Former Royal Bubba Starling finds peace after finding his way through anguishing career

All of a sudden, Bubba Starling is 30 years old.

“I’m old, man,” he said, smiling. “Starting to get some gray hair.”

But aging is the last thing you’d think of if you ran into Starling.

When I met him Thursday at Homefield, where he’s now coaching youth baseball with longtime mentor Jeremy Jones of Building Champions Baseball Academy, the rare athlete in the 6-foot-4 frame looked more sculpted and powerful than ever.

Enough so that the other day at the Olathe facility Royals broadcaster Rex Hudler told him he had a physique worthy of a look from the Chiefs. In fact, I was so struck when I saw him that I initially wondered if he was working on a comeback instead of coaching.

What stood out even more, though, was a demeanor that seemed lighter and younger than it’s been in years. The smile sure looked brighter over the nearly 90 minutes we spoke, with Jones alongside, and the laughs more free and easy as he described his time there.

“There’s something about this,” he said, “that makes you feel good.”

Something about this time of life, really, since the fifth pick in the 2011 MLB Draft retired from the game in 2021 and at last found what he called “relief, to be honest.”

That was a decade in the making. And it largely has held ever since.

After all the years of anticipation and crushing doubts, anguish and perseverance, injuries and resilience, the grating critics in the stands whose voices he’d wake up to in the middle of the night and the breakthroughs that will forever be among the most cherished memories of his life …

The evident serenity is a heck of a happy sight to behold. Particularly if you’ve spent some time with Starling over the years or otherwise understand what Jones called his “trials and tribulation” — events that Starling says helped him grow and even shaped him.

“I believe it made me the person I am today,” he said. “Especially those downs in my career.”

Quick to point out that real adversity is what Jones and his family are going through with son Mickey contending with leukemia, Starling added, “We think baseball is life or death. There are so many other things in life that are so much more important.”

“Get all these demons out of me”

Even in the weeks after suffering a concussion running into a center-field wall during Team USA’s silver medal performance in the Tokyo Olympics, that perspective made for further clarity of thought that he needed a fresh start toward what mattered most.

If his retirement seemed abrupt, it was well-considered.

He was soon to be married to Laura Glenn, after all, and wanted to be able to devote himself fully to their marriage. And to reset with more of the simple ways that he’s always treasured.

Like being around family more, the soothing peace of fishing, the challenge of hunting and even spending more time with his six cats and two dogs.

“Just things that aren’t stressful in my life that I love to do,” he said.

Not that the rewards of baseball weren’t plentiful.

Start with the $7.5 million signing bonus that compelled Starling to sign with the Royals when he was torn over whether to instead play quarterback at Nebraska — where he loved spending weeks that summer, taking part in seven-on-seven drills and bonding with prospective teammates as negotiations went on with the Royals.

The offer essentially made the tenderhearted Starling feel he had little real choice because of what he could do for his family.

Amid buying what he recalled as maybe a shotgun and a fishing pole for himself (and not so much as upgrading his flip phone), Starling paid off the mortgage on the home of his parents, Deb and Jimbo.

He bought cars for everyone in the family, including the sisters, Jamie and Jill, that he long worried didn’t get as much as he did growing up. He paid off their college debts, and then he paid off the mortgage on his parents’ next house. And then some.

Playing in the Olympics was an incredible way to cap his career, from winning the silver medal to the parade of nations during Opening Ceremonies. He still can hardly believe he was walking next to basketball stars Sue Bird on one side and Draymond Green on the other — with Kevin Durant right behind him among many other notables. Or even the sensation of walking up to the plate in a USA jersey.

But even that wasn’t quite the feeling he had on July 12, 2019, at Kauffman Stadium, the place he still remembers being overwhelmed as a kid seeing the field for the first time.

Not as much as the night of his major-league debut, though.

Not after the deliverance that came after eight years … and hundreds of minor-league bus rides … and some moments thinking about playing quarterback Nebraska … and many a night spent gazing at a hotel ceiling and finally — counter to his stoic inclinations — learning to “express my feelings and get all these demons out of me.”

“I couldn’t feel my body”

So he immediately “fricking started bawling” in an El Paso hotel room while representing Omaha in the Triple-A All-Star Game when he finally got The Call.

The real emotion didn’t wash over him until the night of his debut, though. He couldn’t eat because he couldn’t keep food in his stomach. If they could have measured what he once called the RPMs in his heartbeat, he figured he was close to having a heart attack.

As he walked to the plate to face Detroit’s Spencer Turnbull, he said, “I couldn’t feel my body. Whatsoever. I couldn’t feel my body.”

Well, with one exception. As he happened to look up before the first pitch, his dad was in his line of vision.

“My dad doesn’t cry, but …” he said, smiling.

No doubt the moment would have been similarly sweet had it happened in the time frame Starling and others had envisioned and had his career blossomed and sustained.

But that timing told a story of its own about Starling, a plus–outfielder who hit .204 with five home runs and 17 RBIs in 2019 and 2020.

It was a story he would have preferred had a different signature but that nonetheless had a powerful undercurrent.

Through what Jones called the “humongous” pressure on Starling from the start as a local hope under a microscope, through the squeezing too hard and the dwindling confidence and untimely injuries and cruel jeers that so often kept him awake, Starling grew through it in ways that are instructive now more than simple success would have been.

So instead of continuing to sit “in this little box and let things snowball,” as he put it, he learned to speak more openly with Jones and Ryan Maid, the Royals’ senior director of behavioral sciences.

He shared his anxieties and learned techniques to deal with them. Such as different ways to breathe and focus on the present and even to think, something he told me in 2020 that enabled what he called a 180-degree turn as he entered that 2019 season.

It was part of what he came to embrace as “’one day at a time’ living,” he said in 2020, and “how good can that one day be?”

As he ponders it all now, Sterling reckons “my problem was I would either dwell on the past or think about the future.”

And shutting out the noise.

In the hardest times, Starling can still remember words that pierced, he said, “more than I should have let them.”

Terms like, “you suck, you bonus baby” even as he was asking himself if he deserved to be there and bottling it all up.

“I could go to bed, and I’d wake up and I couldn’t get those voices out of my head,” he said. “They just kept coming in my head.”

If he could pay a visit to the 18-year-old version of himself, he’d try to address that among other points:

He’d tell him “praise God that you’re able to wake up every day, that you’re healthy, that you can go to a baseball field and do what you love.” And to soak it up because it goes by fast. And to “free your mind” by enjoying the present and not clinging to the past or worrying about what’s ahead or what others think.

“Any ways that we can help”

Days after his honeymoon in Costa Rica in 2021, Starling woke up a few times “freaked out” thinking he was due to be on the field for a workout.

“It took a little while,” he said, “but I’m kind of on my own schedule now.”

He misses “your highs of highs,” he said, the camaraderie of the clubhouse and the friends and Royals personnel to whom he’ll always be grateful.

But he’s thrilled about this chapter of his life, beaming as he speaks about working with kids and what he can impart both in terms of the game itself and all that surrounds it.

He often points to appreciating what their parents are doing for them, he said, and he’s also stressed that the coaches can be that extra person to lean on beyond baseball.

“We’re here for those different things, too,” he said. “What you might be going through, the stress or the anxiety. Any ways that we can help.”

Along those lines, Jones will tell you that his relationship with Starling has come full circle with Mickey in Children’s Mercy Hospital. Starling is a vital part of his support system, he said, and “has helped me through stuff.”

While many might know the freakish athlete Starling is, Jones added, “very few know his heart and are close enough to understand who he is. That’s why he’s a success story.”

Speaking of the broader impact he directly knows Starling has had on others, Jones added, “You can be a bright star in someone’s life and never know it.”

Even if he didn’t become the star he dreamed he would be.

“Would I like to change a few things? Yeah. But I am what I am today,” Starling said. “And I can’t change that, and I’m happy where I am now.”