After graduating from Norman High School (Oklahoma) in 1972, I was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in the third round of the MLB draft. Prior to the MLB draft, I had signed a full baseball scholarship with the University of Oklahoma. Consequently, I had to decide to either sign with the Brewers and play professional baseball or decline their offer and play college baseball at the University of Oklahoma.

I was a good student, but I wanted to play baseball, and I was afraid that if I played college baseball that I would sacrifice academics in favor of baseball and end up wasting my scholarship with a second-rate education. I promised my parents that if they let me sign with the Brewers, that I would get my college degree when I finished playing professional baseball. I signed with the Brewers and began an eight-year journey chasing my dream to play in the Major Leagues.

In 1974, I played for the Brewer’s AA team in the Texas League. April 8th of that same year, Hank Aaron crushed his record setting 715th home run off Dodger’s pitcher Al Downing, breaking Babe Ruth’s record that had stood for 39 years! When the season was over, I received a telephone call from my father telling me that I had been traded to the Atlanta Braves for Hank Aaron. He had heard the news from his cousin in Illinois, who had heard it on the radio. A week later, I received a letter from the Brewers advising me that Davey May and I had been traded to the Atlanta Braves for Hank Aaron.

I went on to play five years in the Braves’ organization, 2 ½ years in AA Savannah, GA and 2 ½ years in AAA Richmond, VA. I guess it was a touch of irony that after Hank Aaron retired, the Braves hired him as their Executive Director of Player Development, which meant that he was my boss the last three years of my baseball career.

After Hank Aaron passed away on January 22, 2021, I began to receive telephone calls from reporters asking me questions about how it felt to be traded for Hank Aaron. To be honest, I never thought about it that much. Obviously, I was honored to be part of a trade for a Hall of Fame ball player, and it was a good barroom trivia question that could win you a beer; however, I never considered it one of my personal achievements. In fact, I was more likely to brag about eating a 72 oz steak with four side dishes in an hour at Big Tex Steak House in Amarillo, TX than I was about being traded for Hank Aaron.

After eight years of riding buses, eating KFC, and drinking lots of beer in the minor leagues, which included three seasons of winter league baseball in Mexico, Venezuela, and Dominican Republic, I retired from professional baseball. As I promised my parents, I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1981 with a degree in Petroleum Land Management and worked in the oil & gas exploration business for thirty-nine years.

I retired from the oil and gas business in 2020 and my wife and I moved to Sandestin, where we are living happily ever after. I keep myself busy playing golf and writing stories on Substack (substack.com/@rogerbeachbum) while my wife, Jaime, volunteers her time with our neighborhood HOA and SOA’s Architectural Review Board (obviously, she never read How to Make Friends and Influence People).

Although I never got to enjoy my cup of coffee in the Big Leagues, I can look myself in the mirror and know that I gave it my best shot. My advice to young kids: chase your dream and give it your best shot, because you don’t ever want to be the person that looks back on his life and says, “I could’ve done that.”