I Should Have Quit This Morning

Adventures in Minor League Baseball

By: Kathy Diekroeger

Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray

Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins

Publisher's summary

The road to Major League Baseball goes through the minor leagues. Every year there are over 5,500 players trying to work their way to the top of the tiered minor league system. Very few people know what life is really like for these aspiring players - until now. This collection of stories from actual minor league players is a hilarious, heartbreaking, and honest account of the struggle to make it to the big leagues. In this book, you will learn:

• How it feels to be the first pick in the MLB draft (“everyone started screaming”) and how it feels for a player to not hear his name called at all (“Three days came and went and I didn't get picked”.)
• What Spring Training is like for minor leaguers (“The difference between big league camp and minor league camp is night and day”.)
• Where players live and how they eat (“I became a pro at cooking in the ‘kitchen bathroom' in the hotel”.)
• What it's like to get promoted, demoted and traded (“It was the first time I actually cried when someone got moved or traded”,)
• What it's like when players get the ultimate call up to the Major Leagues (“It was still during the game and everyone was like, ‘Dude, go call your parents or something”.)

And so much more!

©2019 Kathy Diekroeger (P)2020 Tantor

Full of Laughter and Joy

I light hearted, insightful, and narrative of Minor league baseball. This book had me laughing from start to finish.

I loved the stories of what really happens in MiLB from the players themselves.

I loved every story of the book. This was fantastic. So authentic and raw. I could not stop listening.

Very thorough and illuminating

A thorough examination of life in minor-league baseball. Very enjoyable if you're a baseball fan, insightful if you're unaware of the challenges the players have to endure, and an exhaustive case for why some changes that billion-dollar organizations can easily afford will both improve the players' quality of life and play on the field. Recommended if you enjoy baseball in general; highly recommended if you can't get enough of it or if you own an MLB team.

You'll Love It If You Follow Stanford Baseball

Maybe I hyped it up too much in my mind as I worked with the Vanderbilt Baseball program through these same years and spent time in February at the Sunken Diamond. Stanford is an amazing academic school, which makes it even more incredible that it was an NCAA powerhouse.

The stories were from the years that Kathy's sons were on the team and drafted, so you don't get to hear from those who went to the major leagues before them. It would have been great to hear from the likes of Ed Sprague, Jeffrey Hammonds and maybe Mike Mussina. So again, I was hoping to hear a bit more.

The take on how hard minor league baseball is to stay for long is well-documented and the Stanford guys certainly had their share of 10-hour bus rides. The part about haunted hotels was very amusing,

Michael Butler Murray was not a good narrator for this type of writing. He read it with a defined smug feel to his voice that made me feel that the Stanford alumni were entitled and know-it-all. That isn't how they were at all in Nashville or Palo Alto. They were very humble and had self-deprecating humor at every turn, especially when we played that day of the draft in the NCAA's.

I didn't get the anonymous for most of the anonymous quotes. They just didn't feel genuine and what they said was not even scandalous. It wasn't told as a story, but came off a bit disjointed with the narrator leaving no pause for what was a direct quote and what wasn't.

Maybe this will give someone from other schools courage to write about college baseball and the minor leagues. Everyone just seems to keep the best stories out of print. What are they afraid of in this day and age?

Overall, I guess I just built this read up in my mind. But a great free read for sure on Audible.