When a throbbing pain arose in his shoulder, Chris Rowley, the only graduate of the US Military Academy to play in Major League Baseball, reacted as he always does when challenged. He didn’t blink.
Rowley was 30 and trying to get back to the majors when he realized his unlikely journey had come to an end.
Disappointment for being passed in all 40 rounds of the amateur baseball draft after a stellar career at West Point failed to hold him back. Nor did he have a two-year hiatus from baseball while serving as a first lieutenant in the United States Army. In his second season after that hiatus, he attended an MLB game for the first time in his life and was the starting—and winning—pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays.
But rotator cuff surgery is life-changing and there are many directions a pitcher can take.
Usually law school is not one of them.
“Honestly, I got tired of watching my peers in minor league baseball go through the things they went through,” Rowley, now 32, said last month as he completed his sophomore year at the University of Colorado Law School. “Many of my goals for going to law school have been achieved through the unions of the minor leaguers. But the battle is not over yet. It will never be. That is inherent in labor negotiations.”
To carve his atypical path out of a sport in which few players graduate from college, let alone law school, Rowley was awarded the Michael Weiner Scholarship for Labor Studies, which was established by the MLB Players Trust following the death of Weiner, a executive director of the MLB Players Association, who died of brain cancer in 2013 at age 51. The program provides $50,000 per year for up to five graduate students or law students who want to improve the lives of employees.
Rowley has never met Weiner but understands his impact and legacy.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to benefit from his infectious leadership, both as a player and as a law student,” said Rowley. “So although I never met him, my work is both consciously and unconsciously influenced by him.”
It was the spring of 2020 when Rowley’s shoulder gave out and the pandemic set in. He was a free agent who faced the tough task of returning to the majors when MLB canceled the minor league season. Suddenly there would be no paychecks. While most minor leaguers earn very little money, some, like Rowley, were expected to earn more because of their major league service.
“This group was particularly vulnerable because these are often older minor leaguers with spouses, children and homes,” Rowley said. “And we make a lot of financial decisions in life based on our projected income. When something like Covid happens and that is taken away from you, it can leave devastating conditions for people with spouses and children.
Rowley contacted the nonprofit Lawyers for Minor Leaguers while researching his rights. He met the director, Harry Marino, who was going to work for the MLB players’ union. Rowley volunteered for hours of outreach during the initial organizing phase.
“What started with very tangible, practical questions about contract interpretation had, within minutes, turned into a much broader conversation about the system, the inequalities of the system and what could be done to fix that,” said Marino. “I thought Chris’s interest in systemic change was pretty unique.”
When MLB turned down one of the proposals to pay minor leaguers during the pandemic shutdown, Rowley said, “I felt quite saddened because it was so little money and it was so obvious that players were going to be in financial poverty. And the league said, ‘We don’t care.’ It was typical of what I’ve seen in the minor leagues.”
So he took the law school entrance test and extended his lifelong pattern of landing — and thriving — in unexpected places.
A Georgia native, Rowley was recruited out of high school by Mercer University, but chose West Point because the Army promised him a chance to start, while Mercer wanted to use him as a reliever. When all 30 teams bypassed him in the 2013 amateur draft — in which 1,216 players were selected — right-hander Rowley signed a minor league deal with Toronto and reported to the rookie-level Gulf Coast League.
There, Rowley said, he was told that a Jays executive had said he was only signed to save the arms of the team’s draft picks. “They had no intention of my professional career lasting beyond that summer,” Rowley said.
Instead, he was dominant in nine games, pitching 32⅔ innings and striking out 39 batters with a tiny 0.673 WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched). It was enough to pique the interest of the Blue Jays just before Rowley had to take a leave of absence to fulfill his military obligation.
“I’ll tell you what, that guy had crazy numbers that first year in the GCL,” said Toronto catcher Danny Jansen. “Sinker, slider, I remember almost all of me was behind the plate and he was a lot of fun to catch. It was fascinating, because that doesn’t happen from West Point.”
Rowley was deployed to Bulgaria after Russia invaded Crimea, a precursor to the war in Ukraine, and spent most of 2015 there. He was assigned to the Individual Ready Reserve with the primary purpose, he said, “shaping the battlefield to keep our men safe.”
There was a strong Russian influence in Bulgaria, Rowley said, and although he saw no combat, he was physically assaulted in Sofia, the capital, “by a man who very clearly identified me as an American.”
After missing the 2014 and 2015 seasons, Rowley, with the approval of his battalion and brigade commanders, resigned from the active duty commission. It was “based on the assumption that we were overworked, and I felt my shift would be better spent pursuing a professional baseball career,” Rowley said.
During his time on active duty, he kept his arm in shape by throwing with one of his old army teammates. He hadn’t pitched off a mound in two years, but he had a good spring in 2016 and a year later on August 12, 2017, he got his call-up to Toronto and held Pittsburgh to one point. over five and a third innings as the Blue Jays defeated the Pirates 7-2 in front of 46,179 at Rogers Center.
It was a Saturday afternoon, his family was there, and he followed the advice of Jays pitching coach Pete Walker: Look up. On his own debut, Walker didn’t have that. So Rowley walked up to the hill, picked up the resin bag, looked around at the nearly 50,000 people and had his “oh my god” moment. Then he breathed, closed in and threw a first pitch to Starling Marte.
It was his lone big league win. He went 1-2 with a 6.75 ERA over six games—three starts—that season. The Jays called him back for two relief appearances in 2018, but he went 0-1 with a 40.50 ERA. He doesn’t think the bullpen was a good fit for him, but, as he said, “I understood where I was in the pecking order.” Texas claimed it from waivers in late 2018, then it went to the San Diego and Minnesota systems.
“He was always very passionate about what the minor leagues were like and that lack of what was available, that lifestyle,” said Tim Mayza, a Toronto illuminator who will be a groomsman at Rowley’s wedding this winter. “Yeah, we’re professional athletes, but the minor leagues is a very erratic lifestyle, locking guys in rooms, you have air mattresses and things like that. He always wanted to improve conditions. You could tell he had a passion for wanting the next group to have better conditions than the current guys.
Marino, who recommended Rowley for the Michael Weiner scholarship, thinks his friend “brings a unique mix of experiences, but more than that, it’s unique to have the level of success that he’s had in different fields, and I think that what you see from service to his country to reaching the big leagues and now pursuing a career in law is a level of commitment needed in each of those areas that is truly unique and a little bit exemplary.
Rowley has an article he expects to appear in the Spring of 2024 in the University of Colorado Law Review. The working title: “It’s Past Time: Unionization and Labor Management in Minor League Baseball.”