The Gunn Show - 7.28.24
What I'm Thinking. What I'm Reading.
Hey Everyone,
Hope you all have had a great week. It’s been a busy one on my end with our draft camp out in Arizona and the Trade Deadline upcoming, so this week’s edition is going to center around the biggest topic I’ve been thinking on (energy) in lieu of any resource shares. Will try to get back to more normal programming next week as time permits.
As always, hope you enjoy - and please reach out with any thoughts or comments!
- CG
Thinking - Energy
This past week is one of the most paradoxical time periods of the baseball calendar.
When the league office decided in 2020 to move the MLB draft back a month in order to line it up with All-Star festivities, they ended up creating a unique blend of overlapping ‘befores’ and ‘afters’. The last week of July is no longer simply the domain of the Trade Deadline - it also now coincides with the aftermath of the MLB draft, and all that it entails.
On the player development side, most every organization runs a ‘Draft Camp’ in the immediate week after new players are both selected and signed. It is an excellent opportunity every year to build relationships and welcome the newest members your organization; for staff and players to get to know each other on a more personal level; to expose draftees to your organization’s core principles and philosophies.
But it is is also one of the most grueling weeks of the year, on par with the challenges endured yearly during Spring Training. From the time players are selected in the draft to Day 1 of camp, PD staff embark on a quick sprint to get everything in place - daily schedules, medical screenings, presentations, training session designs, and more. It is controlled chaos at its finest, and a true feat of collaborative effort that the camp comes together in such a tight window each year.
And then you layer in the heat. For us and 14 other MLB clubs, Draft Camp occurs in the hell that is Arizona in the last week of July. You hop on the plane Sunday evening knowing that you are buckling up for 7 days of 110+ degree weather in the desert, an environment where your energy levels get sapped by 50% the second that you step out into the high sky sun. Regardless of how many times you’ve been there and done it, it never gets easier. If going to Dallas in August is the equivalent of being cremated, then going to Arizona in July is like being cremated, reincarnated, and cremated again just in case you didn’t get the point the first time (side note: every year this trip gives me an immense amount of appreciation for our Arizona Complex League staff that grinds in this environment every day for 7+ months).
Add in on top of this the fact that you are often pulling triple duties with Draft Camp in the morning, Arizona Complex League games at night, and trade deadline work interspersed throughout the day. One of these things alone is enough to drain you heavily - all three at once is a nearly impossible task.
So suffice it to say that when I got onto my plane last night to head home to Dallas, I had every intention of melting into my seat for the 2+ hour long flight. Of turning my brain off, shutting it down, and recharging the batteries after a grind of a week. But when I sat down, I noticed something I didn’t expect.
It was an energy paradox, of sorts - a tension between two states, a strange existence of polar opposites at the same moment. I wanted to sleep and shut off, yet I couldn’t - my mind was racing, energized with excitement even though my body had had its fill. It was like my batteries were empty, but somehow still brimming with a kinetic charge at the same time. The week took a great bit out of me, but it also gave me energy in a different form in exchange.
Noticing that paradox got me thinking on a concept with which I have become well acquainted over the past couple of years: energy - what it is, where it comes from, how we strike a balance with it. And as an extension, how we can prevent against energy depletion. Or, as we most frequently call it, burn-out.
If you work in professional sports - especially baseball, with a 162+ game season - you will inevitably have a run in with burn-out at some point. It’s an incredibly rewarding lifestyle, one where you get to be a part of something bigger than yourself and help others accomplish their dreams. One where climbing to the pinnacle will give you emotion and feelings that you never thought possible to experience - as we learned in Texas in 2023.
But a life of sport is also a grind - don’t let anyone tell you any differently. It requires an inordinate amount of sacrifice that you hope will be paid in full over time, but comes with no guarantee. It means countless hours on planes and beds that are frequently not your own. At some point you stop viewing the number of nights in your Marriott account as a badge of honor, and start thinking about the opportunity cost of what they represent: the time away from home, from your family, from your loved ones. Because at the end of the day, that is what the loyalty points are: an objective measure of all the sacrifices you have made to get them. The longer you are in it, the more that recognition will start to set in. And the more it will test your faith, your belief that what you are doing is right, your conviction that your feet are in the right place.
I’ve been around the game for long enough to know that the people that think they are the most immune to this reality are in fact the ones that are most susceptible - they are the ones that think they have an unlimited charge to their energy stores, a motor that will never stop running, one that others cannot match. And for a while they are right. They outpace people out of sheer will - they are the first to arrive and the last to leave, the ones that pride themselves on how many flights they can cram in over the summer without needing to take a single day off. But at some point rent is due, and the reaper cometh. Of the people I know that were in and out of the professional sports lifestyle quickly, there’s often a commonality - they burned bright and fast early, and their candles wore down too quickly with no wax to build them back up.
I know this story better than most because I’ve fallen into the trap more times than I care to admit. It happened after my senior season in college, where I grinded through a hip surgery for the year and was burnt-out from the effort at the end. It led me to turn down an opportunity to play professionally in Europe, one that I never got again and regret not taking. It happened again when I was in my first spring training, where I tried to be the first one in and the last one out - more for show than the fact that I was actually doing anything important. I needed multiple weeks to feel like myself again when I got back home. And again the following year when I realized I hadn’t seen any of my closest friends in over 2 years since I moved to Texas for work. It ate at me heavily and compounded a feeling of isolation I’d been developing, with not knowing a single person nearby where I’d chosen to start my career.
The truth is that some of us are more pre-disposed to falling into this energy trap than others - those of us that have an obsessive passion for something and are willing to invest every waking moment into it. That’s me, for sure, and I’m guessing that some of you feel the same way as you read this. Burn-out is real and no one is immune - that reality necessitates having some guardrails in place to solve the problem.
For me, the solution I’ve found over the years is the following: I am much more interested in energy creation than I am in energy preservation. I know my bias is to dive into something heavily and exhaust myself on it - and that’s okay. It’s that obsessive nature that makes the process rewarding most-times, and I don’t want to strip that away. So rather than treating energy like a finite store, I’ve started to think about it much more along the lines of the devices we carry in our hands - the more I ask of myself the faster the battery will drain, but there are an infinite number of outlets I can use to plug-in and charge back up. Things that can give me energy, even as I use up whatever it was I had before up. Things like a good book; a hard workout; a morning writing session; quality time with friends; Sunday home-cooked steak dinners with my wife. And more.
Sometimes you have energy sources that already exist but you forget about - that was the lesson I learned when I didn’t see any of my best friends - from home and college - over those first two years in Texas. They were a charging plug that gave me life and energy, but one I lost when I moved far away. And I didn’t realize what I had until I didn’t have it anymore. The only way to plug back into that source was with intentionality - it takes money for flights and time for travel, but the ROI I get back in terms of the energy far exceeds anything I spend to get it.
Other times you’ll need to tune into the world around you and look for new sources of energy that you haven’t previously discovered. That’s what this week of the year has turned into for me - Draft Camp, and the time it gives us with our new players, has a unique way of imbuing me with a newfound sense of excitement for what’s ahead. It’s a similar feeling I get when I go to the Dominican, or travel to our affiliates to see our coaches and players - I come out of the week having been given energy back at at least the rate that I expended it.
Over time, I think what each of us needs is two things: (1) to avoid things that unnecessarily drain our energy - a topic for another time - and (2) consistent energy sources we can turn to in order to charge ourselves back up. The answer to the second part will differ for each of us - but the first step is to recognize that regardless of what the answer is, each of us has to have one (if not multiple).
No phone or laptop is capable of running forever on a single charge, and humans are no different. Energy drives us and sustains us - so where are you getting yours?
