Career changeup

Cy Young winner Jim Lonborg pitched for the Red Sox 1967 Impossible Dream Team. (As we learned in game seven of that year's World Series, the dream sadly did turn out to be impossible.) After hanging up his cleats, Lonborg became a dentist. Pro-Football Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton started a successful software company when his quarterbacking days were over. NY Knicks star (and Rhodes Scholar) Bill Bradley was for many years a US Senator from New Jersey.

But most professional athletes follow a few pretty well worn paths once their playing days are over. They stay in sports in some capacity - coach, scout, announcer. They do ads. They sell their autograph. They forge a career in Hollywood, trading in sports stardom for movie stardom. They do public speaking engagements, giving motivational speeches at company sales conferences and high school sports banquets. They become non-profit figureheads. They work for financial services - insurance, banking, money management - acting as rainmakers who golf with prospects and favored clients.

Given the outrageous money so many of today's athletes make, some of them just retire at 38, move to Forida, loll around the pool all day, and play golf for the hell of it, not to woo someone else's clients. 

Few professional athletes do like Dr. Jim Lonborg, CEO Fran Tarkenton, or Senator Bill Bradley and break out of the likely what's-a-guy-to-do-post-playing career molds. 

But Brad Lidge did.

After a fairly successful pitching career as a reliever, a career that spanned 11 seasons, Lidge - who finished up an undergraduate degree (online) in religious studies while playing ball - decided to become an archaeologist.   

In 2017, he completed a master’s degree in ancient Mediterranean archaeology. He’s now a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology — and for the past five years, a supervisor at two different excavation sites in Italy, where he studies the ancient Etruscan civilization (he’s also completing a PhD program on ancient Etruscan symbols at the University of Colorado). (Source: NY Times)

Archaeology was attractive to Lidge for a number of reasons. In Lidge's own words, this pursuit let him:

...take a desire to know about world history and still be outdoors, still work with my hands and be able to take part in excavations. 

He'd been a history buff since high school, but his interest in archaeology was piqued when he was playing for the Phillies. Learning of Lidge's interest in world history, a couple of Egyptologists at the UPenn Museum invited him over for a tour. He came away from that tour inspired, and the summer after he left baseball, he:

...went as a volunteer to a site in Italy, and the first day I flipped over a couple of Roman coins and was hooked after that.

As it turned out, baseball provided Lidge with solid experience for a career in archaeology. Demanding physical work. Dealing with heat. Long hours.

Lidge also credits the mental discipline required for success in sports for helping him deal with the demands of archaeology (lots of frustration, paying attention to detail). 

The grind of the baseball season kind of prepares you for just about anything afterward. 

And there's another "crossover point." 

You deal with a lot of different types of people in baseball, people from all over the country and obviously now from everywhere. And I think you learn to function well in a lot of different atmospheres and different contexts of people.

Quite similar to how all those waitressing jobs prepared me for a post-waitress career in business.

And I will add that baseball, above all other sports, leans on its history, the lore of the past. Seems plenty natural for a baseball player to be a history buff, even if Lidge has traded in Tris Speaker and Shoeless Joe stories for Etruscan symbols.

Anyway, interesting to read about an athlete who's pursuing something entirely different in their retirement. 

Good on you, Brad Lidge. Don't know if a changeup was in his pitching repertoire, but he's sure changing things up career-wise. Hope on one of his digs he finds something unique. Maybe he'll find out that the ancient Etruscans, not Abner Doubleday, invented baseball. I mean, Doubleday has already been debunked many times over as the founding father. Let's give the Etruscans a shot!

---------------------------------------------------------------

Image Source: Etsy