Career Minor Leaguer Is Defying the Law of Averages

"You know what? I'm trying to keep it in perspective," he says. "It's a special year. It kind of seems a little magical, my first year in the big leagues and chasing .400, at the end of the season it's a dream season. I guess some seasons are just that way."

Of course this wasn't the dream. Nobody ever thinks it will be like this when the signature is delivered on the first professional contract. The signs were there from the start, when the Orioles picked him in the 33rd round of the 1994 draft, which is all but saying the dream is already dead. But Short is nothing if not persistent. And the fact is, he could hit. Not like a slugger; he never hit a lot of home runs -- his career best is 16 with Bowie in 1999 -- despite the fact he has hewn his 6-foot body with daily offseason workouts to a robust 200 pounds.

No, Short was all about singles and doubles. Soon they were coming everywhere. They have gotten him this far with 1,314 hits for 12 teams in eight leagues including the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan's Pacific League. Still, players who hit singles and doubles usually don't make the major leagues unless they can do something else. Short is not a fast runner and he's played so many positions -- including catcher in an emergency -- that he doesn't have a true position, although he is listed as an infielder. This is frustrating because he finds his own selflessness coming back to hit him in the face.

"Baseball is such a negative game," he says. "When I started being a utility guy people said, 'Oh, that's a good thing because you can play every position.' Now they come back and say, 'Well, you don't have a position, it's going to hurt you.' What can you do?"

He's thought about quitting, thought about it hard. When you're 27 and haven't been out of Class AA for more than 13 games, you think about leaving. When you're 30 and hit .303 in Japan and a new manager, Bobby Valentine, comes aboard and says he doesn't want you, well, what reason is there to keep going?

Somehow Short always found one. He had a deal a few seasons back to become a coach in the Orioles' minor league system. The contract promised stability, a steady paycheck, the certainty of a home base. But one of his best friends in baseball, a player named Howie Clark, talked him out of it.

"Coaching will always be there," Clark told him. "You can only be a player once."

So Short kept playing. Yet the end is coming; he can feel it. This year he made peace with his baseball mortality, telling himself that life would go on even if he wasn't on the field. That released him from something, a nagging sensation that this is all he can do, that even a criminal justice degree from Western Illinois might not be able to save him away from the game.

He figures this realization has something to do with the season he's having, 36 points better than his previous best year, when he hit .356 with Salt Lake in 2002. Otherwise he has no other explanation, and neither does anyone else around the team. It appears he is just having one of those blessed seasons that come along rarely when everything goes right.

He is comfortable now, chasing nothing, understanding the dream might be nothing more than that night in Washington. Still, he looks around the crowded room, at his teammates -- many of whom are nearly a generation younger -- and he feels an attachment that he is unsure how to replace.

"I think all of us here, we were born to be ballplayers," he says.

Karyn Short has come to realize that. If only she knew what she was getting into when she flirted with the baseball player next to her in a statistics class at Western Illinois. Before she met Rick, a friend of hers dated a player at the school and one day the friend gushed, "Wouldn't it be great if he plays baseball for a long time and I get to travel all around the country and go to the games?"