Indianapolis
It had been 619 days without baseball at Victory Field, but outfielder Chris Sharpe felt calmer than he expected for the Indianapolis Indians’ May 11 home opener. He chalks it up to the day job he took up after his season was abruptly canceled last year: teaching 10-year-olds baseball in his home state of Massachusetts.
“The simplicity of teaching young kids for the first time helped me backtrack and dumb things down, which I realized had improved my mental game,” says the 24-year-old. From July 2020 to March 2021, he spent four afternoons a week working at Route 2 Athletics in Arlington, Mass. “It gave me something to do, and of course, it also gave me some money to make it through the hard year,” he says.
Minor-league baseball is the raw talent pool for the great American pastime, but it has never been an easy job, nor a high-paying one for most players. The pandemic was especially hard on minor leaguers. From March 2020, when their spring training shut down, until now, with their new season finally under way, players did their best to navigate the pandemic.
Like many Americans, their paths included joining the gig economy, filing for unemployment, collecting stimulus checks, moving back home and dealing with intense uncertainty—while also pushing to stay in game shape.
