Gorsch: A ride to remember, the minor-league journey of John Dittrich
From Travis Gorsch at Front Office Sports on October 15, 2015, on SABR member John Dittrich:
Front Office Sports is proud to have sat down with John Dittrich, retired baseball executive. John was gracious enough to have offered up his time and insight in to his long career in professional baseball management. John has experience at every level in baseball spanning from independent ball all the way to the MLB. His keys to success came from taking the initiative to drive from Illinois to Texas to meet his future mentor, Bobby Bragan. This ultimately led to John’s long career in baseball with many stops along the way.
Your education is from Southern Illinois University in Journalism. What were your plans after college?
“I thought I wanted to be a broadcaster or sports writer when I got into it. I love all sports. I found that was a harder career to break in to. You would have to work at a local radio station or TV station for a while before moving on while making little money and all that.”
“I became fascinated with going to minor league baseball games in college and I thought to myself how many people would really want to work in the front office? So I decided to write letters to all of the MLB teams. I didn’t get any responses from some and others sent rejection letters. I was excited that they were writing back even if they were rejection letters.”
“The president of the Cincinnati Reds at the time, Bob Howsam, wrote me back and recommended trying the minor leagues. So I got myself a copy of The Baseball Blue Book, which was the equivalent of today’s Baseball America Directory. I wrote every minor league team, which was about 110 teams back then. It’s different today we didn’t have internet and email back then. Obviously it was a copied letter but I signed them all by hand. I got back maybe 30-40 responses. They said they would keep my resume on file. When you’re a new college graduate you don’t have a great resume.”
Read the full article here: http://www.frontofficesports.org/#!A-Ride-to-Remember-the-Journey-of-John-Dittrich/clfr/561e7ca80cf2c6c643745792
Originally published: October 15, 2015. Last Updated: October 15, 2015.