John Jaso knew he needed to retire, so he began looking for sailboats. It was the 2017 season, and Jaso, the Pittsburgh Pirates’ first baseman, would spend his downtime at residence shopping on boat web sites. And when the Pirates visited a workforce close to a physique of water, he would wander the marinas and picture himself on the open water.
One June morning in Baltimore, earlier than a 7:10 p.m. first pitch in opposition to the Orioles, Jaso rented a automotive and drove to Annapolis, Md. There, he discovered the boat he’d been in search of: a 2014 Jeanneau 44 DS. He had it surveyed, purchased it and had it shipped to his low season residence in St. Petersburg, Fla. He made it again to the stadium in time to go 2 for 4 with an R.B.I.
Four months later, when the Pirates’ season ended with out a playoff berth, a handful of reporters wandered over to Jaso’s locker and requested him what his plans had been. He had reached the top of his two-year, $8 million cope with the workforce and was set to turn into a free agent. He informed them that his subsequent vacation spot can be someplace within the Caribbean. He was retiring.
“I have a sailboat,” he mentioned, “so I just want to sail away.”
Five years later, as pitchers and catchers started flooding into spring coaching camps in Arizona and Florida on Monday, Jaso, the final catcher to have caught a excellent recreation, has no regrets about having sailed off into the sundown. “Sometimes I’ll just be out on the boat bobbing in the water, not sailing or even fishing, and I’ll think to myself: ‘There’s nowhere else on the planet I’d rather be than right here,’” he mentioned. “It’s been the perfect fit for who I am.”
Jaso’s baseball journey was by no means fairly pretty much as good a match. Tampa Bay chosen him within the twelfth spherical of the 2003 draft, and he made it to the majors close to the top of the 2008 season. In his nine-year profession, he was traded 3 times and switched to first base from catcher after sustaining a number of concussions. But he had loads of highlights too: He caught Félix Hernández’s 2012 excellent recreation for the Seattle Mariners — there hasn’t been one in M.L.B. since — and hit for the primary cycle in PNC Park historical past when he was with Pittsburgh in 2016. His lengthy dreadlocks towards the top of his profession made him virtually immediately recognizable. And he pulled in profession earnings of greater than $17 million, in accordance to Spotrac.
But he discovered the M.L.B. life to be unfulfilling in some surprising methods. “Baseball set me up for life,” he mentioned. “I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me. Even when I retired, people said: ‘You might be walking away from millions of dollars!’ But I’d already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?”
Boating stuffed the void in his life. He familiarized himself with each foot of the ship. He took a class for diesel motor mechanics and put in photo voltaic panels and a wind generator. He devoured hours of YouTube movies concerning the electronics and made positive he knew what each wire did. “If anything goes wrong in the open ocean,” he mentioned, “I’m the only one out there to fix it.”
All that was left to do: Learn how to sail.
He discovered an advert for a sundown tour on Craigslist and emailed the captain, providing a few hundred bucks for a crash course in commanding a boat. After a few hours, he felt snug sufficient to go it alone. “It was like learning to hit a fastball and lay off a slider,” he mentioned. “You can hear coaches talk about it all day, but you’ll only learn how to do it if you face it in a game.”
Jaso named his boat Roaming Rose and began taking day journeys into the Gulf of Mexico in early 2018. One day that spring, he was working on his boat when he was struck with a sudden and unusual sensation. “I thought, something feels really weird right now,” he mentioned. “Like I was forgetting something. And then it hit me: I should have been in spring training. I started laughing because I realized: I didn’t miss it at all.”
He took his first large voyage a few weeks later. He sailed south to Key West and stayed on the boat for 3 weeks earlier than departing for the Abaco Islands within the northern Bahamas, anchoring down in a protected bay for the higher a part of a month. He took off when he heard about a main storm making its means throughout the Atlantic. He prevented many of the winds and rain on the five-day sail residence, however on the ultimate night time, he mentioned he encountered violent winds and lightning.
On the deck, he saved one hand on the wheel and one on his go bag. His life preserver was strapped on tight in case he was thrown overboard. He watched the lightning marble the sky and felt its surges shake the boat. He alerted the Coast Guard to his place and referred to as his brother as a backup. After a few hours of white-knuckling, he was again on dry land.
“In the moment, you’re terrified, and you want to be as far away from danger as possible,” he mentioned. “But once it’s over, you appreciate where you’re at more. There’s this euphoria that comes over you when the storm clouds part. It’s like holding your breath underwater and then coming back up to the surface and taking that first gulp of air.”
When Jaso described the expertise to Fernando Perez, a pal and former teammate, Perez wasn’t stunned within the slightest. “Playing professional baseball is a kind of drug,” mentioned Perez, who’s now a video analyst with the San Francisco Giants. “When you retire, you have to find another high. The drug that John found was being in the middle of nowhere and keeping himself alive. That first storm didn’t scare him away. He liked getting caught in it.”
For the primary two years after retirement, Jaso spent about six months of the 12 months on his boat. For the remainder, he was primarily based in St. Petersburg. Although he mentioned he doesn’t comply with baseball anymore, he does strive to catch a recreation or two yearly. In 2018, throughout a Rays win over the Boston Red Sox, he tried to go down to the dugout to say whats up to some former teammates. But an usher noticed his tie-dyed, sleeveless T-shirt and his lack of a ticket and waved him back up to a budget seats. Eventually, one other usher acknowledged him and let him down.
He has additionally taken a number of journeys to Europe, discovering a ardour for exploring his father’s ancestral land within the Basque Country of northern Spain. And he has pushed a camper van round Australia and Indonesia. But the boat has been his largest pleasure. “I want my life to be simple, and it doesn’t get simpler than being on a sailboat,” he mentioned. “You treat the boat right, and she treats you right. That’s all there is to it.”
Before the pandemic, he docked Roaming Rose in Turks and Caicos. With journey restrictions, it was caught there for nearly two years. When he was cleared to come again and gather the boat in 2022, he introduced alongside his girlfriend, Jayden Davila, for a three-month sail across the Caribbean. They docked within the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
“John is a pretty peaceful person in general,” Davila mentioned. “But there’s another level of peace and happiness for him when he’s on the boat. Even when there are issues — and something is always going wrong — he liked dealing with it. When things are calm, sometimes he’ll just randomly grab his guitar and start playing. It’s really a beautiful existence for him out there.”
Jaso nonetheless lives primarily in St. Petersburg, the place he manages some funding properties. But he’s hardly ever in a single place for lengthy. This winter, he’s been snowboarding in Colorado and Wyoming. By the spring, he’ll be again on the boat.
“When you’re sailing, you’re going back to something primitive,” he mentioned. “You’re removing yourself from the material world — this concrete, electronic world. And you’re returning to this sense of wonder. It’s the same sense you get when you’re holding a newborn baby, looking into their eyes, and feeling the world disappear around you.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we all come from the same place. When you’re out there on the water, you remember.”
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