These days Blue Jays’ ace Mark Buehrle is a much-respected veteran with 15 years of MLB experience under his belt. Hard to picture him, then, as a tormented kid being subjected to the kind of rookie initiation you’d think would have been rare at most when he started his career with the White Sox in 2000 (it wasn’t) and which you’d hope is totally gone from the game today (it isn’t).
But that’s how it was for a then- 21-year-old Mark Buehrle. Things are different now. Shi Davidi met up with Buehrle in Dunedin to get the full story on how that rookie experience shaped the kind of veteran Beuhrle has become.
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Here are the top-three things we learned from the story.
Buehrle holds a grudge: At a Sox players and alumni event a full 10 years after Buehrle was a rookie, he finally told off the by-then-retired pitcher who most loved to torment him.
Buehrle classes the kids up: As part of his self-imposed duty to help rookies get acclimated to big-league life—and, partly, to apologize for any initiation trouble they’ve had to endure—Buehrle takes all Jays rookies to a tailor in New York to get them a brand-new suit or two.
Hierarchy is everything in baseball: Even a guy like Buehrle, who says he hated what he had to go through as a rookie, still respects the cast-in-stone hierarchical structure of a baseball clubhouse, which mandates that rookies essentially be seen and not heard and treat older players with respect (in the form of fetching them drinks, obviously, and who knows what other humiliations minor and major).
