Away from baseball, former minor-league product remains on MLB's radar

Garrett Broshuis' fastball may have been just a tad short on the radar gun for the Big Show, but he resides on the radar screen of Major League Baseball and the commissioner's office.

The 6-foot-2 righthander fell one level short of the major leagues, but the now St. Louis-area resident remains among the prides of Advance, Missouri, with his professional baseball endeavor having provided new aspirations and direction for his life.

Already first-team all-state in baseball and basketball at Advance High School, All-American and Academic All-American at Missouri and a fifth-round pick by the San Francisco Giants who reached Class AAA, Broshuis has added attorney to his resume.

The addition came in typical Broshuis fashion. Previously valedictorian of the Class of 2000 at Advance, Broshuis took his game to another level when he graduated valedictorian of his class at the Saint Louis University School of Law in 2013.

It didn't take long before he joined the law firm of Korein Tillery and fired a pitch to Major League Baseball. It's more than a brushback pitch. He's aiming to leave a mark with a class-action lawsuit.

In Senne et al v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, et al, Broshuis is showing that he can play hardball with the big boys after all.

Like any good pitch, this one is thrown with conviction.

Having been a member for six years of a fraternity of minor leaguers, he witnessed the side of baseball left on the editing floor, absent from highlight reels. It was the darker side of dreams in a multi-billion dollar industry, where players sustained themselves on hope and meager wages, and a world where overcrowded living arrangements and peanut-butter sandwiches were as vital to sustaining a player as talent.

The class-action suit includes 32 plaintiffs -- one former minor leaguer from each MLB organization -- with the defendants being all 30 MLB teams, MLB and former commissioner Bud Selig. It seeks unspecified past financial compensation for the players, contending that MLB violated wage and overtime laws.

"You only have a few opportunities in your life to reach a lot of people, probably," said Broshuis, who still holds the title of precocious at age 33. "I think it's an opportunity for me to hopefully make a difference in thousands of guys' lives. I appreciate that opportunity, and it's not something I'm taking for granted."

Broshuis was drafted by the Giants in 2004 after a record-setting 11-0 season at Missouri but was told by the Giants before the 2009 season that the major leagues were not in his future.

He has since reshaped his career with the swiftness, precision and dedication that residents of Advance have come to expect from the former star.

Broshuis, armed with a life-long mantra of outworking the competition, has been on radio stations and appeared on a segment on HBO to discuss his case against MLB.

"To think that he's as professional as he was in that interview, calm and composed at the age he is now," longtime Advance resident and family friend James Rainey said about Broshuis on the HBO segment. "Basically the lack of experience in that arena, you would think he had been practicing law for 20 years. That's just the way he is. He's a natural. Whatever he makes his mind up to do, he's going to do it, and he's going to do it well."

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"I think one thing I learned early in my basketball career and my baseball career, and growing up in a small town that it's constantly reinforced, it's just not how hard you work on one given day. It's how hard you work on a consistent basis day after day after day. I think that's one thing that helped me once I got to college to become the pitcher I ultimately became, and it helped me in my pro career, too. Once I got into professional baseball, I certainly wasn't the most talented guy out there. On every team there were always guys that threw harder than me; there were always guys that had a better slider than me; there were always guys that had better changeups than me, but I don't think there were guys that day in and day out outworked me. That's something I had a lot of pride in was how I approached the game on a day-to-day basis. And that's how I approach life today."

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Rainey has had a first-hand seat to Broshuis' talents since coaching him in basketball in the second grade. Rainey's son, Adam, is a year younger than Broshuis. They were teammates in basketball and baseball throughout their childhood.

"I've got pictures of those kids when they were 8, 9 years old, and he was just as dirty, with the uniforms and chubby cheeks, and hats not bent right. He was just a typical kid, but he was just ... better than everybody else," Rainey said, laughing his way through the final words about Broshuis. "It didn't matter. He was better than everybody else."

In basketball, Broshuis received high praise from his veteran coach Jim Hall, who had previously coached 27 years at Dexter.

"Garrett as a junior is as good of an offensive player as I've ever coached," Hall told the Southeast Missourian at the time. "He's very attentive, he listens to instruction and he's got the ability. He can play inside and outside. I would say his maturation that he's made in the first month of the season and the adjustment to the varsity level [is the reason for his improvement over last year]. He's a very adaptable kid."

"Attentive" and "adaptable" have proven a wise choice words to describe Broshuis, who can excel on multiple fronts.

His senior year he averaged 24.5 points per game, shot 45 percent from 3-point range and had a reputation for scoring points with the game on the line. He helped a perennially down-trodden Advance program crash the championship game of the then-University High Christmas Tournament and ultimately a 27-5 record and No. 6 ranking in Class 2.

As a junior, Broshuis averaged nearly 30 points over four games in the tournament. It was a bit of a coming-out party for a player who would later score a career-high 42 points in a district win his junior season.

"He would have definitely played in college if he hadn't been so good in baseball," Rainey said. "He was definitely good enough."

On the baseball diamond, his accomplishments were just as prodigious. In a game against Bloomfield he threw a one-hitter his senior season -- 19 of the 21 outs were on strikeouts.

"The only thing I remember about that game is the first couple of innings my arm felt terrible, and for some reason I kept striking everybody out," Broshuis said. "I was like, 'OK. It's going to be OK.'"

He also remembered he also did not throw a no-hitter that day because it somehow remains absent -- at all levels -- on his resume.

In the classroom, he posted a 4.0 GPA and scored a 32 on the ACT.

Broshuis played the trumpet for six years for music teacher Bob Moses, whose own son, Trenton, would follow a nearly identical path, starring in baseball at Southeast Missouri State before being drafted by the Atlanta Braves.

"Whatever he was going to do, he was going to do a great job," Moses said about Broshuis. "He was in my band and he was a really, really good musician. In fact, I think that's why Trenton played trumpet because Garrett did. ... Everybody wanted to be like Garrett. ... It was easy to recruit trumpet players after Garrett."

College baseball recruiters weren't as easy to come by.

Broshuis was lightly recruited through his junior year, with Southwest Missouri State among his top suitors. That is until he was spotted by Jerry Daniels, the founder of Balls and Strikes and the Rawling Prospects circuit, while Broshuis was playing in a tournament game in the St. Louis area with the Cape Girardeau American Legion Post 63 team.

Broshuis said Daniels invited him to an upcoming showcase event and waved the $180 fee to ensure the right-hander would be seen by college coaches and major league scouts from all 30 teams.

When the showcase arrived, Broshuis waited in the outfield much of the day for his turn. "I get up there and it's my time to throw my 10 pitches, that's about all you get, and there's a radar gun behind you and they're calling out to all the scouts how hard you're throwing," Broshuis said. "The first one I heard 89. I said, 'OK, that's pretty good.' The next one was 90. The next one was 91."

The next day the phone was ringing.

He estimates 20 college coaches called the day after, and letters soon arrived from major league teams.

"Just like that, I went from one day being relatively unknown, not having hardly any colleges talking to me to all of a sudden hearing from big schools and hearing from major league teams -- just from 10 pitches," Broshuis said.

The newly discovered talent opted for Missouri, where he planned to major in psychology and attend graduate school to become a cognitive psychologist.

Perhaps unfortunately for MLB, that plan was derailed.

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"The [minor-league] contract isn't for seven years. It's for seven championship seasons. I technically played six championship seasons. I still have one season left under my contract. Still today I couldn't go play in Korea. I couldn't play in Tawaiin or the Netherlands unless I got the San Franciso Giants' approval."

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After red-shirting and two mediocre seasons equipped with a fastball and curveball and a seldom used changeup at Missouri, he dedicated himself to a makeover of his pitching mechanics and conditioning, canceling plans to play in the Cape Cod league, one of the top summer leagues for college players.

"I worked harder than I ever thought was imaginable and got in the best shape of my life and transformed myself as a pitcher into a different style pitcher," Broshuis said.

He started throwing more sinkers, converted his changeup into an effective weapon, saw more movement on his fastball and opted for a slider instead of a curve.

"I went into that year not really knowing what to expect because when you make that many changes you aren't sure what's going to happen, but it worked," Broshuis said. "You put your faith in the coaches and you put your faith into the work that you're putting into it and hope that everything turns out for the best, and it did."

After the makeover, the 2004 season turned into a fashion walk for Broshuis.

It was a season that Missouri coach Tim Jamieson did not see coming.

"Obviously he was very intelligent, very competitive and athletic," Jamieson said about Broshuis. "He's a guy that continued to work at it. To his credit and hard work, it finally clicked for him."

His feats included a victory over No. 1 ranked Texas, striking out 10 batters in 8 1/3 innings. And the Longhorns were not alone. Broshuis went unbeaten with a school-record 11 wins and earned All-American accolades. He also was an Academic All-American, but graduate school could wait -- the major leagues were calling.

The Giants selected Broshuis in the fifth round and he signed a contract that included a $160,000 bonus, a lucrative sum compared to players outside the top 10 rounds.

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"I think major league players have a responsibility toward helping out with this. Every major leaguer went through the minor leagues and knows what it's like down there, but at the same time, too many of them once they get up to the major leagues, either forget about what it was like in the minor leagues or they feel like it's the rite of passage that needs to be taken, and I don't think that's the right attitude to have at all. If more major league guys would step forward and would tell their union heads that 'Hey we need to support this. We need to back this.' It could make a difference."

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The dream life of pro baseball was accompanied with a whiff of smelling salt when he arrived with the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes in Keizer, Oregon, the short-season affiliate with the Giants and Class A San Jose (California) in 2004.

"Very early on it was kind of disappointing and kind of eye-opening," Broshuis said. "Coming from a big college and playing in the Big 12 and a major conference, we had really good coaches, really good strength coaches and they took care of us in a lot of different ways, and then all of a sudden once I got into minor league baseball, it seemed like it was a step down almost ... in a lot of different ways. It seemed like a step down in what we were provided from the standpoint of meals and nutrition. It seemed like a step down in coaching in some ways. ... The parks seemed like a step down is some ways, too. So it was kind of shocking. And I think if you talk to a lot of the guys who've come from Division I programs, they would say the same thing.

"I remember joking around with some of my teammates who had been drafted from Division I programs, and a lot were like, 'Wow, it's not like what we expected.'"

Jamieson said he never played minor league baseball, but he knows colleges look after their athletes.

"The kids are pretty well taken care of whether it's a baseball player or some other sport," Jamieson said. "There's a lot of student-athlete support at our school. I think from that, a facility standpoint, our guys are treated like adults, and the coach-player relationships have always been good. And pro ball is just different. It's a business, and it's not about raising a family, which is what college ball is supposed to be about."

Broshuis found long hours -- sometimes 60 to 70 a week -- and low pay were the norm at the affiliates he played for, which also included Class AA in Norwich, Connecticut, and Class AAA in Fresno, California.

Players were paid $850 a month when he started, and even at that they were only paid during the actual season. There was no compensation during spring training or while in offseason instructional leagues. Even now, players make just $1,100 a month, which amounts to about $7,500 a year.

"It's impossbile to live on that," Broshuis said, also noting it was difficult for many players to find temporary work in the offseason and that contracts required them to train out of season.

He said the lack of funds often resulted in four guys -- sometimes more -- sharing two-bedroom apartments and sustaining themselves on the cheapest food available. Players often would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- a staple in the minors -- when they awoke and then head for the ballpark.

Unionized minor league umpires were paid more than players and had larger daily per diems.

"There were not a lot of guys as lucky as me," said Broshuis, noting that he used his signing bonus as a subsidy.

He observed a curious environment in a $ 9 billion industry -- poverty.

Athletes were sometimes sleeping on air matresses, consuming cheap, non-nutritious food while trying to perform at an elite level on the field.

From his perspective, everyone but the players were making money. Minor league teams were an investment for owners, who were making their money off young men chasing their dreams. He terms it a "recipe for exploitation."

In that landscape, he found traction.

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"Especially after the HBO story came out, I started hearing from bunches of them [former teammates] all the time, and I also hear from just random minor leaguers that I've never met before. Some of them current, some of them former.... There's just been a tremendous outpouring of support."

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Early on, Broshuis' pursuit of the majors went as envisioned.

"I had a good year my first year, that short-season league, and I had a good season my second year at A ball and got a taste of Triple-A that year, too," Broshuis said. "At Double AA, I kept hoping the same thing would happen. Double AA is the level that is probably the biggest jump in the minor leagues, going from A ball to Double AA, and I just kind of got stuck there. I call it my tar pit."

It was in that "tar pit" about midway through his six-year minor league career that he started to have thoughts about going to law school,

"Two things happened," Broshuis said. "The first thing is I realized I didn't want to be a psychologist. I realized I didn't want to be stuck in a lab my whole life and didn't want to be doing memory research my whole life, but the second thing was I wanted to find a solution to the problem of what was going on around me in the minor leagues. Like I said, from Day 1, things didn't seem right. Things seemed kind of wrong."

In his second season at Class AA, Broshuis had the distinction of leading all of minor league baseball in losses with 17.

"That season probably ended my chances of ever making it to the major leagues," Broshuis said. "It happens quickly. Either you make it in a few years -- especially coming out of college because you're already a little older. Either you make it in a few years, or you're no longer a prospect."

He was second in the league in wins the following year and hopeful he had revived his career to at least make the big leagues as a journeyman,

In 2009, the 27-year-old arrived at spring training slotted as a starter at Class AAA.

"I went through all of spring training and was in the Triple A group, and then the very last day I go up to the minor league spring training complex and they pulled me aside and they said, 'We appreciate everything you've done for us, but we don't really see you in the future of our organization. You've always been a hard-working guy, but you're not going to be a major-league pitcher,'" Broshuis said.

"And I stuck around that year and just filled whatever role they needed me to fill."

He said he probably could have played minor league ball for a couple more seasons, but he began preparing for life after baseball, studying for the Law School Admission Test on bus trips that summer.

"During my last year playing, we would talk all the time in the outfield during batting practice, all of us would gather round and talk about how they're probably paying us below minimum wage and something needs to be done about it," Broshuis said. "The players would talk about unionizing once in a while and stuff, but how do you actually put that into action? How do you go about doing that? Well it's a whole different story just talking about it in the outfield versus actually coming up with a game plan and putting it action."

Just days after the season he took the LSAT, and he entered law school in 2010.

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"In some ways I'm a realistic idealist. The idealistic side of me believes that a person can make a difference, and so yeah, going to law school does provide you with the type of tools that you need to affect some change in the world. So in some ways it was empowering because it gave me some tools I didn't have before, and it enabled me to have a bigger voice than what I had before."

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He came out with a degree and an agenda in 2013.

The lawsuit was first filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, with MLB, the commissioner and three teams as defendants. Aaron Senne, a 2010 graduate of Missouri and former Marlins minor leaguer, Michael Liberto, who played in the Kansas City Royals organization, and Oliver Odle, a teammate of Broshuis' in the Giants' organization, were the original plaintiffs, but the suit was later amended to include plaintiffs from all the teams.

"This lawsuit alone could take a couple of years," Broshuis said. "We're in it for the long haul. Our point is the guys that stepped forward and put their names on the complaint, they're all former minor leaguers and they're not in it for themselves. They want to improve the system and change things and want to make sure when their cousins go through it or their sons go through it 20 years from now, they don't have to go through the same thing."

Thus far MLB's response has been to deny the allegations, and a long arduous task of taking depositions is the next step of order.

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"It goes back to my work ethic of day after day after day working hard toward making a difference and hopefully improving things. Is it going to result in guys suddenly becoming millionaires? No, but that's not the goal of it. The goal of this thing is to apply the minimum wage over the time involved to minor league baseball players. So they aren't going to get rich off this, but at the same time they realize they are minor league players and they shouldn't be getting rich. There's a difference between the minor league guys and the major league guys. In the long run, a union would probably be the best solution for the minor-league players, but that is a totally different story for another day. At this point, this lawsuit is hopefully the first step in the right direction. If it emboldens the guys and sparks a movement, that would be great."

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Broshuis is in the process of getting his agent license and already represents one major leaguer and four minor leaguers as a representative with Platinum Sports and Entertainment Group, a firm started by Nick Brockmeyer, who grew up in Bell City.

Broshuis is married -- he met his wife, Alicia, while at Missouri -- and is equipped with stories for his two children, 4-year-old Elena and 8-month-old Ty. There's the one about chasing possums up a tree one night with a gangly teenager by the name of Madison Bumgartner, who would become the World Series MVP with the Giants in 2014. Catchers of the likes of 2012 NL MVP Buster Posey and postseason hero Pablo Sandoval were on the receiving end of his pitches, and he referred to others from the three-time World Series champion Giants, shortstop Brandon Crawford and pitchers Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain, as teammates.

"And as far as me bringing this lawsuit against the game I love, this isn't in any way about me being upset about me not making it to the major leagues," Broshuis said. "It was not about my dream at all. This is actually about trying to improve the conditions for guys and trying to improve the game I love."