This morning Buster Olney said -- I think in response to a question a lot of us had, but were too respectful of the man’s decision to ask -- that the A’s have no expectation that Grant Desme, the prospect who is leaving baseball to become a priest, is going to change his mind.
I think Aaron covered most of the relevant angles on this the other day, but let me throw one more thought out there: the people who are saying “well, why couldn’t he have waited until after his baseball career was over to have done this?” don’t really have a handle on what becoming a priest really entails.
I’m not talking about the spiritual commitment here -- I’m way out of my depth commenting on that. I’m referring to the academic commitment. The logistics and mechanics of seminary school. As the Columbus Dispatch’s Todd Jones* reported in a fabulous six-part series last summer, it is an extremely demanding undertaking. It certainly does not sound like the sort of thing one would be able to slide into easily after several years following some other pursuit.
Upshot: it’s more likely that Desme could wash out of seminary school as a result of its rigorous demands and get back into baseball than it would be for him to play out his baseball career and commit to seminary school.
*Jones is actually a sports reporter by trade, and a good one at that, so I’d be pretty interested to hear his take on all of this.