Miguel Rojas Is Thinking About Retiring, and the Reason Is a Phone Call His Son Will Not Make

Miguel Rojas is 37 and playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers as the postseason approaches. His wife Mariana and their two children, Aaron and Skye, are in Miami.

That gap is the subject he keeps returning to.

The professional calculation is the easy half

Rojas is clear-eyed about the physical arithmetic of a long career, and untroubled by it.

"A lot of the players in this game are getting younger and younger, and obviously, you wanna keep up with that and kind of stay in the best shape as possible to help the team win," he said.

Then the turn. "But at the end of the day, it's not just about performance. It's not just about what you do on the field. It's what your life is outside of the field."

That is a more interesting statement than the usual version, because he is not saying his body is failing. He is saying the calculation has stopped being about his body.

Sometimes my son doesn't like to call me on the phone to tell me he had a good game or a bad game

What a season actually costs

The Venezuelan-born infielder is careful to frame his career as good fortune, and he does not undercut it.

"I'm so grateful and so lucky to have the ability to play this game for a long time and have the opportunity to be on this team and travel the world with them," he said.

The qualification that follows is the one every parent working away recognises. "The family and the time with the kids and everything that they experience on their own is always something that you can't really go back and turn the clock back."

The detail that carries it is small and specific, and it is about a boy who has stopped picking up the phone.

"I'm so far away, and sometimes my son doesn't like to call me on the phone to tell me he had a good game or a bad game," Rojas said. "I would like to be there a little bit more to be an outlet for them to kind of share my experience. I feel like I want to be there for them as well."

A child who will not report his own game to a father who plays professionally is not being difficult. He is managing a distance nobody chose, in the way children do.

He is not going anywhere yet

None of this is a retirement announcement, and Rojas is direct about why.

"If you ask me today if I'm ready to go and I'm ready to retire, I'm saying no because I feel like I can still produce, and I can still play, and I can still go there every single day and give my team the best opportunity to win," he said.

What he wants, if the timing cooperates, is one more World Series ring before he finishes.

And then the line that complicates his own plan. "Obviously, if we win this year, it's going to be really hard for me to go home."

That is the trap in the whole thing, said out loud. The outcome he is playing for is the one most likely to keep him playing.

Building the next thing early

Between the travel and the season, Rojas has been assembling what comes afterwards. He is an investor in CasAzar Tequila, a bottle he describes as closer to a porcelain object than a standard spirits package.

Athletes moving into drinks brands is a well-worn route and easy to be cynical about. In this case it fits the rest of what he is saying. A man working out how to be in Miami more often is, sensibly, building something that does not require him to be anywhere in particular.