Vincej with the Louisville Bats, the AAA affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds, in 2017.
Zach Vincej was drafted by the Cincinnati Reds in the 37th round of the 2012 MLB Draft from Pepperdine University. He is currently an undergraduate assistant with his alma mater. He played a total of eight minor league seasons and made he MLB debut with the Reds in 2017. We have spoken to career minor leaguers, MLB All-Stars, and everyone in between. Zach Vincej is directly in between. Being a late round draft pick, he did not have the luxury of a huge signing bonus to feed himself and live lavishly in the MiLB. However, his work ethic and his incredible talent took him all the way to The Show. He finally had some sort of financial stability. He shared some amazing stories with the MLM Team on a Zoom call.
“One year we had to share a three bedroom apartment with 12 guys just to make rent. Once I got to AA we had seven guys in the same apartment. Living on $1400 per month was difficult when rent was $1100 some years.
My teammates and I went to a Goodwill to get furniture. We couldn’t afford anything else. We ended up all getting air mattresses to sleep on since there were not enough beds in the apartment for all of us.
We would spend 12 hours at the park one night, drive another eight hours to our hotel for the next game which we had to play the day of. Once we got there, before Uber and Lyft were around, we would walk to McDonald’s or Jack-in-the-Box to get something to eat, which was all we could afford anyway.
In rookie ball, we had an 18 year old clubbie (clubhouse manager) who we would give a couple bucks to here and there to do our laundry. He would pick six of us up at our hotel in his 1985 Trailblazer. It always broke down and we had to sit on each other’s laps to get to the field.
Yeah the living conditions and pay were terrible, but there was something about doing it with all twenty five guys on the team that made it fun. It was like everyone was going through misery together, and laughing about how bad our life was, but at the same time we were all looking towards the light at the end of the tunnel.
You have to look at it positively. The guys that complain all the time never performed well because they were so negative. They typically never lasted that long.
Some of my teammates, all they knew was baseball. Their careers were not about getting a nice check, but instead just trying to find a team to play ball for and continue living the life of all they know.”
- Zach Vincej