While Hussey has now reached a more reflective and perhaps more settled phase of his baseball life, it has only been after a veritable journey since he signed as an outstanding youngster with seriously projectable talent a dozen years ago. He inked a deal with San Diego Padres in 2004 and headed over the United States the following year, playing Rookie Ball and at Minor League level.

 

After Tommy John surgery and missing an entire season in 2008 he returned to the Padres but found the draining Minor League requirements tough going.

 

He effectively walked away from the sport, at the time citing a desire to complete his education as he sought to make sense of a range of physical and emotional factors that were at play.

 

“I really was just fed up with the baseball grind, although there were multiple thoughts and feelings going through my head at the time,” he said. “It was very hard for me to repeat the level I was at only three years earlier. In that short amount of time I went from one of the younger players on the team to one of the older, struggling ones.”

 

“Yes, coming off surgery and getting the feel for pitching again is very hard in itself, but no-one really prepares you for the fact that you are still getting your feel for pitching back. Your stuff isn’t as sharp as it was before the eighteen months out of the game. You feel great one day and the next you feel like you are back to learning to throw strikes again.”

 

“By this time – 2010 - I had spent five years in pro ball, I was into my sixth season and I was only at low A,” John Hussey recalls.

 

“With high expectations as a young kid – where I had progressed level by level each year - it was a hard thing to swallow mentally, knowing that my progress was much slower than I had always imagined,” he said. “Throw in the grind of a baseball season in the Midwest, the peanuts you make as pay, and now this mindset of ultimately failing at the sport you had put so much time into and you begin to second guess your own ability. Why you are doing this and where it is ultimately going to lead? At this age my friends back home were fully qualified tradies or had finished with university and were making real money.”

 

“You begin to envy everyone who had once envied you,” he said.

 

“Professional baseball is not only tough physically, but it is mentally an enormous grind and emotionally a roller coaster like something you have never experienced. It is hard to hold onto any relationship, simply because you are never home – and, let’s be honest, baseball was a priority for me over everything and everyone. I just became sick of loving and putting in the time to something which I felt didn’t love me back. As a then 23 year-old struggling in low A, the big league felt further away than it ever had in my life.”

 

“I really felt I had lost the love for the game,” he said.

 

After coming back home and spending some time in the Australian Baseball League for the 2012/13 and 2013/14 seasons, John Hussey discovered that the Padres had kept him on their restricted list, even though he had effectively walked away from the organisation that had invested so much time in him – largely through the effort of long-serving executive Randy Smith, who was recently given his marching orders by the Padres after a remarkable period of service spanning two appointments.

 

“I have actually just tried to reach out to Randy Smith but his email bounced back to me and this is when I found out he is unfortunately not working with the Padres anymore,” Hussey said.

 

“He was great to me. Everyone within the Padres organisation was. Trevor Schumm and Damian Shanahan need to be mentioned in that regard too. I consider myself very lucky to have landed in that organisation with the people who were around at the time.”

 

“It was a strange thing going back to pro ball because it wasn’t necessarily that the Padres were hoping I would go back,” he said. “I believe it is a formality that they keep you on a restricted list. More so that you can’t just retire and then sign with another team for better opportunities. I was having a decent year in the ABL. I actually played that season because I had heard it was going to be the last year of the ABL, but then again that rumour goes around every year. I thought to myself I should at least play in my own backyard before that opportunity is gone. Anyway, I was having a decent year and it was Russell Spear who was encouraging me to go back to the Padres. I really owe it to him and getting into my ear about it.”

 

“We had Travis Blackley playing with the Aces at the end of that season (2012/13) and he was telling me I should head back. Rockies scout Phil Allen also looked into my status and he was the one who told me I was still restricted and contracted by the Padres. With these people talking to me - people I respect - I thought about giving it another chance, and seriously,” he continued.

 

“I was surprised at how much I was enjoying the baseball in the ABL that year. I had a taste of the real world and it made me realise once again how lucky I was to have an opportunity to play baseball for a living. The chance to play in the big leagues and make good money simply playing sport was an attractive proposition,” he said.

 

“All of this combined helped me get back in contact with the Padres. They gave me an opportunity and I guess I was lucky I was feeling it at the time. I was throwing well. They took me back. I threw very well in extended spring training (I missed spring training while waiting for a visa) and they threw me into low A again. Sink or swim scenario.”

 

“Thank god I threw well and it bought me the rest of the year,” he said.

 

 John Hussey had an excellent stint at Fort Wayne in 2013 – carding an ERA of 1.59 - before going to Lake Elsinore and then to San Antonio AA in 2014. Yet even after his solid season with the San Antonio Missions – and re-signing at the end of that year - he was surprisingly released by San Diego in March 2015.

 

“That release was a shock,” he said, “although I could look back now and sort of understand how it came about.”

 

“I had been prepared to be released well before that after having some terrible seasons, or even a really bad streak in a season. I can remember calling home at times and telling my folks “as soon as this road trip is done I’m coming home, they are going to give me the flick”, and that would have been easier. I had a good year in AA in 2014. I was carrying a 3.5 into the last week of the season, and gave up eight runs in 1.1 innings to blow my ERA over a 4.”

 

“I was furious,” he said. “That’s the worst as a pitcher. A hitter can have a bad day and it doesn’t affect their season. A pitcher does and it can change a year. And for anyone who tells you they don’t know their stats, well that’s a lie. We all do, especially when we are competing for jobs. Anyway, I had actually re-signed with the Padres as a free agent at the end of 2014 after my year in AA. I had also re-signed only a couple of weeks after the end of the season - or agreed to terms - so I felt pretty good about the team showing such faith in me.”

 

“A new General Manager, and with him new minor league staff meant their opinion of me wasn’t that of the old regime - and that’s fine,” Hussey said. “I was 28, with only AA time. That’s baseball – as they say - but I can remember it hitting me hard because I had just re-signed with them. It was very hard having to say good bye to all the staff I had effectively known since I was 18. It’s not something to brag about, but I was the longest tenured member of the Padres organisation. Will Venable in the big leagues was the only other guy to have been with them for as long as I had. We played Rookie Ball together in 2005.”

 

“It was very hard to say goodbye to people I had known for so long. Trainers, clubbies, coaches. I was never going to see them again.”

 

While John Hussey had a lengthy stop-start career with the Padres, in one sense – though ironically perhaps not in another – he was one of the lucky ones from Australia cast into the maelstrom of United States professional baseball. There are plenty of young Aussie players who finish up on the scrap heap of pro ball after a year or two – three if they are lucky, or perhaps more if they are attached to one of the more patient franchises. Cognisant of a current push towards raising the international signing age to at least nineteen, John Hussey has some strong and well-considered views on the matter.

 

“I was extremely lucky to have effectively ten years under contract with the Padres. This is never lost on me, especially since so many younger kids only get one to three years,” he said.

 

“Of course it is tough for a young kid - especially from Australia, leaving home for another country at a tender age. For Americans it is a little easier - same as Latinos, because they know what to expect. They have seen guys throwing 95, and seen hitters turning on it like it was 85. Aussie kids haven’t.”

 

“It is great to max out at 90 when you are a junior in Australia, get signed and strut around National Championships - but it is a very sobering feeling when you get to your first spring training and guys have 90 mph change ups!”

 

“I really don’t believe in raising the age for signing international talent,” Hussey said. “There is nothing like being eighteen in pro ball. You have time to develop under the best coaches, you get to know the program and you have almost a free pass for a year or two. I don’t think they like to hear this, but some people just throw around the argument that at that age the kids just aren’t ready. Especially the Aussies. They entered pro ball too young, the argument goes. I don’t agree. After a couple of years with the best coaching, given every opportunity to improve by playing the best, an organisation simply knows whether you are panning out like they had projected or not. If not, you are out. It is nothing more than this. You either have it or you don’t.”

 

“A young kid is signed on projection,” he said. “If he isn’t developing like they had gambled on, then it is time to roll the dice on someone else. Professional sports are a very cruel world. Cruel only because the system is so brutally honest.”  

 

“You can always go to school. You can never be young in pro ball again. Being young is a huge advantage,” he said.

 

Still a relatively young man even now in pitching terms, John Hussey is one of many who have made a successful return from Tommy John surgery – an increasingly more common operation with potential to extend both longevity and velocity. Travelling quite well with his baseball commitments at the moment, he has no lingering desire to make his mark at the highest level in the sport.

 

“I was lucky to come back very well from Tommy John surgery,” he said. “And this is perhaps another perspective that should be considered in the college versus pro ball debate that everyone seems to have an opinion on. I was young and the Padres took their time with me. A college program wants you back as soon as possible. My surgery went well. I struggled to get a feel for pitching again after I had it, but structurally it has been fantastic. A lot of guys end up coming back stronger because of all the strengthening of the arm they go through during rehab. My arm - knock on wood - has been fantastic the past couple of years but I also put that down to taking time off, or having an off-season.”

 

“I don’t have any aspirations to pursue baseball again at the levels I once did,” he said. “I am really enjoying my time in Europe as a player coach. I do enjoy teaching the game to the next generation. It’s a very rewarding thing. I am a realist - perhaps too much so at times, especially given my mindset at my retirement in 2010 - but I am content turning 30, knowing I have played at the highest level I could.”

 

A two-season player in the Australian Baseball League, John Hussey retains an acute interest in the fortunes of the competition – and of the Melbourne Aces, for whom he served as a player, an Assistant Coach and as a staff member charged with helping fulfil administrative and marketing tasks. That experience and subsequent observation as a baseball person detached from direct involvement has enabled him to formulate some considered views on the state of the national league – and its future.