How were you received by the players in Toronto given your reputation as an author?

It was a 50/50 split. There was a bunch of great guys on the team, class acts. That was a really wonderful team as far as all the upscale personalities. Halladay was fantastic — he didn’t speak much but when he did he was always classy, and you just had a bunch of guys that were really cool. Vernon Wells, the year that I got there, was just getting flogged by the media, because there’s an example of a guy who signed a big contract, he’s got a lot of money but he’s not producing. He did a lot of charity work and he was very active and he was a good guy.

But then you had guys that were jackasses. And every team has them. These are the guys that look at baseball as a religious thing, and you never break the code. And nobody knows where the code came from, but you just can’t break it. So here comes Dirk Hayhurst, fringy guy on a search for meaning and purpose and maybe big-league fame if I could get it, and I’m just writing down stories and asking big, uncomfortable questions about the validity of our existence as ballplayers, and guys were not happy about that. And as long as you’re playing well, they’re not going to call you out about it, and I was pitching well. But then I got hurt and the gloves came off, and it was like, “Dirk, you need to apologize to the team. You need to bring everybody together and tell them you’re out of line for what you’re doing.”