SEASON 2: EPISODE 09 TRANSCRIPT

R.A. Dickey

R.A. Dickey (00:06): I knew how to survive, right? But I didn't know how to thrive. I didn't know how to really live authentically. Those are the things that have made my life so much more enjoyable. I love learning. I tell my kids all the time, be lifelong learners. Let that be one of the attributes that you possess. I really believe that two of the things that you can really hold onto is being incredibly self-aware and being a lifelong learner. If you can possess those two things and you're going to have a lot of success in your life.

Dr. Greg Jones (00:42): Our world is facing significant challenges and at every turn, another conflict awaits. Yet we survive, we overcome, we even thrive by relying on an intangible but undeniable gift, hope. It fills us, connects us, highlights our individual purpose and unites us in the goal to do more together. Hope fuels us toward flourishing as people and as a community. My name is Dr. Greg Jones, president of Belmont University, and I'm honored to be your guide through candid conversations with amazing agents of hope. People who demonstrate what it means to live with hope and lean into the lessons picked up along the way. They are The Hope People.

Today's agent of hope is R.A. Dickey, former major league baseball player and the first knuckleball pitcher to ever win the Cy Young Award. R.A.'s story is one of resilience and faith, navigating the challenges of childhood trauma, a turbulent baseball career and a crisis of hope that nearly ended it all. Through the guidance of mentors, the support of his faith and his own determination, he emerged as one of baseball's most celebrated pitchers and a powerful agent of hope. Throughout our conversation captured live at this year's Hope Summit, R.A. shares how his unpredictable knuckleball mirrors his journey from survivor to author and how he's now dedicated to pouring into others through his family and humanitarian work. Good morning and we're delighted that you're here.

R.A. Dickey (02:28): I'm glad to be here. This is a privilege really.

Dr. Greg Jones (02:31): And I should begin by just noting though we won't highlight it significantly that you're joining us on your 50th birthday today.

R.A. Dickey (02:37): Boy, I knew you're going to say that. You messed me up on that.

Dr. Greg Jones (02:39): It's good way to start today. Well, we're delighted that you're here and thanks for joining us. I gave a little bit of the highlights of your career, but there's so much more. I want to just pick up. You're turning 50 today and that's a milestone. You've packed a lot into 50 years of life. You were a student at MBA and played baseball, recruited by the University of Tennessee. You become a first round draft choice. You're an Olympian, you play for the US in the 1996 Olympics. You eventually win the Cy Young Award. You're known as one of the best knuckleball pitchers in the history of baseball. In many ways, that sounds like an incredible list of triumph after triumph, and yet you write a memoir that tells a much more complicated story about adversity. Talk about the complexities of life and what's gone on behind the headlines of all those successes.

R.A. Dickey (03:41): Well, I often have to remind people that I'm also in the history of the game of baseball, which is over a hundred years old. I'm the number one at the top of the list for most home runs given up in a game and also the most wild pitches in an inning. So I hold a couple other records too, and that helps keep me grounded. But I learned early on in my career, I think through the benefit of having a lot of great people who loved on me well and moments that I didn't feel like I deserved and also outside of themselves without asking anything in return that really motivated me into growth. And they helped me see the value of walking through hard things and what that could do.

Dr. Greg Jones (04:28): Some of that had to do with baseball, so you had a really good fastball, which is usually what gets people drafted in the first or second round. And then all of a sudden the fastball is no longer working for you because of health challenges. You write about that as requiem for a fastball that turns you into a knuckleball pitcher. But that also meant you spent a lot of time in the minor leagues and that had to be hard.

R.A. Dickey (04:53): Yeah, the minor leagues, I joke around a lot with some of my peers and a lot of people who followed me that I spent so much time in Oklahoma City, which is the AAA affiliate of the Texas Rangers that I could probably run for mayor, which is if you're not familiar with baseball, the structure of baseball is you have your major league team like the Dodgers and the Yankees that you guys are watching in the World Series if you're watching that. But underneath those teams are six additional teams of players all trying and fighting against one another and still trying to do the things that make a good team, a good team. But you're also competing with one another for one of 25 spots on a major league roster, and that happens every year of your life. And so for me it was a real balance on how do I be a great teammate and also how do I do the things for me that make me unique and special and different and fall in love with that stuff outside of all the white noise that happens around you when you're in that kind of environment

Dr. Greg Jones (05:53): You talk about and write about that you became a Christian when you were 13 and yet it hadn't really become a part of you. When you were in the minor leagues you'd gotten married, you were on the road a ton. I think between spring training and then a baseball season. You're away from home more than half the year and it's not easy. And you have been remarkably candid about a particular instance when you were kind of at the lowest point. You had some suffering as a kid and then the fast ball had left you and you were in crisis. Tell us about that time in the car.

R.A. Dickey (06:35): Okay, so I'll tell you about that time in the car, but I have to give you some backstory on all the events that kind of got me there. I found myself behind Belle Meade Mansion in the first home that we had ever bought, and I was at the end of myself. I had just decided that it was too hard for me and I was ashamed and I carried around a lot of shame, both as a professional in my career, as a father, as a husband. And I found myself in this car with a hosepipe taped to the muffler of the car run into the driver's side window so that it could fill up with monoxide and I could just leave it all behind. And that's the moment that he's referencing.

And thankfully because of that Genesis moment for me where I had gotten on my knees and asked Christ to be a part of my life, and although I did not cultivate that faith for a number of different reasons, it was a real experience for me and it was because of that singular experience I feel like I really heard the Holy Spirit in me saying, "Hey." You hear stories about hearing God's voice a lot in people's lives. And I can tell you for me in my own life, there have been three or four different times where I felt like I've really audibly heard the audible voice of God in my heart and resonating through my mind to help make me make a decision that was a really, really important decision and this was one of them. And he said, "Do not turn the key. I've got something else for you." So I didn't turn the key.

But leading up to that event, I had suffered as an eight and nine-year-old boy, some horrific sexual abuse. And then I used baseball as this place to escape a lot of that and sports to escape a lot of that pain. But I was really good at being a chameleon and keeping people at arms distance. I learned a lot of very toxic mechanisms for being able to survive and those are the things that I cultivated over time instead of the things that were healthy and pure and noble and true and lovely and admirable, the things that scripture says that we need to hang on to. And so when I got to that point and I didn't make that decision, it wasn't the very next day that somebody popped into my life to help lead me on a different kind of journey.

Dr. Greg Jones (09:04): It's a powerful story that you tell and a profoundly hopeful one, not an optimistic one, because hope means you face the brutal facts and yet you rise above them and you become one of the things that shines in your memoir. And in your life is the role other people have played in believing in you in baseball and in life, whether it's your wife or it's Buck Showalter and Orel Hersheiser. Talk about other people as agents of hope in your life.

R.A. Dickey (09:33): When I won the Cy Young Award, I was the first knuckleballer in the history of baseball to ever do it. And the very first call I made after my wife was to Phil Niekro. And Phil Niekro is a 300 game winner in the major leagues and probably the most famous knuckleballer of all time. And he was a big part of my story and he was one of those people I mentioned earlier that had given away a lot of himself to me without asking for anything in return. And when that award, when I was able to win that award, it wasn't just for me, it was like a way for me to get to share my story with all these other great people who had poured into my life. He was one of them, Phil Niekro, Charlie Huff, Tim Wakefield were all kind of part of the Jedi Council of Knuckleballers that they were all on my speed dial like they were on my favorites of my phone.

And anytime I would have a bad outing, I could call one and it could be one in the morning and they would always pick up. It was amazing. And so yes, in baseball, those guys were really instrumental, but as part of my life development away from sports, and that's really the thing that probably transformed me in a way that helped me be successful as a professional. I really had people invest in me that didn't give 2 cents about who I was as a baseball player. And so I was hearing things for the first time through a guy named Steven James who was a local therapist here and through Carter Crenshaw, who was my pastor at West End Community Church at the time, and had walked with Ann and I through a lot of difficult things. And I had friends all of a sudden that were popping up and I say popping up, but we all know that that was God's gift to me and that were walking alongside me in a real vulnerable and transparent way.

And I started to see how life could be lived differently and I didn't have to be ashamed of being sexually abused. I didn't have to be ashamed of not getting the most out of my career as a conventional pitcher. You mentioned when my fastball was dying in the minor leagues and I felt like it died about 15 different times throughout the course of my minor league career. But when I started to understand that if I could make living the next five minutes well a lifestyle, that was a real transforming moment for me when I learned that.

Dr. Greg Jones (11:55): Wow, that's beautiful. I want to go back to the Knuckleball for a moment. You mentioned Phil Niekro and Charlie Huff and Tim Wakefield. It's a pretty select fraternity of successful knuckleball pitchers. How have you thought about the Knuckleball as a metaphor for life?

R.A. Dickey (12:13): Oh, wow. Yeah. So I grew up an English major in college and I love the written word. And at MBA where I went to high school, I had incredible teachers that really, they were like dead poet society kind of stuff, man, it was awesome. And they really gave me an appreciation for the written word and how to communicate the written word. So metaphor was always a big deal for me. Seeing the story behind the story, learning how to connect things in ways that you felt like were a little bit more spiritual than just superficial. And the knuckleball for me was like when I look back on it couldn't have been any other way. That had to be the pitch that was designed for me to throw. Right. And I'll give you a little background and tutorial about that pitch. If you watch TV, 99.999% of the pitchers that you watch have learned how to manipulate the spin of a baseball, and you'll see guys who throw curveballs and sliders and great fastballs.

Well, a knuckleball is antithetical to that in the sense that I'm trying to subtract spin, and that's really hard to do when you've had a lifetime of being taught the other thing. So I had to really unlearn my mechanic as a conventional pitcher and relearn a mechanic that could produce a good knuckleball. Similarly, in my life as I was learning this pitch, I was also learning a new way to live. I was unlearning all those toxic mechanisms I referenced before. I was relearning how to do things with character and integrity and really trying to commit to the moment of a thing. And so before I was just trying to get to the end of the process, and when I learned how to do it differently, I learned that the thing that has value is the process. It is the moment that you're in. It is if I throw 120 pitches in a start for the New York Mets, that's 120 separate individual commitments to a moment.

And if I could take that and I could transplant that in my everyday walk with my wife and my friends and my family and my children, the richness of those relationships, I mean they supersede any hope that I could ever had of having a relationship with another human being from where I came from. I did not want relationship. When you're sexually abused early in your life, your growth is stunted. And so unless you get help in those moments, which I did not, I came from a divorced home and I was kind of a latchkey kid where my parents would leave the key under the mat and I'd go to school, I'd come back and I'd be unsupervised for a long time and I was trying to figure it all out as a kid. And I didn't have the intervention that you would need when something that horrible happens to you. And so I learned to take care of myself, and when you learn to take care of yourself as a child that's gone through something like that, you learn how to only survive. That's it.

And I was really good at survival. I could live in my car great. I did it when I was a high school student at MBA. I would park in vacant rental. I'll never forget going to our MBA library and turning through. I don't know if you guys will remember, but you used to read the newspaper where you would turn the actual pages and you could see all the houses that were for rent and were vacant, and I would pick one and I would go to it. I'd park my car in the driveway and I'd sleep in my car. And I knew how to survive, but I didn't know how to thrive.

I didn't know how to really live authentically, and those are the things that have made my life so much more enjoyable. I love learning. I tell my kids all the time, be lifelong learners. Let that be one of the attributes that you possess. I really believe that two of the things that you can really hold onto is being incredibly self-aware and being a lifelong learner. If you can possess those two things, then you're going to have a lot of success in your life.

Dr. Greg Jones (16:23): You have many gifts, and that's beautiful. I want to go back to your contrast between surviving and thriving, and when you're throwing the knuckleball, it controls you or at least you can't control it. And it strikes me that part of that metaphor is also learning as you did to live into relationships which can't be controlled, and relationships become much more of a walk in faith with God, with others. Talk about the development of those relationships after that moment in the car.

R.A. Dickey (16:56): Well, that's a great insight, Greg. I don't know if I've ever really thought of it that through that lens, but you're absolutely right. The thing that makes a knuckleball successful is that if I don't know where it's going, the hitter surely doesn't know where it's going. And so in relationship, a lot of times I felt the safest places for me were in relationships that I could really control, which is horrible, manipulative and controlling, and it didn't matter the relationship. It could have been my wife, it could have been my child, it could be a manager to a player, a friend, how I'm always looking for ways that I can benefit out of the relationship because that's how I had to live. That's how I thought I had to live in order to survive. And so I really believe that my life relationally has gone through three or four different transformations.

I mean, I really feel like I knew what it was like to survive and how to get the tools to do that well. And then from survivor, I wanted to try to figure out once I started getting healthy, how to use different tools that makes you what? A craftsman. So from survivor to craftsman, right? How do I use what I'm now being given relationally that's different from what I've ever known in real life application to be able to do relationship differently, and then ultimately I think the freedom really comes when you embrace the artistry of it. So you go from survivor to craftsman to artist. Those are the three kind of movements in my life that I have recognized so far as being very transformative, and when you get to that place where you can be an artist, it's really all about transparency and telling the truth and being okay with the consequences of that sometimes.

Because you know in the end that you have an authentic spirit to grow. Right? When I started getting healthy as a human being and started to understand leadership in the sense of how do I lead my wife? How do I be a good teammate? How do I lead my kids and what gifts do I bring to bear in order to do that? Then the baseball stuff took care of itself. Professionally, that started to occur almost organically out of the overflow of how do I be a good husband? What are my steps in doing that better? And then I would just carry that into my professional career.

Dr. Greg Jones (19:23): That's beautiful. I love that journey from survival to craftsman to artistry because the book is a work of art. It's one of the blurbs says that it's the best baseball book since Ball Four, which was a pretty legendary book, but it's not a baseball book in my view. Even don't like baseball, this is a really powerful book because it's a testimony to faith and life and hope and joy in all those ways. You're an incredible agent of hope in the way you've lived throughout your life, especially as you wrote the book and then going forward. Talk about that theme of hope and why that has been so important in your life and in the book.

R.A. Dickey (20:04): Well, I think that was the heartbeat of change for me and hoping, it's risky. It's risky to hope, and for all my life I feel like I was really afraid to risk it. It wasn't until 2005 when I was at the end of myself that I... And I think that's exactly where God wanted me, right? He wanted me. I heard this great lyric the other day, Greg that said, "The highest point that I could ever hope to achieve on Earth is at the foot of Jesus." Hoping in that was the transformative piece for me, but it also was scary and I think I would be unauthentic if I were to say it was all cruise control. It was absolutely not cruise control. It was having hope and then hope being shattered in a moment and then having to reengage the hope, right? And learning how to do that part well because a lot of people, they can say, and this was me. I'm speaking out of my own experience.

I hope to be a big leaguer one day. I hope to have a good marriage one day. I hope to make enough money to be able to provide for my kids one day. All those are really good hopes, and you feel the waves of culture crash against you over and over again of heartbreak and getting fired and people telling you're not good enough, and you have all these dream busters out there that want to take what you hope for and crumble it up and throw it right in your face. And you have to learn how to reengage the hope over and over. There's a perpetuity to hope that does not go away, real hope, and that was my quest. How do I get into that spot where even if it doesn't go well, that I still trust that God's got an incredible plan for my life. And hope has to do completely with surrender and we don't want to surrender.

That's the hard. A person that wants to control you and be manipulative and was really good at it. That's the last thing I want to do is surrender. That's a weak word. Well, I come to find out that's maybe the strongest word in the human language is surrender, right? How do you surrender to putting others before yourself? How do you surrender to being humble and leading by humility and how do you surrender to not being in control of your future but working hard with the gifts God's given you to hope for and dream big and do all the things that you know in your core you feel like you've been called to do, but be okay with the answer if it doesn't work out the way that you think it should work out. Like I am not with you up here because I have arrived at anything, man. I am a work in progress and I'm still trying to figure all that out, and more than that, I'm trying to teach my children about that at their ages, and that's really hard to do.

Dr. Greg Jones (23:15): I want to follow up on being a parent. You're one of those people that unfortunately is all too rare who's had extraordinary success, especially in sports and has had an equally successful post sports career. Because you've seen your life since you retired as a ministry and you've poured into your kids and your family and your wife. And you've also engaged in a number of ministries where you've gone to India, you've been involved in fighting human trafficking. Talk about how you pour into others as an agent of hope.

R.A. Dickey (23:55): I don't think there's any real secret formula for me other than I want to give away what I was given.

Dr. Greg Jones (24:01): That's a beautiful phrase.

R.A. Dickey (24:03): That's it. I mean, when you have been rescued from so much, you can't help but want to give it away to other people. It's not like an epiphany. It's just it's an organic occurrence that when you have really been poured into and your life has changed in a way that has made a real difference. You can't help but want that for other people, including your own family, and I think my message to my kids is, look, you don't have to walk through hell to get to heaven. That's not the message.

The message is you have been gifted with incredible things to love people well, and even though you might not feel that way or see it in yourself, you need to know at your core that that's why you were designed. And so trying to give that away in leadership too, that's a real special part to me is I want to be a good leader for my family and for my friends and for my team. And to do that well is to try to see the best in them even when they don't see it in themselves. That's what people did for me. That's really it, Greg. It's not anything special other than I just want to give away what I was given and am so thankful and humbled by people who would pour into me in a way that would be that transformative.

Dr. Greg Jones (25:19): That's beautiful. You coach baseball these days as well as engaging in a lot of service activities. What advice do you have for young people who are coming along who want to aspire to the kind of excellence of maybe winning a Cy Young or whatever the version of that is, a Grammy or whatever excellence would be? What advice do you have to younger people to be agents of hope in their own lives?

R.A. Dickey (25:48): One of the things that I think is real important is to not take yourself too seriously. I think that's in our culture these days, especially with young people, they're grown in a way, especially if you're... I'll just give you an example. In the travel baseball world, their identity and their worth is so tied up in their performance as a baseball player, and so for me, it's trying to help kids see their worth and that it's the overflow of understanding who you are Authentically is that you're going to want to get the most out of the gifts that you're given, right?

If you understand the first piece, the foundational piece, that you have value and you have worth, and you have dignity, and you have all these things inside you that God has meant for you to cultivate, grow, and give away. If I can help a child see that early, not only will they be a more healthy human being, they'll be eons better than they ever would be otherwise as a baseball player, if they grasp that component. And you work, it says work as if you're working for the Lord and not for man. If I can teach a child to do that because they know that they are fearfully and wonderfully made, then man, that's it there.

Dr. Greg Jones (27:03): I think of that sense of grace and being beloved. It can come alongside that sense of excellence. R.A. Dickey, you have had an extraordinary life, happy birthday on your 50th birthday.

R.A. Dickey (27:14): Thank you.

Dr. Greg Jones (27:15): And we thank you for your honesty, your candor. The subtitle is My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, your sense of truthfulness, authenticity, and your palpable love and sense of hope. You are an agent of hope and we celebrate you and honor you, and thank you for being with us today.

R.A. Dickey (27:33): What a great birthday present. Thank you very much.

Dr. Greg Jones (27:41): Thank you for participating in this conversation with The Hope People. Our aim is to inspire you to become an agent of hope yourself and to help us cultivate a sense of well-being for all. To join our mission and learn more about this show, visit thehopepeoplepodcast.com. If you enjoyed this conversation, remember to rate and review wherever you get your audio content.