Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
When you're cardinal, you can't go anywhere without people talking about baseball.
And that's great, but I'm also a husband, I'm a father, I'm a believer in Jesus.
Yet it was all about baseball all the time.
And now I want people to see me when my career is over as a person, as a husband, father,
those things because those are what are really important.
Welcome to the Up Your Average Podcast.
Where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life.
So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Avenue.
Welcome to another week of Up Your Average.
We've pre-recorded this one, and Doug and I have a some travel and some training going on
here in the next few days.
And we're gonna be absent Friday.
But we thought you'd enjoy this conversation with Major League Baseball pitcher Andy
Bennis as we're into the playoff season of baseball.
We just wanted to cheer you on with some thoughts and some encouragement and leadership
principles from
Andy Bennis.
So sit back, relax, and enjoy the time with Andy.
And as always, we appreciate you hanging out with us.
Hey guys, it's my my pleasure to introduce Andy Bennis.
Andy's going to join us for a conversation.
And Keith, uh, looking forward to this and learning a little bit about Andy's journey.
So Andy, you were a pro baseball player, which most of us have played literally.
There's no hope that's ever going to happen.
That's that is.
a scarce thing, right?
We all max out at different times.
Some retire at like seven or eight and then some retire at I was thirty five, so it's very
blessed.
So so what it comes to my mind is Dave Portnoy's one bite pizza review.
Are you are you familiar with that?
No.
I so you Portnoy goes all over mostly the East Coast and ranks pizza and you can't get a
you can't really get a nine, I don't think, can you Caleb?
You can
You can get from one to eight and some change and if you give a nine or higher rank on a
pizza, that's a rookie thing.
So so what I'm thinking i is that you got a one to ten scale and so we're we're ranking
your skills from your own perspective as a high school athlete.
So th you played baseball, football, and basketball.
So rank each one of those uh with a numble between one and ten.
Well, I was yeah, I was a quarterback in football.
Okay.
And
so I asked.
As a high school player, yeah.
I was I was super young for my class, so I should have been a class below, but I would say
six to seven.
I was recruited to play in college.
Okay.
Football as a quarterback.
baseball, six to seven.
Okay.
Basketball, I was better in high school.
I might give myself a seven.
Okay.
Seven five.
So from Indiana.
So So none of those scores say you're gonna be a
Pro athlete.
Not at all.
Did you think that way when you're in high school or?
Not really.
I was thinking more about my girlfriend and true to an education.
And I didn't really until my senior year in high school, the Evansville baseball coach was
referee in a football game.
And I got, I was just getting smoked in the backfield.
And I kept getting up, and I'm like, tell my officer, you you gotta block that guy.
Come on, give me some time.
And he's like, that's my guy.
He was pretty fiery at the time.
And so I went to Evansville to play division one baseball.
I was our third pitcher on the high school pitching team.
I was our third guy.
Two guys were really good and I was okay.
Good record.
I was pitching against teams that weren't as good.
And then I also played football because it was division two.
And I played football because it was paying for most of my scholarship.
They had most of the money.
And so it wasn't until my junior year, into my sophomore year, that I started throwing
very hard.
I was eighty-five, eighty-six, and eighty-eight, eighty-nine.
I hit ninety for the first time in the summer.
And then the fall, I'm ninety-three.
In that in that interim, I've gotten married.
Um, Jennifer and I've gotten married.
And I'm thinking I was a pre-med undergrad.
We wouldn't have made it to medicine, but doing something that way.
And then in the spring, with my second start on a hundred and one, and all of a sudden,
it's like game on, because before that I had to kind of locate and pitch and everything.
And so
I went from being not even really looked at professionally, going to school, being
married, to being the first pick in the draft.
I'm on the Olympic team.
And then it was game on.
All of this in about 18 months.
In about 18 days.
Yeah, so I I'm what I'm thinking about, there's a book called The Tipping Point by Malcolm
Gladwell.
And so you said a couple things that kinda say that maybe that book isn't so so there he c
he's the one I think came up with the ten thousand hour rule that
If you do something 10,000 hours, you can be an expert or whatever.
But he also spent a lot of time in one of his writings talking about the um youngest
players are never the the pros because the oldest players are the best.
They get the most coaching attention and things like that.
So you you defied a lot of gravity.
Tell me this.
So it what comes to mind is what happened that you went from 85 to 101 because
That seems like some style change or something.
Everything was kind of the same, but I was just super young for my class.
And so I'm thankful that I was in the class I was because my wife wouldn't have started
dating me.
However, body maturity and just getting physically stronger, I had good mechanics and it
all came together.
I was strong in my lower half abs and I had a good delivery.
And so all of a sudden, man, a lot of it's what the good Lord gave you.
But
Most of it is, but it was like a lightning bolt and I just it was late.
I'm happy it was like that.
Uh most of the guys that are really good young, they're just more physically mature than
everybody else.
And so you never really know.
I'm six foot six and I went to Evansville, 195 pounds, and then I was like two thirty five
and really put together and just throwing really hard.
So I'm thankful that it that it worked out like that.
That's really cool.
We we spoke with um college coach Mark Rich a few weeks ago and we were talking about some
of the mental transition into high level college sports.
And what one of the things he pointed out was that these athletes that show up at the
University of Georgia or University of Miami, they're the they've been the best forever
from the time they were knee high.
So you didn't have that experience.
So you you brought I didn't have that experience.
I was playing football at Evansville.
So you know I wasn't like it.
Yes, I wasn't the George.
You brought some humility to your game, I guess.
I really did.
And uh you have to believe in what you do, but it wasn't really until after my junior
year, I'm gonna get drafted in the top five for sure.
Probably one.
And we went out to Arizona State and they were number one in the country and went out and
threw a shutout.
And I'm throwing ninety eight in the ninth inning.
To finish out the game.
And every one of their starters was drafted.
So they were really, really good.
And after that game, things kind of took a big turn because pitching and pitching against
Western Kentucky or, you know, Butler, not that Butler wasn't good, they were not Arizona
State.
And so that really elevated me.
And you have to believe in yourself, but I was also married.
I was young when I was getting drafted.
This is fourteen months into our marriage.
We found out that we were gonna have a little baby.
And so all of those things really helped ground me to put me in a position where with what
I was gonna have to deal with as a a Libyan, as a pro, and the expectation of greatness
being the first pick.
Griffith was the first pick before me.
And you had some Hall of Famers behind that.
And so
Being humble, understanding that it's God given and really trying to max that out is
important, but you also have to have that, I'm really good and I'm gonna show you.
Man, that's gotta be really humbling and it's it's hard to imagine you're eighteen or
nineteen, twenty, twenty and all these things are happening.
And you really don't know anything when you're twenty, really.
No, I didn't know.
I didn't know anything other than I threw hard and I was gonna be a San Diego Padre at
some point.
And then I was only in the minor leagues four months and I'm thrown into being a starter
in San Diego and I I was twenty-one.
The best part about that was there were all these guys that were between twenty-eight and
thirty-two that were thream guys, and they they did this to me.
They knew I was gonna be able to help them and they encouraged me.
There could have been animosity, all of that stuff.
They were really, really good to me and they helped me understand what it was like to be a
pro because it's humbling when you're the pitcher.
Sometimes you want to dig a hole behind the mound if you can, because it's going that bad.
And other times you want to stand up there, you feel like King Kong, right?
And so uh it there's a lot of this, but the key and one of the things they told me, we got
to kind of stay level.
And I think just my growing up in a small town really helped me to be in that position.
Boy, I was I went to a high school game in the last couple of years and watched somebody
play and and and I can reflect back on my days that, you know, if you struck out, there's
a tendency to want to slam the bat on the ground.
But but what occurred to me is there's some mental strength when you learn that if I I
only have to hit the ball three out of ten times and greatness awaits me.
But when you're twelve, thirteen, you think you gotta hit it a hundred percent of the
time.
And so what's it like to bounce back after
You got smoked by the team the day before or whatever.
Right.
So I I knew I had five days and then I had a a series of things that I needed to do.
I was going to throw on the bullpen a couple days later.
That's when we were going to talk about what happened.
What do I need to do?
And I'm just my faith and trust was in the pitching coach, right?
And he said, You're going to be okay.
I needed encouragement.
Major league players need encouragement too.
I coached in high school, and if a guy threw it, I go, Whoa, wait a second.
You don't need to do this.
This is a really hard game at whatever level you're playing.
You need to remember it and say, okay, I'm gonna learn from this.
I'm gonna move on.
I'm gonna I'm gonna store that up here.
And as a starting pitcher, you gotta know when guy hits a home run, I'm gonna store it up
here.
This is what he did.
This is his approach.
And then I have to adjust.
And so it's a hard game and in the guys that survive are mentally tough.
There are so many guys that are so good.
Every time I went to spring training, I'm like, wow, these guys are so good.
And then they give up runs and they just melt down.
I'd given up a lot of runs.
I'm like, that's normal, right?
And so I just need to be strong between the ears, control what I could control, my
approach and my response to things that happen.
Control that.
And then the action I have no control over.
The problem that guys struggle with is your career.
is in what happens, not how you control things, right?
My my my ERA, all my stats, everything is in the zero of my control.
And so being able to have the right perspective is really important.
Man, that is such a big deal for for life thing.
Right, right.
I I was fortunate to be mentored for a long time by a great man.
He was a former pro athlete, played a decade in the pros and basketball.
And he didn't know the principle he taught me while he was pre playing basketball.
And he probably had he known it when he was playing basketball, would have probably
elevated even higher in his skills.
But he he taught me the idea, what you do is not who you are, but who you are has a big
influence on what you do.
And if what I discovered, if you don't know that, that failure can attack your identity.
And failure isn't really failure.
Say say if
If an opportunity to grow.
Yeah.
Well, y I mean, you c you're gonna lose a game as a pro baseball player because you're
throwing to the best ever, right?
Right.
And and so did you ever have to learn that, that that your identity was not a a major
league pitcher?
I understood that more when my career was over.
Did you because when you're doing it, it's all about baseball all the time.
It's 12 months, it's hard to get away from it.
And when you're a cardinal, you can't go anywhere without people talking about baseball.
And that's great, but I'm also a husband.
I'm a I'm a father.
I'm a believer in Jesus.
Yet it was all about baseball all the time.
And now I've tried to separate a little bit from the Cardinals.
I do a lot of community stuff, but I want people to see me when my career is over as a
person, as a husband, father, those things because those are what are really important.
And baseball's gonna be like this, right?
But life is really hard too.
You're going to have those ups and downs.
And dealing with that in the proper way, if it's just my identity is in a financial guy or
a baseball player or a mailman or any other thing, it's really hard.
It's really hard because you're just going to have the swings and there's no way you're
going to survive.
I had
I had to go into the IRS yesterday and um it it was to try and get identity verified for
my deceased uncle.
And you could imagine my attitude going in there because i it it burned up two or three
hours of my day.
But I I kept kind of praying, I'm like, Lord, give me a good attitude because I know I
would not want this job, right?
And and so I kept thinking about every day your job it was to
deal with disfrontal people all day long.
And we got my situation taken care of.
And I I told the lady, Thanks.
I appreciate your help.
I hope you have a great day.
And she said, I hope I do too.
And I thought I can't imagine dealing with that every day, thinking, I hope today's a good
daddy 'cause your identity is more than your role in life.
And I think the more you see that, the more you can really elevate whatever roles you
have.
Right.
It's really important to understand.
Who you are, what you do.
And then I was told one time, when you're really having a hard time, you're thinking about
you, right?
And if you're consumed with that, pick out a teammate that's doing really well and get
really excited for them.
And that's that's a good principle.
It's really hard to do, but it takes your eyes off yourself, your circumstances.
And then you can say, I really care about the fact that you have to deal with these people
all the time.
And so
Yeah, I played a lot of gol I play a lot of golf.
I'm like, I'll see the maintenance people and I say, I just I wanna let you know how great
things look here and I appreciate you what you're doing.
And they're almost like stunned because all they hear about is if things aren't good.
And so taking your eyes off yourself is really important, but it's really hard to do.
And I I think w I think the idea of mental health
The more that you're able to focus on others, the less you're focusing on yourself and the
healthier you're gonna be.
But the the more you're absorbed in your situation, your circumstances, the more you seem
to spiral.
Well, our example's Jesus and he always he always was looking at others and obviously
loving other people well.
And as a believer, that's what I'm supposed to do.
I'm not Jesus for sure.
You used to have to ask my wife.
But I'm moving hopefully each day to be a little closer to that.
And it starts with humbling yourself, knowing who you are as a sinner, and that I really
need to be I can't get to heaven by working, but I need to really focus on that and be who
be who the Lord has me to be.
And when you look at that, it it creates that uh understanding of humility.
I've I've found, I don't know about you, Phil, but I've found that like when you're in
situations that that are extraordinary where you're maybe at a place that a lot of people
with luxuries or whatever that other people don't get to be, that there's a temptation to
believe all that and and what you said about recognizing the waiters or the wait staff.
I and what they're doing and show them a level of appreciation can really even make the
the experience better.
Yeah, you um we were talking yesterday and you shared a story that I thought was really
relevant um about your last year with the Cardinals and what you experienced and how a
teammate reached out to you to help you in what was a very challenging time.
Why don't you talk a little bit about that?
So I played 14 seasons and I'd never been optioned to the minor leagues.
I had never been uh in a position where they were saying you you can't do it anymore.
And most guys in their career with you're just not good enough.
Right.
And so my second to last year was awful.
When you throw a hundred innings and your ERA seven and a half, that's a bad, that's a bad
year.
So I had to earn my way in.
I had some knee problems.
I was dealing with that.
I win a spa, three starts into the season, it's terrible.
And they basically said, you can retire so we can restructure your deal, or you can just
go home.
And uh, and so I just went home.
And for the month that I was at home, just bitter and angry, one guy reached out to me,
and it was somebody that I would never have expected.
And you've I never had that perspective of.
getting set down, being thrown to the side.
And all these years, guys go up and down.
And I would say, dude, that's you know, sorry.
You know, hopefully you're back here.
I I but I really didn't have empathy for that because that's a guy that's going to have to
go down to Memphis.
His family's going to have to move there's a lot that goes on and it's really hard.
But I didn't have that empathy and I really understood that.
And when I came back, I was able to pitch and pitch amazing uh
The second half of the season, but it was circumstances that were beyond my control.
I mean, we had my one of my best friends on the pitching staff died, Darryl Kyle.
I remember that.
And I was the one that took his spot.
But I had empathy for the guys that were going down.
It changed my perspective.
It got my eyes off of me and onto somebody else.
And those types of things were just super important in life lessons that
Man, people have a hard time and we're dealt different cards.
And I don't know why the good Lord gave me the ability to fill the ball a hundred miles an
hour or to really perform for as long as I did.
My younger brother, same DNA, right, was same parents through a year and a half in the big
bleaks, tore his shoulder up and was never the same.
I don't understand why, but I think the good Lord blessed us.
Jennifer and I to be a blessing to others.
And that's what we've seen.
We both have giving hearts.
We want to bless others.
We want to support Christian activities and our church.
And I really believe that's why he's done that for us.
And he gave me the blessing of finishing my career on an amazing note and to be able to
walk away and say, thank you, Lord.
I, I
I did it.
I did it the best I could.
And now I'm going to get on with life, even though I don't know what getting on with life
is in 35.
Now let me shift a little bit.
We we had talked about this before we turned the camera on, but um my neighbor, uh, Mike
Pitts was a avid Cardinals fan.
And so I remember I was standing in his kitchen and he's explaining Andy Bennis to me.
jeez.
And
Andy Bennis's agent missed some timeline.
Right.
And um my my and and we've conversed about this in the past, but I I I thought you learned
a lot from that season of life.
You wanna maybe tell our young people yeah what they could relate to.
Maybe they're a young financial advisor and from your lesson how that might help them.
Right.
So I had played eight years in the big leagues.
I had two years in Saint Louis.
Love the Cardinals.
I grew up a Cardinal fan going and sitting in the upper deck.
And Scott Boris was my agent, and he is very, very persuasive.
And when you're playing, there's a lot of comparison.
And I was a free agent.
They had to get something done by early in December because they couldn't offer me
arbitration to get a draft deck.
That's beyond the conversation.
And so it was getting down to the deadline.
And they weren't offering me what
somebody that my statistics would say were better, they were offering me a huge deal for
five years in the place I wanted to play.
But I'm like, that guy got that.
I need that.
And it was not that much more.
And so it got down to the deadline and Jennifer and I looked at each other and we said,
okay.
And we actually had to get an extension to the deadline.
really?
But the circumstances and the communication within a five minute period
didn't allow me to go back to St.
Louis.
And we had decided, yeah, let's stay.
And so we went to Arizona.
That was the team that wanted me and signed a two year deal there.
But what I f what I found out is when we compare, when we're greedy, to some degree,
that's what it is.
I mean, it's greed.
I need that.
I want that.
They have that.
Uh, that's not a biblical truth, right?
We were being blessed in an amazing way.
And I tell people we got sent the desert for for two years.
Moses went, didn't get to go to the promised land.
Here we are.
We get to come back.
And my perspective changed.
The president of the Cardinals called as a friend because our older boys were were best
friends and said, I'm calling as a friend, not as the president of the Cardinals.
And we hear you're not wanting to come back.
And our agents tell me all these different teams that want me and will pay me.
And I'm like, we're moving back.
And Jennifer told me, Jennifer told Scott Morris, who's probably the top agent in
baseball, Scott, how many times have you moved in the last eight years, ten years?
And he's like, zero.
She goes, Do I need to remind you where we've been?
We've been in like eight different places through the minor leagues and all that.
She said, We're going back to St.
Louis or you're fired.
Now this was back before cell phones if she thought.
And we signed the next we signed the next day.
But it was like
If you want to defer money, defer money.
You do it how the team wants to do it.
I'm good with it.
And they paid me for like eight years after I was done.
But my perspective changed because I knew what that greed and comparison and all that did
to us.
It clouded our thinking.
And here I come into baseball as a young guy, conservative.
We're going to preserve our capital.
We'd done a great job.
We had a great uh portfolio, but blessed to have that.
Yet we still want more, more, more.
And after that, it was like, we're gonna work on just hitting a bunch of singles and not
hit the home run for the top position salary wise.
And uh, I'm very thankful for that.
I'm thankful for that opportunity to go to Arizona because one of my best friends, a life
friend,
uh missionary in in uh here and abroad.
We would never have met if that wasn't the case.
That's very cool.
I and actually we met in the interim between we didn't know where we were going.
I was in Costa Rica on a mission trip when we found out we were going to Arizona.
They were not even on my radar.
So that's there you go.
That's so cool.
I'm gonna wrap this up here shortly, but I I I think of a couple things that you're
telling me there.
Like greed is always
thrust, like the idea is thrust upon people that have a lot.
That's what people talked about.
But I one of the greediest things I've ever seen, I'm not I'm not making fun of the
person.
I'm just making fun of the idea, is I was driving to Chicago for a Cubs game and we peeled
off on this exit ramp, and there was a homeless guy with a shopping cart, and the stuff he
had piled on it blocked the entire lane.
And I I just I just said out loud, that's the greediest person I ever saw because he
couldn't
You you when you watch homeless people, they all have their own way of doing it.
Well, greed is always need more.
No matter what your lot in life is, it doesn't matter if you're a pro baseball player or a
homeless guy or just an ordinary financial advisor, human nature.
Temptation is there.
And and then I think the thing that you said that really can help a lot of people today,
and I was looking for the Bible verse about it, because really a challenge that I see for
young families as they're raising kids.
Is that whole comparison thing that that got you out in the desert?
And and the verse I was looking for is in Second Corinthians ten twelve, and I long ago
tried to memorize it, and it was too much of a tongue twister for me.
But it the apostle Paul says, For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some
of those who commend themselves, but when they measure themselves by themselves and
compare themselves with themselves, they're without understanding.
Like I couldn't I don't remember, I was I was a tongue twister, but Yeah, but those the
guys I played with that were the most consistent were the guys that hit a bunch of
singles.
Maybe a double hick maybe every once in a while a home run.
But in life, it's not about home run or nothing.
Right.
It's about something in between.
And that's a great verse because that's for all of us.
And it doesn't matter where we're at.
Hopefully we have that in our heart.
But we can only have that in our heart if we have faith in Jesus, because our sinful
nature is give me more, give me more, give me more.
And even as believers, it's hard not to go in that direction.
Those are great verses to really balance yourself and understand.
I'll look at it financially.
Our first financial guy said, You just need to hit a bunch of singles.
And we're conservative.
We don't need home runs.
Right.
Hopefully I I made money in baseball.
I don't need home runs.
That's our human nature.
So I'm thankful for you guys that you're like, let's hit a bunch of singles.
That's a really, really important thing, right?
Sure.
But we're like minded in that way.
And it's really good to be affiliated with like minded people because if you're not, you
fall into where I was with Scott Boris, baseball wise.
Yeah.
Give me more.
And and you don't need more.
You need you need consistency.
Man, you've been so gracious with your time and your thoughts and your wisdom.
I really appreciate it.
Anything else we need to s say, Phil?
No, I don't think so.
Thanks for hanging out, brother.
It's been a pleasure.
Yeah.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah.
Well, enjoy your weekend and just have a great time with your family.
Yeah, you got it.