The Grim Reaper

Inside look at professional athletics.

Every year the Grim Reaper walks around professional baseball facilities looking for their next string of victims.

This might sound like an exaggeration, and that's because it is. But every team does in fact have someone known as “the reaper”, some go by it more affectionately than others, but in general the name fits the person.

The reaper is the person within the organization who is responsible for chopping heads. Not literal heads, all though at times it feels like it might as well be the same thing. The term “Chopping Heads” refers to players getting canned, fired, clipped or whatever phrase you choose to use to lighten the blow of having your childhood dreams and method of earning income crushed in a matter of seconds.

If you cannot tell, this week's newsletter is going to be a tad melodramatic, but onward we go.

The reaper is generally someone higher up in the organizational ranks, not a pitching coach or manager (although managers get tasked with chopping heads as well, and in my experience it’s equally as sad for them).

This person usually doesn't talk much, as they're known organization-wide to be the person who comes around chopping heads, and they get an unfairly negative perception from players in the organization. It's not the reapers fault they are tasked with the job, they generally are just successful people who made their way up the organizational ladder and find themselves in the position where they are the lowest of the higher ups.

Work your way up high enough the baseball coaching ladder and yea eventually you too will be tasked with crushing dreams on a regular basis.

Generally, the large “Reapings” are done at year's end over the phone (which is brutal), or in person during the last week of spring training, which is equally if not more brutal because there are zero job openings available after camp breaks.

Once the “Reapings” are done, the season commences. Or the free agency process begins, which to build off my last point of “zero jobs being available in the post spring training phase of the season”, the minor league free agency process is pretty interesting and way less glorious than its Major League counterpart.

Minor league free agency is more or less the Hunger Games (remember, we are being melodramatic). It's you, and all your buddies going to war every day trying to improve as much as you can and get into the best place you can in order to showcase your newfound skills and talents for the eyes of Scouts, General managers and other front office folk that make decisions and give players jobs.

At my gym for instance, I train alongside 30-40 really great humans who chose the same career path as me. We train together about five hours every day for five or six days out of the week. As you would imagine, you get pretty close with these people pretty quickly, and after an off-season that ranges anywhere from 4-6 months (depending on when you got clipped), you're pretty close to one another.

Then, one day in early spring/late winter, you are all dropped into a gym to compete against one another for a few very rare and coveted spots to earn your way back into professional baseball in the minor league ranks. 30 pitchers throw, roughly 5 get signed. Some facilities will have more, for instance the facility that I train at got roughly 10-15 players signed, but had almost 75 throw in their pro tryout.

Of the 75 players throwing at the tryout, every single pitcher threw over 90 miles per hour, and you would be hard pressed to find one that did not at least touch 92. The difference between being signed and not being signed is razor thin, and the best chance you have is focusing on your own game and improving your own talents while building off of your baseball performance resume in the past.

So this upcoming January 13th, I will go into the facility and mix it up with 75 other elite professional arms who are trying to get signed. The next six to seven weeks will be fully dedicated to me putting myself in the best position to stand out physically and talent wise.

Next newsletter I will be going into depth on what entails my training process, and what exactly I plan to prioritize going into pro day.

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John Creel

TRS Founder & Professional Baseball Player