Chapter Three

This chapter talks about how Josh's professional baseball career started out in the minor leagues. The minor league team that he played on was a rookie single A team called the Princeton Devil Rays who are in the Appalachian League. Josh and his parents packed their things and moved down to Princeton where Josh's team was located. This new transition allowed Josh's parents to attend all of his games, and then on away games, they would travel with the team and stay at the same hotel as the team. He would try to spend as much time with his parents as possible during times when he was not playing baseball.

He soon found out that he would get a signing bonus which would be $3.96 million. This was a record for a number-one pick. Plus, he and everyone on the team would be payed $212 a week and would be given twenty dollars a day for meal money. One guy on his team that he became pretty good friends with was named Carl Crawford. Crawford is now an all-star left fielder with the Tampa Bay Rays. Josh would normally sit at a table with him when the team stopped at a Wendy's or McDonald's to eat. On one particular stop at Wendy's, Josh noticed a tattoo of a Rottweiler's face on Carl's arm. Josh told Carl that he too had been thinking of getting a tattoo, but he did not think his parents would like it if he did. Carl responded by telling Josh he was an adult now and that he could make his own decisions now. After that talk, they just laughed and changed the subject.

Later that summer, during a night game at Hunnicutt field in Princeton, there was a thunderstorm moving in from the west. As the manager walked out to the mound to make a pitching change, Josh was in center field like normal, and he noticed the clouds were traveling towards him. Josh kept watching, and then a cloud formation appeared that looked like a demon's face that gave him chills the rest of the game. After the game, he was back in his room and noticed a similar formation that he saw in the clouds on his television set. He then saw an image which he believed was Jesus reaching his arms out to him, and that was when he realized all of these events were connected and meant something important. Josh then started to think about his relationship with Jesus and wondered if it needed to become stronger. He believed in God, but was not extremely religious.

About halfway through the summer, he was transferred to play for a higher ranked A ball team called the Hudson Valley Renegades. This team was in the late stages of a pennant race in the New York-Penn League. The Renegades believed that Josh's parents might become a distraction to him so they had a booster family house Josh. Normally, these families were boosters for the team, and they usually housed two to three players at a time. Josh and his parents did not like this very well, but they had to deal with it. By the end of the season, Josh was awarded the Class A Player of the Year and also got to play in a Futures All-Star game at Turner Field in Atlanta the day before the Major League All-Star game.