I’ve known of plenty of minor leaguers who couldn’t handle it. Some pissed away signing bonuses and bailed, some were never all that into it, some were colossal dicks and alienated everyone around them, some became alcoholics on a level that most of us would be unable to fully comprehend, and others still got homesick or couldn’t adjust to the life of moving around from one city to the next and took themselves out of the game.

I don’t have patience for a lot of them, but we’re a culture that obsesses over some level of stardom, to the point where we look at anyone with talent as some kind of icon and get all huffy about them not doing more with it. Given all the factors working against them, I think it’s a near miracle when anyone makes the majors, but the fact is that even when they get to that point, they are still capable of screwing up. It’s easy to sit around and say, “oh well I never would have done that” but human nature has as much or more capacity for phenomenal fuck-ups as it does angels-singing-from-the-heavens success. We aren’t all making great decisions about what to do with our abilities all the time.