By Victor Lee

He was fed up. Over it. Had seen enough of the big leagues. The boozing. The carousing. The lives centered on self. He was, frankly, pretty disgusted. Not that all Major League Baseball players were or are that way, but he saw the gravitational pull to self-fulfillment, and it moved him the opposite direction. So he retired. Walked away. Bowie Kuhn, then baseball’s commissioner, wrote him a letter to ask him if he was sure that’s what he wanted to do. After all, he was only 21 years old.

Yeah, 21—with eight appearances in the big leagues. He pitched for the 1968 Chicago Cubs, a cagy, veteran team, led by the crusty sage of cage, Leo “The Lip” Durocher. The cubs were high on the 6-foot-3 power left-hander with a sinking fast-ball that tailed away from right-handers. He had three other good pitches too. The kid was destined to be a star-especially with that name!

Darcy Fast. Go ahead and look him up in a baseball encyclopedia—he’s real; this is not the April 1 edition of Sports Spectrum.

It turns out the Cubs could have used a youthful power pitcher the next year. Nineteen-sixty-nine was the year of the great collapse, when the Cubs lost a mid-August 9 1/2–game lead to the Miracle Mets, arguably because of a bullpen that Durocher didn’t trust. Could Fast have made the difference? That’s the speculation in a book called The Missing Cub by Fast and Jonathan Franzen.

But back to how all this began. Or ended. (You can hardly tell the two apart.) Sports columnist John McGrath of the News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, deftly wrote that Fast “renounced his chair in the bullpen for the chance to devote his life to a different kind of save.” It wasn’t quite that simple.

“Basically, I changed my perspective on baseball and had to get a new perspective on what God wanted me to do with my life,” Fast says. He is 60 now and has been senior pastor of Centralia Community Church of God for 30 years. “When I first turned professional, I wanted so badly to be a major league player.”

“When I got to the top and saw what was there, what was happening in the lives of so many of the players—some Hall of Famers, some All-Stars—I saw a lot of emptiness,” Fast says. “I saw the power, the prestige, the money.”

“In my life, the Lord let me get there so I could get perspective on life. Perspective puts us in our place and helps us keep God in His.”

“For me, it was like a child in the toy department of a large store being told he can have anything he wants. He’s got his arms full, then he comes upon the one, large item, and thinks, That’s the one I really want. But the only way he is going to get it is to put the others down. It’s almost like the story of the pearl of great price.”

That decision sank in through 1969 and 1970 as he let go more and more, freeing him to pick up the prize. “All through that time, I was gaining a new perspective on what I should be doing,” Fast says. “I wasn’t in despair over it. I just felt that I needed to practice God’s priority for my life. I needed to make Him my priority, and I chose Him over everything.”

And so, almost 40 years later, how great was that price? It is probable that Fast would have been a successful major league pitcher. He could have made millions, been a star—with the name and the talent, he was a natural.

Maybe he could have kept the Miracle of ’69 from happening and helped alter the Cubs woeful lore.

The question amuses and intrigues Fast, but it doesn’t trouble him. “The could-have-beens!” Fast says, laughing heartily. “I had to give up something very good in my life to get something even better. I would never have known that unless I had given up the something better.”

“I know ballplayers who are millionaires—and by no means am I saying we don’t need Christian athletes; we need them as much as we need clergy—but they need to make sure they don’t allow their perspective for their life to be different from God’s perspective. The object is to make God the No.1 priority, not just what you can do for yourself in life.”

“We need to be like the apostle Paul. He said to let nothing good interfere with life’s race.  Sometimes what is good is the enemy of what is best. I think he was talking about forgetting personal accomplishments—and his personal accomplishments were pretty great.”

The bottom line question for each life must be ‘What is God’s heart for me?’ Fast says, “Make sure you’re going after the right goals in life. The main thing is keeping Christ at the center of your life. I played with guys who, if they didn’t make it, didn’t have anything else in life. God doesn’t call all of us to be pastors, but He calls all of us to be His followers, and that means putting His purposes first. That’s also very fulfilling, and I have no regrets.”