Mayhap You’ve Never Heard of Terry Doyle…

Only the most thorough readers who also are possessed of near-photographic memory will recognize Terry Doyle as a name from Señor Cistulli’s Daily Notes from yesterday. You might also recognize his name if you are a devout White Sox fan — perhaps you are the very fan that created Doyle’s Wikipedia page.

For the many faceless…

As part of my vast and unfocused preparations for fantasy baseball, I search for minor league leaders in certain “advanced stat” categories and then add selections from those leaders to my various web-based watchlists. I’d been watch-listing John Terry Doyle since very early in the 2012 season because of his great K:BB ratios and consistently above average GB%. Pitchers like that tend to be undervalued in fantasy, so I know that I can generally pick them up in deeper leagues without a hassle should they get called to the majors. Even then, however, Doyle was a borderline guy for me: he was 26 and had never pitched in the Majors, and generally I discount a guy’s value if he’s that old, unless he’s really crushing the competition. Doyle was very good, but not dominant.

In this case, I had added Doyle to a watchlists for one of my CBS leagues. On June 13, CBS’s news alerts informed me that the White Sox had released Doyle, but not why. I figured that it had something to do with a contract, or personal reasons, and left him on my watchlist in case some other team would pick him off the scrap heap and give him a shot in the majors.

Turns out, the White Sox were doing him a favor, releasing him so he could take an offer to play in Japan for more guaranteed money. But I didn’t know that until yesterday, when I saw his name on the aforementioned SCOUT leaderboards for the International League (AAA) and became curious.

Now I know (thanks largely to this article by Daniel Paulling) that Doyle had been substitute teaching in the off-season, that he finished his college degree at Boston College because he was concerned that dermatitis — dermatitis! — might derail his baseball career, that he wants to teach calculus after this whole baseball thing is over — that he is sort of just waiting for this whole baseball thing to be over:

“Ten or fifteen years from now, hopefully my baseball career would be over,” he said, “and I’ll join the workforce. I always wanted to get into teaching. Hopefully, I can go help out some kids.”

I now know that John Terry Doyle has a heart and a brain.