Blake McFarland’s Path From Minor League Pitcher to Professional Artist

McFarland can remember tinkering with tools for most of his life. His father was a hardwood flooring contractor who could fix anything, but McFarland was more interested in making things from scratch. At home, he would shape wood into bows and arrows. At school, he’d fill his notebooks with sketches of his two passions: baseballs and ocean scenes.

“At first,” he said, “I didn’t really think of it as art.”

By the time he got to high school, McFarland’s main focus was baseball. He was a star pitcher at San Jose’s Leigh High School but didn’t get any college scholarship offers. After a few years at junior colleges, he transferred to San Jose State, where he started 30 games, completing six of them. He went undrafted in 2011 and began his pro career with the Vancouver Canadians of the low Class A Northwest League.

Without a large bonus to carry him through his minor league years, McFarland knew he would need to find work during the off-season. And he knew he didn’t want that work to involve baseball. Although many minor leaguers spend their off-seasons coaching, McFarland needed a break.

He turned to art, which at that point involved scouring Craigslist for broken surfboards, repairing them and painting murals on them — and then reselling them on Craigslist.

“The margins weren’t that great,” he said, laughing. “I bought the boards for $100 to $200 and I sold them for $400 to $600, and I could only finish about 10 during the off-season. But I learned a lot. The main lesson was: It’s harder to be a professional painter than a major league pitcher. I really believe that.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/18/sports/baseball/blake-mcfarland-artist-sculptor.html