go out to the taxi stand. And you know, I politely tell them, “You know, I’m in a rush. I gotta get to the Coliseum.” At this point it was like six o’clock or so, We have a seven o’clock game. Anyway, I was like, “I gotta go to the Coliseum.”

And so, he’s like, “Okay.” And he goes, “What entrance do you want me to use?” I haven’t—I have no idea like what entrance we’re supposed to use.

(Jesse chuckles.)

You know, I haven’t been there since I was like four. And you know, we get to the gate, and I’m like, “Tell the guy I’m a player.”

And the security guard’s like, “Okay, like do you have ID? Like, do you have—” Because we do have—we have ID cards but, you know, I hadn’t been there yet, so I didn’t have one.

So, I was like, “No, like I’m on the team. Like, I just got called up. I just got here.” We were there like blocking traffic. Like, people were trying to come into the ballgame, and there was this cab at the parking lot, you know, blocking everybody from their tailgates. And it was me trying to get into the players’ parking lot so that I could get into the stadium.

[00:21:10] Jesse Thorn: (Laughs.) I just imagine you like pulling your Costco card out of your wallet. Your AAA card.

[00:21:17] Sean Doolittle: (Laughs.) I was like, “I’ve come so far! Like, I’m at the stadium. Just let me in!” It was crazy.

[00:21:26] Jesse Thorn: What was the first time that you pitched in the majors?

[00:21:28] Sean Doolittle: I didn’t pitch until the next night. You know, that night was—I got to this—I probably got into the locker room, and I got changed, I got settled, I talked to the manager before the game. And he said, “You know, you’re here ‘cause we need you. We need help in the bullpen. We’ve had some injuries. We’ve been taxed. The guys have been thrown a lot of innings. So, you know, we know you’re rested, and you’re ready to go. Like, you know—we know you got here late, but can you still pitch tonight?” I said absolutely.

I know that they like to get guys feet wet like immediately, like right when they get called up, because they like to, you know, throw them right into the fire, kind of a baptism by fire. And so, I was in the bullpen that night, and the pitcher that we had going for us, Jarrod Parker, took a no-hitter into the eighth inning. And we were up; we had the game in hand. We were up 6 or 8 nothing, at that point, and I was so scared. Because I thought that my major league debut might have to be like in an effort for a combined no hitter. ‘Cause his pitch count was getting very high. It was up over 100 pitches in the seventh and eighth innings, and you know, normally around 100, they start thinking about taking the guy out.

And so, I was sitting there. And I’m like the game’s in hand, like I’m gonna—they’re gonna ask me to be a part of a combined no-hitter in my debut. And we were playing the Texas Rangers at the time, who had one of the best offenses in the league, and I was a wreck. And not pitch that night. I ended up pitching an inning in the third the next night, and I was—I struck out the first hitter I faced and had that closed out. That was the third out of the inning, and then I pitched the next inning as well, and it was very surreal. It was something that I actually had to go back and watch on film, because I didn’t remember a lot of it.

[00:23:33] Jesse Thorn: We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll wrap up with now retired major league baseball all-star, Sean Doolittle. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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[00:24:57] Jesse Thorn: Welcome back to Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. If you’re just joining us, we’re replaying my conversation from 2017 with Sean Doolittle. At the time, he was an all-star relief pitcher for the Oakland A’s. Since we talked, he went on to play for another all-star team and won a World Series title with the Washington Nationals. Doolittle has been one of baseball’s most active and vocal supporters of the queer and veteran communities. Late last month, he announced his retirement from major league baseball. Let’s get back into my conversation with Sean Doolittle.

You know, one of the things that you did that I was really touched by—a couple of years ago, there was some controversy around an LGBT night at the Coliseum. And you and your then girlfriend, now fiancé, bought out the unsold tickets to the game in the LGBT night themed sections of the ballpark and gave them to community groups—LGBT community groups in the Bay Area. And I think when I read that story, the thing that struck me the most was not—I mean, it was a really lovely gesture, of course. And it was a really lovely gesture in the face of some real weird, gross stuff that was going on around that. That controversy was really lousy. But the thing that occurred to me was, you know, I’ve been a sports fan my entire life. I’m from San Francisco and grew up in the Bay area. And I couldn’t think of another time that a professional athlete affirmatively said something positive about the LGBT community.

Like, it occurred to me that my standard of acceptance of LGBT people for athletes was basically not being a bigot. And that really astonished me, you know? It was just something that I hadn’t thought about until you did that. And it was such a remarkable thing for being such an unremarkable thing. I mean, it’s not like it was 1983, you know?

[00:27:12] Sean Doolittle: (Chuckles.) Yeah, and you know what? It seemed like it was long overdue, like that—because that was the first time that the A’s had announced that they were going to host a pride night. And other teams had been doing it for years. I think at that point, the Giants might have had—might have been doing it 13 or 15 years. And was exciting that the A’s were going to do that. And you know, some of the initial reaction that we saw on social media was not great. And we just wanted to, you know, kind of turn a negative into a positive and create a space where people felt comfortable, and people felt welcome.

And it just—none of it sounded right to us—the fact that there were people who were actively like against that idea of having a pride night. And we wanted to show our support and try to make it, you know, the night that it was supposed to be, where we were celebrating the LGBT community and welcoming them and using baseball as a—using sports. So many times, sports can be like that common thread, that common ground that people can find to come together over certain issues. It can be a very powerful vessel for change. And what was really—what really struck us though was the response that we got from the A’s fans and the A’s community. We said, “If you don’t want to come, that’s okay. We’ll buy your tickets, and then we’ll donate your tickets to maybe a group or some people that really want to come.”

By the end of it, Erin, my fiancé, had set up a GoFundMe page, and we raised over $40,000. And we were able to use that to bring out people from different LGBT youth centers in the East Bay and, you know, pay for their transportation and their tickets to the game. And you know, that night was one of the most fun nights of the year. We scored like 22 runs, and it was a blowout win, and people were dancing in the stands. And it was—it ended up being—it came together, and it was really awesome.

[00:29:22] Jesse Thorn: I was reading an article about it from when it happened. And one of the quotes that struck me was from the director of an LGBT youth center in the East Bay. What he said was, “I guess it never would have occurred to me to call and ask for help from a sports team.” And it seemed like part of what made it such a vivid gesture was that it was an affirmative indication of welcoming in a situation that hasn’t always been a welcoming place and that hasn’t always sort of said out loud, “You’re welcome here.” And that really touched me. I mean, like you can buy tickets for the boys’ club, you know. I went to the boys’ club in San Francisco. We got to go to a lot of baseball games for free, you know? (Chuckles.) It was great. But that act of reaching out is kind of an unusual thing.

[00:30:17] Sean Doolittle: We realized that we had an opportunity to be a voice in the community. So many times—I’ve said I’ve been so grateful for the way that the A’s fans have embraced me and supported me during my career, during my time with the organization. And I think when it comes down to it, you know, athletes have a voice if they choose to use it. They have a built-in platform if they want to speak out on something. And you know, it was an opportunity that I saw, you know, that Erin and I wanted to welcome these people to the field. We wanted, I think—you know, kind of like what you said. The baseball community had never really—I don’t know if they—I don’t really know how to say it, but it was something—like I said, we felt it was long overdue, and we couldn’t believe that they hadn’t done this yet.

And when they did do it, we just wanted to be involved to make sure that people knew that we supported them, and we wanted them to come out and have fun at the stadium. And we wanted them to feel welcome and comfortable and be able to feel like we wanted them and that we were willing to help them out with it.

[00:31:45] Jesse Thorn: Well, Sean, I’m so grateful for you to take—for taking time out of spring training to talk to me. And I wish you so much luck in the new season with the A’s. It’s an exciting team, and I’m looking forward to watching a lot of games on my MLB.tv, and I’ll be rooting for you.

[00:32:01] Sean Doolittle: Thank you very much, man. I appreciate it.

[00:32:04] Jesse Thorn: Sean Doolittle. He announced his retirement from major league baseball last month. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. We are always wondering, as his social media handle suggests, what would Doo do?

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[00:32:21] Jesse Thorn: That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye, created from the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California. Some guys came and built a shed in my backyard. They did it in one day. It’s like a pretty big shed. It’s unbelievable to me. There was no building there yesterday, and now there’s an entire building there. Absolutely incredible. My thanks to Shed World.

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