The Baseball Player Who Dropped Out of Sight

Although this story contains actual things from the world in which we live, including towns, places, and actual events, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any real person. The events depicted are entirely the product of my imagination.

FAYETTEVILLE, AR— The wording might be a little different, but the essence of the question is the same, whether it comes from somebody who knew him in little league, high school, college, or the Major Leagues— a group that includes teammates, coaches and professional scouts.

“Do you know where he is?”

Many years after he played in his last game at the age of 29, walking away from the game he once loved because of complex and mixed emotions, Greg Hayes has seemingly fulfilled a goal of making himself as invisible as possible when he was done playing the game.

“He once told me, ‘When I get done with sports, you will probably never see me or hear of me again,’” said one former teammate.

A desire to talk with Hayes, and attempt to find out what his life has been like after baseball and football, was unsuccessful. Interview requests, submitted through a variety of individuals, were either ignored or dismissed. Sources did confirm that he lives northwest of Fayetteville, about 40 minutes away from where he once played the game, but there are no property records listed in his name on file. He has been married since 1994 and he and his wife have two sons.

Despite the proximity to the campus, his coaches and former teammates there have not talked with or seen him for some time.

“That’s sad for me,” one coach said. “I’ve tried to reach out and leave messages but I don’t know if they are being heard or not. At one point I talked to his parents a while back. I always had a soft spot in my heart for him. I love him and I love what he has done for our program. All the memories and thoughts I have of him are positive.”

The coach is not the only one who feels that way. Interviews with those former teammates going back to high school, coaches, and professional scouts painted the picture of a player — who despite possessing premier talent — just could not escape the reality that he could not be perfect, eventually reaching the point that he couldn’t sleep and would often inflict pain on himself as a form of punishment when he failed to perform up to his own expectations.

“I honestly think it rattled him,” said one of his former professional teammates. “That happens all the time. It’s rattled me. I’m not immune to this social anxiety thing. It’s tough … I think he is probably happy wherever he is, not having to worry about getting a hit or making a play. I never played with another teammate that was so hard on himself. I think he just got to where he had enough of it.”

From a young age, sports were the focus of Hayes’ life. Born in Texas, his family moved to Arkansas when he was 12 and again when he was 15. By four, Hayes was playing t-ball and hitting the ball so hard it would roll past the kids in the outfield, a home run on almost every at bat. As he got older and grew stronger, legend had it that his father reportedly kept a ball which the kid literally had knocked the cover off. When he had to answer a question in grade school about what he wanted to do when he grew up, he answered, “play football and baseball.” When the teacher said he needed a backup plan, the kid didn’t have one.

Retired high school baseball coach Rob Scott also grew up in Texas playing baseball. A left-handed pitcher, he reached Triple A with the Astros and Rangers before his career stalled. He moved back home after his father had some health problems, and some friends asked if he could fill in as an umpire for a youth league. That was the first time Scott saw Greg Hayes play.

“I was standing behind the pitcher’s mound calling balls and strikes,” Scott recalls, the memory as fresh as if happened last month instead of three decades ago. “A ball was hit in the hole at shortstop, and this kid made a major-league play. Then the kid got to the plate and hit a ball over the scoreboard in left field. Nobody had ever done that before.”

“I thought he might be the best player at his age in America. You couldn’t really be any better than he was. He looked out of place because he was so much better than everybody else.”

Greg Hayes was 12 at the time.

By the time he became a senior in high school, Scott was the local high school’s coach. Hayes had already helped the school win a state championship as a sophomore and the team won again two years later.

“His freshman year, he batted cleanup. The first game of the season, he hit two scorching line drives directly to the left fielder that were caught. On his third at bat, I watched him take two balls and run the count to 2–0. He hit the next pitch about 420 feet into the parking lot beyond the center field wall. He was 15 years old. I think he hit well over .500 that year and his on-base percentage had to be .600 or .650. It was unreal. He made the Freshman All-State Team in 1983.”

At least one scout noticed. Dale Carpenter, now with the Pirates, was the area scout for the Chicago White Sox in the Houston area at the time. He wasn’t certain Hayes’ skills projected as a major-league third baseman but told Coach Scott the White Sox would draft him in the second or third round and give him a $250,000 signing bonus if Hayes would agree to sign and become an outfielder — a position he hadn’t played since little league.

The three — Carpenter, Scott, and Hayes — met for breakfast one morning when the team was playing in the College Station area.

“I told him, ‘Dale, I can tell you right now you are going to ask him and he is going to look at you and say no’,” Scott said. “He doesn’t talk in sentences. I never heard his voice until the middle of the season when I went out to third base one day at practice and asked him a question. I just thought he was an introverted type of guy.”

“Dale asked him that question and Greg just said, ‘No thanks’ and kept eating. Doug started laughing because that was what I had told him Greg was going to say. Just like that, Greg turned down a $250,000 signing bonus, because he didn’t want to play in the outfield.”

Whether that word got around the scouting community or not, Coach Scott didn’t know, but the draft came and went in 1986, through all 50 rounds, with no team selecting high school senior Greg Hayes, even though he had made several All-State Teams, hit close to .500 and hit 17 homeruns in only forty high school games. Scott, who had played at Texas, tried to interest his former coach in Hayes but was told the team had other plans. Scott also suspected the fact that Hayes was also a very good football player and had been offered scholarships by several top-tier college football programs worked against him in the baseball draft.

“A major league team is not going to spend a draft pick on a player that has other options or is a really good student, and Greg was in both categories. It seems crazy, but it actually works against you.”

Later that summer, a rival coach agreed to come see Hayes play during a tournament in Fort Worth. Jeff Watson was an assistant at Arkansas at the time, and is now the head coach at Wisconsin.

Watson remembered having seen Hayes the year before at a high school showcase but this time he was more focused on watching him.

“He was a player you had to see a couple of times to understand what his true value was to a team,” Watson said. “The more I saw him over the course of that week the more I knew he was a really good player who could do a lot of different things. When he was at bat or had a ball hit to him, you would walk away thinking, ‘that’s the best player on the field.’”

Watson signed Hayes to a scholarship, and over the course of the next four years, Hayes blossomed into a first-round draft pick and a player who as a senior led the school to the College World Series. As a senior he hit .415 with 27 homers and 95 RBI in 70 games.

“The year he had was one of the best I have ever seen,” Watson said. “He was always very private and quiet, but when it came time to play he was always ready, he always had the right frame of mind. He was just one of those kids who went about his business in his own way.

“He was very disciplined off the field and very regimented in what he ate. He was great student and never skipped a class. He just marched to his own drum. But all of his teammates would probably tell you he was the best player they ever played with.”

Hayes was also was smart. He had a lot of interest in history and literature and majored in those subjects at Arkansas and earned all-conference academic honors for three consecutive years.

Mike Rogers had watched Hayes as an assistant coach at Texas Tech and as an opposing manager in the summer Cape Cod League before becoming an area scout for the Oakland A’s during Hayes’ junior year at Arkansas.

“He was always a real interesting kid to me,” Rogers said. “Looking back, he was just so incredibly disciplined in everything that he did. He was so focused and driven. Everything he did was just so precise — how he took batting practice, how he fielded ground balls. It was like he was already a veteran major-leaguer in his routine and he was still in college.

“Off the field he was different. I don’t think he engaged a lot socially. When the other players would go out, he would stay in and read books. These were the days before smart phones and tablets and video games, and on road trips when the other players were playing cards on the bus or the plane or whatever, he was either studying or reading; he brought his school books with him on the road. The other players would tease him and he would just grin. He was very serious about his studies.”

“He didn’t date a lot. He was the kind of kid who either had a very serious girlfriend or he didn’t date at all, there was no in between. He didn’t have time to mess around. He chose his friends very carefully. He was a really cool guy but he was definitely different, with different interests.”

“As a scout a big part of our responsibility is to try to assess makeup and how driven a certain player may be, with the ultimate goal to be a good major-league player. I couldn’t have had more confidence that he was that type of guy. He was so driven, so focused.”

“Kind of looking back the one question maybe I ask myself was how much fun he was having on the field. For instance, he would hit a 400-foot home run and never smile — the expression on his face would never change. He didn’t outwardly appear to get much joy out of being successful. It was like it was expected. On the other hand, when he would strike out or make an error — which were rare — every once in a while this other side of him would come out, sometimes violently. Let’s just say he broke a few helmets in his time and I had to talk with him about controlling that.

Rogers convinced the A’s to use the 15th overall selection in the 1991 draft on Hayes, an unusually high spot to draft a college senior but that was how much Rogers believed in Hayes’ ability.

Hayes left northwest Arkansas for life in the minor leagues, with the promise of a successful major-league career on the horizon. It took less than two seasons, and just 171 games spread across four levels of the minors, before Hayes found himself in Oakland, making his debut for the A’s on September 3, 1993 against Baltimore. His first starting assignment at third base came two days later.

All of those who had been part of his journey, from Scott to Carpenter, Watson to Rogers and countless others, expected it would be just a matter of time before Hayes established himself as a star at that level as well.

None knew, however, the seriousness of Hayes’ personal anguish that would force him from the game only five years later.

Kevin Neil was the A’s shortstop on September 5, 1993, the day Greg Hayes made his Major League debut at third base for the A’s, the man who would be the closest to Hayes on the field for the next four seasons. He saw Hayes talent, but he wonders now about what he didn’t see.

“I have nothing but fond memories of playing with Greg and knowing him,” Neil said. “He was very quiet, an introverted sort of guy that took baseball very seriously. I tell a story pretty often about how he would be in the weight room maybe a half hour before a game. He would be alone and he would be going through the motions — slowly and methodically— of hitting a baseball or fielding a ground ball, but with no bat or glove. He had his eyes closed the entire time, like some kind of Zen thing.”

“I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘You have to visualize it before you do it; if you are going to drive the ball or make great plays you have to see yourself doing it before you do it.’ I had never seen that before and have never seen it since.”

Neil said neither he nor his teammates ever saw indications that Hayes was struggling with social anxiety issues, but heard about it a few years later.

“Baseball is an anxiety producing game with a lot of failure,” Neil said. “Getting a hit three times out of ten at bats (a .300 batting average) might win you a batting title. But in every other profession failing seven times out of ten is failing. Every player kind of deals with that performance anxiety, and that failure, differently. In his case I think it was probably more difficult for him than others to deal with that.”

“We kind of understood that he was quiet and introverted and went about his business in a professional way. Players kind of get tunnel vision, particularly during the season. You are concerned with your own performance. That was part of the reason even his teammates didn’t see exactly what he was going through.”

People saw the broken fingers on his right hand, injured while playing defense in 1994 and 1995, and the toe he fractured while diving for a ball. They also saw the torn ligament in a finger hurt while batting in the ’95 season.

In one of his infrequent interviews, Hayes discussed the injuries with a reporter during spring training in 1996. “I don’t look at it as I’m unlucky or that this is unfortunate, I look at it as a test,” Hayes was quoted as saying. “There are things that happen to you — whether it’s in your profession or outside of your profession. Things happen for a reason and it’s not for me to analyze it and find out a reason why.”

“Sometimes it’s not for you to figure out, you’re not necessarily supposed to know everything.”

Hayes overcame those injuries and had the best year of his career in 1996— hitting 32 homers and driving in 107 runs as he played 158 games — and hopes were high for his continued success in 1997.

Instead, Hayes’ power numbers dropped in 1997, and his average tumbled to .243. On the night of July 30, he struck out for the 100th time, prompting him to take out his frustration on a dugout wall. The result was a season-ending broken wrist.

Needing to cut salary that winter, the A’s traded Hayes to the Brewers, who at the time only saw a third baseman with power who should have been approaching his prime. But they didn’t know about the underlying issues.

One possible warning sign came from an A’s coach on the day of the trade. “One of the things that people don’t really see is how he internalizes so much. He doesn’t let it out, but he’s a player who cares a great deal about his performance, to the point where it gets to him.”

“I wish he would let go and enjoy how good he is. But for whatever reason, he can’t do it.”

It turned out Hayes couldn’t do it in Milwaukee either, where his anxiety problems led him to twice being placed on the disabled list during the 1998 season.

“It was never brought to our attention, and any inside information we had from a medical standpoint, it was never revealed,” said a Brewers front office insider. “It was something we didn’t have any history with. Unfortunately he was dealing with some demons that were something he could not overcome.”

On opening day, 1998, Hayes was in the Brewers lineup, playing third base and batting cleanup. In his second at bat, he launched a towering home run to left field and and was greeted with a standing ovation. But the transition to playing in a new city did not start off well.

He hit just .221 in April, with two homers and just 9 RBI in 65 at-bats and in May his average dropped to .212 in 45 at-bats. On May 30, he went on the disabled list. It was the beginning of the end.

An attempt to play again in June was aborted after only 10 days and Hayes went back on the DL. He missed all of July, and started a total of seven games the final two months of the season, most often appearing as a late-inning pinch-hitter.

“I thought he was a great guy, a great teammate,” one Brewer player said. “He had a great sense of humor. He liked talking about things besides baseball. When he did engage with you he wanted to talk about current events and history, things like that. He was one of the most well-read guys I ever met.”

“It was unfortunate to see the way baseball can kind of weigh on you. It does that to everyone over a 162 game season, but mentally it was very tough on him.”

Several teammates at Oakland and Milwaukee saw Hayes take it out on himself on the field when he thought he had failed or made a mistake.

“He had some things he would do on and off the field,” one teammate said. “On the field he would scrape his hands real hard on the clay and scratch himself. He would scratch his arms real bad with his fingernails, so deep sometimes it would draw blood. He was really grinding mentally with the expectation to go out and get a hit every time. That can weigh on you.”

“We didn’t know how to help him. All you could do was try to be a good friend and good teammate and hope he would come around.”

On the final day of the regular season in October, Hayes came to bat as a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the 12th inning. The Brewers were out of the playoff race. The game was meaningless. The first two pitches were outside. With the count 2–0, Hayes drove the next fastball deep into left-center, a missile that cleared the wall by a mere two feet. It was the kind of line drive in the gap his father used to love to see him hit when he was a kid.

He rounded the bases to a standing and cheering crowd that was happy to close out what had been a disappointing season (74–88 and just five games out of the NL Central basement) with a win. And although his teammates mobbed him at home plate, what none of them really noticed was that he wasn’t smiling.

He walked back into the dugout, and even though nobody knew it at that moment, completely away from baseball.

In November, Hayes was granted free agency. In January, 1999, the White Sox — the team that had originally wanted to draft him out of high school — announced they had invited Hayes to spring training to try and win a roster spot, but as spring training camps were opening in late February, the White Sox said he would not be reporting to their camp, and Hayes quickly slipped out of the limelight and the public eye.

In parts of six seasons, five with Oakland and one in Milwaukee, Hayes played in 836 games in his major-league career, compiling a .265 average with 110 homers and 395 RBI. By any comparison, it was a pretty good career, averaging more than 18 homers and 65 RBI per season, with the career best year in 1996, in which he hit 32 homers and drove in 107 runs. And what goes almost unnoticed is the fact that he won three straight Gold Gloves at third base from 1995–1997. In his six years in the majors, he earned an estimated $14.3 million.

But what he could never find, no matter how hard he tried, was a way to cope with failure, how to forget about striking out or committing an error. The game that came so easily to Hayes for the first 23 years of his life was the same, but the pressure of trying to succeed at the highest level was just something he could never escape, even though his numbers say that he did — in fact — succeed.

What Hayes couldn’t do was the one thing now he seemingly has managed to accomplish. In that one spring training interview back in 1996, he hinted at would he might do after baseball, when he said, “I prefer to be anonymous.”

“I never got the feeling he was defined by baseball at all,” teammate Neil said. “He was good at it, and I think he enjoyed it to an extent, but it wasn’t the only thing in his life. He was a lot different than your stereotypical baseball player.”

Of all the many people Hayes came into contact with because of baseball, one of the few who has continued to maintain a relationship with him the last few years is his former A’s teammate Kevin Neil. Their wives are friends, and Neil said he usually stays in touch that way.

“I give him space,” Neil said. “Unless you reach out to him he is not going to bother you. He has kids now, and he is just kind of doing his thing. I get a general idea of how he’s doing. I do want to pick up and get with him again. I guess life just moves on, and you get distracted with a lot of different things.”

“It’s not because I don’t think about him. I love him as a person and I love what he’s about. He’s a special person. I know how he feels about me and I think he knows how I feel about him. I’m protective of him because I care about him. He is a good soul.”

What Hayes has lost because of his desire to stay so hidden is the knowledge of how many people care about him, think and wonder about him, and want to be reassured that he is doing OK.

A few years back, Hayes and all his teammates were invited back to the school’s 30th reunion to honor the 1989 championship team during the halftime of a football game against Alabama, but he did not show up. He didn’t even respond to the invitation. The fact that he lives a half-hour away from campus made it all the more strange. But people have learned over the years that this is just the way it is with Greg Hayes.

“I am very anxious to make contact with him,” his former college coach Watson said. “He’s got the world in his hands down there. People love him and know him on a first-name basis. He’s got a home there. I would love for him to go and talk to the team, to just be around. They need him, and although he might not realize it, I think he might need them a little bit too.”

Watson, the man who recruited him out of high school and coached and mentored him in college, is not surprised that Hayes has dropped out of sight but — like all of those who spent time around him — hopes that solitude has finally brought him peace.

Glen Hines is the author of six books, including the recently published Welcome to the Machine, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing on sports, the outdoors, military service, and the bright and dark sides of American culture has been featured in Sports Illustrated, The Concussion Legacy Foundation, Task and Purpose, The Human Development Project, Kirkus Book Reviews, and elsewhere. Kirkus Reviews recently called Welcome to the Machine “An often-compelling examination of a sport’s sins from a man with an insider’s view.” He was inducted into the Authors Guild in 2022.