After All-Star career, Huston Street is chasing something else in retirement

WEST LAKE HILLS, Texas — As night crept toward morning, Huston Street slipped out of an Uber and into his new house in an affluent Austin suburb. He had spent the day coaching baseball at his old high school and the night reminiscing about playing baseball across the world. He had savored sous vide short rib at a world-class sushi restaurant and sipped an after-hours Old Fashioned at the downtown hotel he co-owns.

With his wife and boys fast asleep, he headed for the bedroom nearest the front door with one last task in mind. Before he could join them, he needed to feel the thrill of crazed competition once more. So he strapped on his gaming headset and fired up Call of Duty. At 3:09 a.m., while the game loaded on the television behind him, he snapped a grinning selfie with his iPhone. Then he shot intently at on-screen avatars for hours, passed out on the couch and awoke at noon.

“Have you ever seen a more symbolic picture of retirement and what it can do to a man?” he captioned the photo in a text message.

On July 2, 2017, Street coaxed his body to throw what he sensed might be the final pitch of his All-Star career. Nobody knew but him. Nobody seemed to care. With the home team trailing, Angel Stadium’s lower level had already emptied.

Street had pulled his groin while ceding a hit to the previous batter. He knew he carried a 2.96 career ERA into the game. He wanted, needed, to complete the inning, to finish with his pride intact. But if he allowed the two runners on base to score, he feared the mark would reach 3.00, the threshold he had always sought to stay below.

“I swear to God on my life I was thinking about it, which is so bad to admit out loud, but it was my job,” Street said. “It’s my life’s work, man.”

As an unconventional closer who used uncommon command to save 324 games, Street had come to crave the roar of the crowd that coincided with his final pitch. This time, he settled for scant applause.

The end had come quickly. He followed the first 40-save season of his career, in 2014, with another. That winter, he thought for the first time he had a Hall of Fame chance. He saved only nine more games. The last pitch he ever threw, on that Orange County afternoon, was an 84-mph fastball over the middle. Fortunately for him, Seattle’s Ben Gamel pounded it to second base.

Huston Street pitched in only four games in his final season in 2017. (Gary A. Vasquez / USA TODAY Sports)

As that day’s two-year anniversary approaches, Street has settled into life back home with his wife, Lacey. He coaches their three sons. He collects cases of the world’s finest wine and cracks open bottle after bottle with friends. When he feels like it, he games through the night. He rides his golf cart to business meetings at a local cafe, chasing big real-estate deals, aiming to amass $2 billion by age 60 — $1 billion to have and $1 billion to give. And still he has ample free hours at home, the lone luxury his first career never afforded.

Baseball, of course, compensated with so much else: riches, recognition, places to see, places to direct his relentless spirit. He pitched strictly in the highest-leverage situations. He prepared for them on his own, skipping team stretch and playing online speed chess right before games. He got results, and he had so much fun — until the end, when injuries rendered him ineffective on the field and disinterested in the clubhouse.

On the Monday morning after the season ended and his contract expired, Street arrived at his friend’s general-contracting firm in Austin to work an office job. Learning basic contracting, he reasoned, would equip him to grasp real estate to an extent he never could while he played.

“I thought for sure I could learn: ‘I’m mentally tough, I’ll do it,'” said Street, who’ll turn 36 in August. “But when you’ve been outside on the baseball field for all that time and you don’t have to answer to anybody and your routine is your routine, it’s hard.”

He left the firm, amicably, after eight weeks. His efforts have become more dilettantish. He smokes beef ribs, in his front yard, and marijuana, through a vape pen. He drafts poetry. He befriends fellow young retirees in his neighborhood. The best thing about retirement, he said, is the infinite tank of energy he possesses. The challenge is finding places to exhaust it.

After baseball, Street lives in search of outlets for his competitive spirit. His famous father was the same way.

“I actually think it’s just an addiction problem,” Street said. “Our truest addiction is competitiveness. As my dad would say, ‘There’s always a game going on. It’s just whether you’re in it or not.’ Baseball was, obviously, an easy fix. But I’m in constant search for a game.”

Past the western edge of Austin’s city limits is Westlake High, where the Street boys went, where the next generation of Street boys will go. At the campus’ highest point sits Westlake Chaparral Stadium, the proving grounds of future Super Bowl champions Drew Brees and Nick Foles.

A path behind the football field winds through lush woodlands to a hidden baseball diamond. On one April afternoon there, Street delivered dozens of pitches to each boy on his under-10 team, insisting they finish with productive swings.

“You want the last one that goes through your brain to be a good one,” he said, like a man who had learned from experience.

When he ran out of balls, he paused to collect the mishits. He checked his FitBit and glanced at two fathers standing outside the batting cage.

“I get winded by this time,” he told them. “Tell your kids to bat early.”

Over his 13 MLB seasons, Street threw 680 innings, a relatively small number. Even in this abbreviated era, starters sometimes surpass that mark before they earn their first million-dollar contract. But Street was a closer through and through, since his standout freshman season in college, when he finished Texas’ College World Series title and won Most Outstanding Player.

Closing was a choice made out of necessity and a choice that rewarded him well; he grossed more than $100,000 for each inning he pitched. The two-time All-Star and 2005 American League Rookie of the Year never threw as hard as his fellow closers, rather relying on deception and location, skills more often seen from starters. But Street’s slighter frame would not have held up to the rigors of repeated 200-inning seasons.

“There was a reason I never lifted a bunch of weights in the middle of my career,” he said. “Because I was so fucking injury prone that I would get too tight.”

Toward the end, he made headlines when he quipped he would retire if told to pitch in an undefined role. “Huston Street is kind of a big baby,” an ESPN headline read. As Street has seen teams move further away from role-specific relief, he maintains they are underestimating the value of preparation routines.

“Now, am I predisposed to believe that because I’m so fucking fragile and I need that shit? Maybe,” he said. “And I’m willing to cop to that.”

Street insists there is one underrated difference between setting up and closing. On a bad night, the set-up man might be pulled before he has a chance to cough up runs. Closers don’t leave games until they surrender the lead.

“In the ninth,” Street said, “it’s fundamentally yours.”

Which was why he loved it so much. The final inning’s enveloping feeling invigorated him, just like the final minutes did his father. In James Street’s most famous comeback as an undersized college quarterback, he led Texas over Arkansas in what is often called the “Game of the Century.”

On the afternoon of Dec. 6, 1969, the majority of United States television sets were tuned to the ABC broadcast. Billy Graham gave the pregame prayer. Marine One, carrying President Richard Nixon, landed next to Razorback Stadium just before kickoff.

Going into the fourth quarter, Arkansas led 14-0. In trouble deep in the pocket, Street evaded several defenders and scrambled for a 42-yard score. He snuck in for the two-point conversion. Down by six with fewer than five minutes remaining, the Longhorns faced a fourth-and-3 from their own 43.

In its wishbone offense, Texas rarely attempted deep throws and rarer still converted them. Street completed only 40 passes all season. As America sat transfixed, Street stepped to his left and unleashed a 45-yard toss to double-covered tight end Randy Peschel. The ball plunged perfectly into Peschel’s hands, Texas soon scored and President Nixon pronounced them national champions.

For the rest of his life, James Street was a local legend.

“You’re just like your dad,” Huston Street’s mother, Janie, once told him. “It’s almost like you want it to be fourth-and-3.”

He has realized she was right. He wanted every game he entered to be a big deal. With his focus intensifying, he struck out more men and walked fewer in save situations. Now he looks to late-night shooting sprees for the same sensation.

“Gaming is the easiest replacement for baseball because it’s the only one-to-one ratio I have in life,” Street said. “Baseball was a perfect one-to-one ratio. I threw a good slider, he swung and missed. I had a good day, the team won. In gaming, I pull the trigger before the other guy, he dies.”

For as much as real estate intrigues him, Street has come to understand how different it is. Sales take far too long to supply the same rush. For four years, he has dreamed about purchasing and developing a massive plot of land on Lake Austin. He regularly treks over in his truck, the untamed trees scratching it all over, to absorb the view and ideate what it could become. Then he reminds himself he doesn’t own it yet.

“Even when it closes, there’s so much work to be done,” he said. “There is no actual idea of winning.”

On Sept. 28, 2013, Street’s parents visited him in San Francisco, where his Padres were playing out the string. A rare day game was on the schedule that Saturday, so Street made a dinner reservation weeks in advance at a Michelin-starred Spanish restaurant.

When an ownership group cancellation opened up last-minute tickets next to AT&T Park’s visiting dugout, Street’s parents took them. From his bench seat, he saw his father basking in the clear 70-degree day, watching his favorite sport from the best seats of his life.

The game was brisk, dinner was a delight and, before 10 p.m., the Streets were back at the Westin St. Francis, near Union Square. Janie went to sleep. Father and son stuck around in the lobby. For hours, they talked about baseball and life and business, like they did when Huston was a kid but in far greater depth. James told Huston the drastic steps he had planned for his structured-settlement firms over the coming years.

Around 4:30 a.m., they headed upstairs. In the elevator, James Street hugged his son. “Buddy, I love you so much,” he said. “I’m so proud of you.”

Later that morning, Huston Street’s parents flew home to Austin. In the evening, with the season over, he followed. Before he went to sleep that night, not 24 hours since their hug, he learned his father had died from a heart attack.

“I’m sorry I’m fucking crying,” Street said, recounting the story. “Yeah, it was sudden, and it was tragic. But, for me and him, it was the perfect closure.”

For a time, Street lost his equilibrium. He did not train that winter and kept busy taking over his father’s businesses and drinking to excess. He reported late to spring training and hardly pitched until the regular season.

Somehow, he logged the best season of his career, so good the streaking Angels traded for him in July. He quickly became the closer with steady set-up man Joe Smith. On dozens of nights in ritzy hotels across America, they would meet up, talk and play cards for hours before bed. And to converse with Street is to interact with his father’s memory. Never does an hour pass without James Street’s name invoked, often alongside an aphorism he coined.

“By the end of our three years together,” Smith said, “I was like, ‘I wish I could’ve known James Street.'”

For many years, Huston Street and his father debated the nature of happiness. They employed extended theoretical examples. Who would be happier between an old-school, third-generation farmer and his college-educated son who returned from school bursting with ideas to modernize the family business? They called it the complacency conundrum, never settling on an answer.

“I would argue that the actual idea of happiness is not needing anything else,” Street said. “You can want, but you don’t need. The lake land, the business, I want all that stuff, but I don’t need it. I would say that I’m perfectly happy right now. I’m not chasing happiness. I’m chasing something else.”

During the latter third of his career, Street often brought his business briefcase to the ballpark. He would leave the clubhouse to take calls pertaining to his real-estate investments or wine auctions.

“Of all the guys I was ever around,” Dave Roberts said, “I’ve never seen anyone who was so in touch with life after baseball.”

Roberts played 10 big-league seasons, coached five and is managing his fourth. He coached Street with San Diego from 2012 to 2014. He came away convinced that Street would have an easier transition to retirement than anyone else he observed.

“As I’m now managing, you really have an appreciation for that,” Roberts said. “Because there’s that balance that he really understood at an early age. Sometimes in the industry, that’s frowned upon, but it shouldn’t be because that allows you to perform your best.”

Players are taught to discover an edge and preserve that edge at all costs. “The 1 percent of players that feel like they can do something different outside of their sport and not lose their edge,” Roberts said, “is very rare.” There is an often-unspoken pressure, too, for each player to exhibit how focused he is.

“The second you show some interest in something else than the sport you’re playing and you falter, in this day and age, people are gonna jump all over that,” said David Freese, Street’s teammate with the Angels. “You’ve got to succeed first, and then you’ve got to keep pushing.”

Street collected 80 of his 324 career saves with the Padres. (Lenny Ignelzi / AP Photo)

Among his investments that date to his playing career, Street has poured more than $1 million into High Brew Coffee, a canned cold brew product. He took smaller stakes in local ventures and cannabis companies.

He is perplexed with the way this country has criminalized cannabis instead of taxing it. He is certain the substance calms people. He partook on a few occasions as a player, but found that it suppressed his next-day drive. In retirement, he has taken to more frequent enjoyment.

“Let’s be clear: Marijuana is amazing,” Street said.

When he loves anything, anyone, Street makes it clear. When he despises something, someone, he does the same. To former teammates, the tilt toward the extremes was part of his appeal. It can be fun to be around someone so plainly having fun.

“When it wasn’t baseball time, the excitement of his business ventures really got him going,” Freese said. “He had a blast playing baseball, and he has a blast doing his off-the-field stuff.”

The joy Street found in baseball sourced more from the nature of one-on-one contests than the sport itself. He loved deciphering how to beat more talented hitters, the same way he loved to squabble with teammates.

“He loves debating,” Smith said. “It doesn’t matter what it is, and it doesn’t matter if he even believes the side he’s on.”

Darren Balsley, the Padres’ pitching coach, recalled times he walked through the Petco Park postgame clubhouse and found Street in the food room in mid-argument with Carlos Quentin or John Baker. “I would hang around,” Balsley said, “just to stir the pot.”

Baseball’s longest-tenured pitching coach, Balsley has seen the game change immeasurably in his 16 seasons. Velocity reigns. But he believes Street’s tools of the trade to be timeless. Even in his spring bullpen sessions, Street sought to never throw a pitch down the middle. Until his last one, he rarely did.

Street once told Smith he aimed to begin most at-bats with three outside fastballs. One would miss. One would net a foul ball. One, the umpire would probably call a strike. So he would get to a 1-2 count without risking hard contact. He would plot the putaway pitch based on the hitter’s reactions to the earlier gambit.

Street also once told Smith it was mathematically impossible to beat him at chess because of how many games he had already played. After months of discussions, they agreed to play. When Smith won, Street immediately proposed a rematch.

“To say he didn’t love baseball, that he loved to compete more, that’s no surprise to me,” Roberts said. “Because he was so competitive, and he was so intelligent and cerebral. That competitiveness attacking hitters and the confidence he had, that’s why he was so dominant.”

In his real-estate negotiations, Street offers the same competitiveness and an unusual flair for disarming honesty. He is gathering experience and confidence to match. Fusing those attributes with the baseball bounty he earned and a taste for risk, he is aiming astronomically high.

“Where I want to be credible next is in business,” Street said. “That’s my next goal, to have made another one hundred or two hundred million dollars by the time I’m 50, and, by the time I’m 60, to be a billionaire. But that’s gonna require a lot of time, a lot of risk, and it’s gonna take 25 years of success. And I might not ever get there.”

One month after his father’s death, saddened and dislodged but still eager, Street purchased the Paggi House, one of Austin’s oldest standing structures, and its surrounding lot near the city center. He quickly entered negotiations to develop the lake-facing land into high-rise condos, but he couldn’t bring himself to finalize plans. Finally, this year, he came to an agreement with a hotelier to build more than 100 hotel rooms, 25 apartments and a restaurant. Street will take a cut of the development profits and retain the rights to a portion of the property.

“If this project happens,” Street said, “it legitimizes a lot about me as a real-estate professional.”

During Street’s eight weeks of general-contracting work under his mentor, Tommy Burt, he heard so many unfamiliar terms and phrases. Many times, Burt recalled, Street would stop him mid-sentence, shaking his head. “I have,” he’d say, “no idea what you’re talking about.” Burt would laugh and retrace his rhetorical steps. Street’s lack of experience slowed his learning, but his ease acknowledging it stood out.

“Most people who have gotten to his level of accomplishment are uncomfortable doing that,” Burt said. “Even in uncomfortable situations, his authenticity would always make him comfortable.”

This hotel project, Burt said, will help catch up his pupil. Partnering with a hotelier lessens his risk, but staying involved is essential.

“That will be sort of his knowledge, his boots-on-the-ground-process,” Burt said. “That’s what you need to have credibility and be able to hold your own with other folks when it comes to this business.”

Street understands that, despite his ambitions, he has not yet achieved legitimacy. His surname has aided him. He said he has had offers sweetened when brokers learned it.

“Street can get in any room in the state of Texas,” said former Texas teammate Buck Cody, a principal at Endeavor Real Estate Group. “The University of Texas, in Austin, is the Yankees and the Cardinals and the Green Bay Packers all rolled into one. When you combine’s Huston success at UT and after with his dad’s iconic stature at UT, there will always be a fascination with him and his name.”

Street, too, will always be engrossed by this place, by the university, by the proximity between downtown and the water. On a balmy Friday afternoon, Street parked his Ford Raptor behind his son’s preschool and queued up pop hits “Old Town Road” and “Rolex,” 3-year-old Rafe’s favorites. From his car seat, he sang along as Street turned out of the parking lot and onto the highway, bound for Lake Austin, bound for the mansion there he hopes to sell and the vast expanse of nearby land he hopes to buy.

These days, he is thinking a lot about the nature of contentment. The 10,198-square foot palace with an elevator and rooms he never enters is unnecessarily big, he realizes now. Half the house would be plenty luxurious for his family. If it came to it, the one-story home where they live now would be just fine, too.

Street poses with a fan at the annual Innings Festival in Tempe Beach Park in Arizona. (John Medina / Getty Images)

“All the rest is just want, some other desire to compete or to battle or to try to improve,” he said. “Or is it just time and how I like to spend my time?”

He likes to spend his time in pursuit. No. He needs to spend his time in pursuit. Without pursuit, he is disoriented.

“In baseball, it was a World Series,” he said. “That was always it. And then you’d get halfway through the season, you’d realize you were not going to win the World Series, and so then you’d have to change your mind, set it elsewhere: ‘Now, I’m not gonna give up a run for the rest of the year.’”

He does not know what exactly he is pursuing now. He thinks it might be respect in business. He also thinks that will leave him unsatisfied. “It is an impossible, infinite game where you will never be your best,” he said. “You can always do better.”

Street is chasing the thrill of negotiation. He is chasing the funds from a successful development. He is chasing the dream he could provide the same guidance for his three sons his father did for him. He is chasing the late-night video-game kills. He is chasing the chase, and he is OK with it.

For now, the chase led back to Austin’s West Lake Hills. The time neared 4 p.m, and a neighborhood block party awaited. Leaving the mansion, Street steered his Raptor onto Capital of Texas Highway and found before him impenetrable rows of cars. In the distance was Pennybacker Bridge, the way back to town. He sighed at the sight.

Rafe Street chimed in from behind him, wondering why the truck was moving so slowly.

“Well, there’s cars in front of us, bud,” Huston Street answered his son. “It’s called ‘traffic.’ Traffic is the only true waste of time in life.”

Top photo of Huston Street: Lisa Blumenfeld / Getty Images

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