Dansby Swanson, the No. 1 overall pick of the 2015 MLB Draft. (AP Photo)

In a post to his blog, former Blue Jays and Padres reliever Dirk Hayhurst offers advice to the newly drafted young ballplayers about to set off on professional careers. Hayhurst, who has also authored four books about a baseball career mostly spent as a minor league journeyman, writes that players need to learn to to value themselves beyond what they do or don’t do on the field despite the seemingly all-encompassing baseball bubble in which they will soon reside:

On good days you’ll feel great about yourself. On bad days you’ll be mad at yourself. Over time you won’t be able to separate yourself—the player—from yourself—the person. If you have more good days than bad, you’ll think you’re awesome. If more bad than good, you’ll think yourself a failure. It’s a trap, kid. It’s a trap….

No one is saying you can’t enjoy the good days—you totally should. But you’re not an awesome person because you played well, or play at all, and you don’t suck at life because you stunk today. Simply put; you get paid to play a kid’s game, and somedays the ball will bounce in your favor and others it won’t. All you can do is train to give yourself more chances at success than the standard distribution calls for. What happens after that is just an outcome, not a definition of your worth.

This is hard to remember. Mainly because you’ll be in a locker room of competitive personalities, happy to act like they’re awesome just because they got drafted higher, from a better school, or had a good day, week, or season. Let them act. Confidence and arrogance are always on display in this new world, and they are both volatile stocks. You don’t don’t have to display yours like peacock feathers, and you don’t have to let it waiver like many of your teammates will.

The whole post is worth reading, and Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels — which covers many of the same themes in much greater depths — is one of the best books ever written about life in the minor leagues.

Though playing Major League Baseball is a glamorous job, the minor league experience for most players is far from that. Guys cram into tiny apartments and eat tons of fast food and spend lots of time piled into buses for long road trips late at night, only to have their daily productivity tracked and measured and analyzed with exacting and devastating precision. The successful athletes are often those best wired to filter out the noise and the distractions, but not every young ballplayer can. And the odds of longterm big-league success, even for a top pick, are pretty long.

Hayhurst knows about all that better than almost anyone, so he’s in a good spot to offer advice on the journey.

(Thanks to Just a Bit Outside for calling our attention to this story.)