NASHVILLE, Tennessee —Everybody knows the scouting report on d’Arnaud: he’s great at framing.
No, not Travis, though the Mets’ catcher does have a remarkable ability to turn borderline pitches into strikes. We’re talking about his older brother Chase, who is currently playing for the Texas Rangers’ AAA affiliate in Nashville. Years after a tenth-grade photography class and two semesters of photography at Pepperdine University sparked his love for composition and color on film, he is advancing from framing the shot to framing his own story. He is turning his twelfth year in professional baseball into something of a self-made reality show.
“Everything is done in real-time,” d’Arnaud says of his YouTube show, titled “Journeyman Series.” “The content that we’re working with and editing is from the week prior, and it’s going to give people an inside look, a unique perspective into baseball.”
D’Arnaud is far from the only player taking matters into his own hands when it comes to storytelling. CC Sabathia has a podcast. So do Pirates pitchers Trevor Williams and Steven Brault. Padres minor leaguer River Stevens and former Giants farmhand Matt Paré have chronicled minor-league life before — Paré even got Hunter Pence and his wife Lexi (who has her own YouTube following) in on the joke. Cody Decker’s company got a big boost when he played a questionable and elaborate prank on Jeff Francouer, and Alex Bregman pranked some Little Leaguers for content. d’Arnaud’s Nashville teammate Tim Dillard has made short comedy videos for years both on YouTube and social media, and more than one player has their own channel on Twitch, a service for streaming video games.
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Meanwhile, Trevor Bauer has started his own series as part of his new production company called Watch Momentum, and just released the first episode of a series called “Bauer Bytes”, wherein he interviews Nolan Arenado.
As recently as 15 or 20 years ago, fans didn’t have much access to players at all, beyond what was fleshed out by reporters and TV cameras. Those soundbites or quotes were often shoehorned into short quotes, intended to support the narrative of a story for a newspaper. That all began to change with the ascent of social media, and was boosted significantly when The Player’s Tribune was launched by Derek Jeter in 2014, allowing players to tell stories that were important to them, and in their own words.
With the advent of Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram stories and others, the trick for players now might be in carving out a unique voice among the multitude of people trying things out to see what sticks.
“It’s just an evolving thing,” d’Arnaud says of the trend. “I feel like the social media world is the wild west (…) players are going to be expanding their own (brand); they’re going to have their own videographers …It’s just different coverage.”
If this is the “wild west,” one can only imagine what the Roaring Twenties might look like.
As for the content of the series, it’s aptly titled. If anyone knows about a journey, it’s d’Arnaud; the Rangers are his seventh organization in twelve years. After being selected by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the fourth round of the 2008 draft, d’Arnaud has bounced from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Atlanta to Boston to San Diego to San Francisco to Texas.
More accurately, that journey has gone State College, PA -> Charleston, WV -> Lynchburg, VA -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Indianapolis, IN -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Indianapolis, IN -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Bradenton, FL -> Indianapolis, IN -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Indianapolis, IN -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Indianapolis, IN -> Pittsburgh, PA -> Indianapolis, IN -> Allentown, PA -> Philadelphia, PA -> Gwinnett, GA -> Atlanta, GA -> Boston, MA -> San Diego, CA -> El Paso, TX -> Sacramento, CA -> Richmond, VA -> Sacramento, CA -> San Francisco, CA -> Nashville, TN (and that’s not counting the six-plus weeks of spring training in Arizona or Florida each year, which add up to more than another full year of d’Arnaud’s life).
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The foray into video production actually started in 2016 when he was playing for the Braves and pursuing a completely different side-project: the Chase d’Arnaud Band.
“I was in a band the entire time I was with (Atlanta),” says the California native, who also played violin for ten years as a youth. “Because of our good story, we got great opportunities. We played Turner Field that year, we played Eddie’s Attic and headlined a sellout show there. We played at the Verizon Theater and opened up for Lady Antebellum, we had a slew of great opportunities because of the story, and the music was good.”
It’s difficult enough to play music and baseball at the same time, but the breaking point for the Chase d’Arnaud band came when d’Arnaud got married and became a father. Oh yeah, and he was also claimed off waivers from the Braves in 2017 , which required a move to Boston.
But before the band’s demise, d’Arnaud learned a lesson.
“I became really close friends with our video producer and editor; his name is Patrick Dennis,” d’Arnaud says. “He taught me how to use Final Cut, Premiere, all that good stuff. I was already familiar with photography … so it’s really just interactive photography; that’s how I view videography. I like compositionally strong stuff, and I just wanted to take my love for that and baseball, and kinda mash it up together.”
He started documenting his life soon after, unsure of what he was going to do with the footage. Initially, he began producing standalone videos like this one, which profiles a homeless Giants fan:
Ultimately, he settled on the Journeyman Series idea, perhaps as a gateway to a career in video production after baseball was over. But you can’t hold a camera and a bat at the same time. So d’Arnaud started interviewing people to accompany him this season and do most of the actual shooting. He interviewed “five or six” videographers before finally deciding on fellow Californian Brandon Sloter, who had some past experience in baseball video production.
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“He knows his way around a ballpark, so that makes it a lot easier for me to trust him to walk around. He has good feel. We’re a two-man crew, and we’re Journeyman.”
For now, the journey has brought him to Nashville, where he will be joined by his wife and two-year-old son in a few weeks.
“Sometimes I feel a little guilty having to subject my wife and son to this kind of lifestyle, but it’s a sacrifice either way,” he says. “Stability is great for a child, and the baseball life is not the most stable upbringing for a kid. But at the age of two, it’s not too hard for a child to live that transient lifestyle.
“He doesn’t have friends yet,” d’Arnaud jokes with a wry smile.
But the infielder knows that his playing days won’t last forever. In fact, that’s part of the reason he’s doing the series.
“I wanted to start to generate some credibility as a producer and director, and that’s what Journeyman is,” the 32-year-old says. “It’s my first time getting my feet wet and putting stuff out there. In the future, yeah, I’d like to do stuff in production; I’d like to direct. in the baseball world, that would be fantastic, sure. If it’s in some other capacity, fine, (but) I think I shine in baseball.”
Who knows where life will lead Chase d’Arnaud next. For now, he and Sloter are six episodes deep on the journey at hand.
(Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports)
