SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. — What do ACDelco and the Colorado Rockies have in common?
Rockies pitcher Jake McGee.
The 29-year-old worked multiple odd jobs after signing with the then-Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2004.
“I delivered car parts to different places in Sparks and Reno for ACDelco,” McGee said of working during the offseason in his hometown outside of Reno, Nev. “I would go to different shops and drop them off. It was pretty cool.”
From delivering car parts to mechanics to delivering pitches to Major League batters, it has been a winding professional road for McGee, along with his Rockies teammates who worked to earn paychecks wherever they could before making it to the big stage.
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Outfielder and first baseman Kyle Parker’s father helped him get his first job, as a camp counselor, while he was in high school in Florida. As St. Johns County’s Recreation and Parks northwest program director, Parker’s father had established day camps for children with two working parents during the summer.
“We’d have to do anything from mildly chaperoning the kids, to going and picking up their lunches,” Parker said. “It was alright, it was a high school job so we made really little money. It wasn’t really that difficult because we weren’t the primary chaperones but it was definitely a responsibility.”
While Parker already had a summer full of his own sports workouts, adding camp counselor to his agenda kept him busy all day long.
“We needed money and to stay out of trouble,” Parker joked.
Driving for ACDelco was not the first job McGee took during his downtime from professional baseball.
“My first job was actually after I signed,” McGee said. “I got a job in the offseason because I would get kind of bored. I went through a temp agency and I got a job stacking coffee cup sleeves. The pallets would come out and you’d have to separate them, and organize them. It was kind of a fun job and I got to meet a lot of cool people.”
Unlike his teammates, the only job shortstop Trevor Story has ever held is the one he is doing right now – professional baseball player. If the 23-year-old had worked during high school, he said it would probably have involved serving at a place famous for chili cheese coneys.
“In my hometown it was big to work at Sonic, that was kind of the spot to be,” Story said. “That’s where a lot of the high school kids went and would get drinks and snacks or whatever. So I’d probably be a Sonic worker.”
If baseball hadn’t been in the cards for Story after high school, he said he would have become a fireman, the same career as his father.
“He’d take me to work sometimes,” Story said. “It was cool to be around the other fireman. They kind of have a brotherhood like we have here and that was cool to see, so I kind of fell in love with that part of it.”
If McGee had to choose a profession other than baseball, it would’ve been far away from his early work with auto parts and coffee cup sleeves.
“I’d probably want to be some kind of physical therapist,” McGee said. “Eventually maybe work in sports doing it, but maybe starting out of it and then getting into it.”
