Remember being in school and how much fun you used to have with your substitute teacher, playing games, laughing all day, and trying to frustrate the sub into quitting! Well imagine if 1 day, instead of your teacher walking into the room, a baseball player was there instead!
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Former outfielder Chris Swauger of the Springfield Cardinals, a minor league team for the St. Louis Cardinals, used to work as a substitute teacher during the off season. Minor league baseball players don’t always get the paychecks their Major League counterparts pull in. That’s why most have to work 9-to-5 jobs just to make ends meet! Minor league baseball players typically earn $1,100 a month in short-season leagues to $2,150 a month for Triple-A. But remember, most seasons last from 3 months to 6 months!
“You don’t get paid in the off season, and that leads to some odd jobs,” Swauger said. “I worked at Dick’s Sporting Goods last year—they give really good discounts. My first year, I had a paid internship at the University of Tampa, which was great.” He isn’t the only one to work unique jobs during the off season; even many baseball legends have had their fair share of experiences.
Stan Musial, a three-time World Series winner and three-time National League most valuable player for the St. Louis Cardinals, used to sell Christmas trees from a parking lot alongside some of his team mates. Roy Campanella, three-time MVP winner for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s, owned and operated a Harlem liquor store throughout his playing career.
Probably one of the creepiest off-season jobs belonged to Richie Hebner, a shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late 1960s. He worked as a gravedigger at a cemetery in Massachusetts. These stories are a humble reminder of what many sports players used to go through before they hit the major leagues and before the days of million-dollar contracts