John Jaso knew he wanted to retire, so he started shopping for sailboats. It was the 2017 season, and Jaso, the first baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was spending his vacation at home browsing boating websites. And when the Pirates visited a group near a body of water, he would wander the marinas and imagine himself on the high seas.
On a June morning in Baltimore, before a first pitch at 7:10 p.m. against the Orioles, Jaso rented a car and drove to Annapolis, Md. There, he found the boat he was looking for: a 2014 Jeanneau 44 DS. He inspected it, bought it, and shipped it to his off-season home in St. Petersburg, Florida. He returned to the stadium in time to go 2 for 4 with an RBI
Four months later, when the Pirates’ season ended without a playoff spot, a handful of reporters wandered into Jaso’s locker and asked him what his plans were. He had reached the end of his two-year, $8 million deal with the team and was set to become a free agent. He told them his next destination would be somewhere in the Caribbean. He was retiring.
“I have a sailboat,” he said, “so I just want to get away.”
Five years later, as pitchers and catchers began flooding into spring training camps in Arizona and Florida on Monday, Jaso, the last catcher to throw a perfect game, has no regrets about sailing off into the sunset. “Sometimes I’ll just be out on the boat and I’ll be in the water, not sailing or even fishing, and I’ll think, ‘There’s nowhere else on the planet I’d rather be here,'” he said. . “It was the perfect fit for who I am.”
Jaso’s baseball journey has never been better. Tampa Bay drafted him in the 12th round of the 2003 draft and he reached the majors near the end of the 2008 season. In his nine-year career, he was traded three times and converted to first base from catcher after multiple concussions. But he also had plenty of highlights: He caught Félix Hernández’s perfect game in 2012 for the Seattle Mariners — he hasn’t had one in MLB since — and hit the first home run in PNC Park history when he was in Pittsburgh in 2016. The dreadlocks to end of his career made him almost immediately recognizable. And it earned more than $17 million, according to Spotrac.
But he found the MLB life unfulfilling in some unexpected ways. “Baseball set me up for life,” he said. “I love it and respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that started to really weigh on me. Even when I retired, people said, “You could be walking away from the million dollars!” But I had already won millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?”
Boating filled the void in his life. He familiarized himself with every leg of the ship. He took a course on diesel engine engineering and installed solar panels and a wind turbine. He devoured hours of YouTube videos about electronics and made sure he knew what each cable did. “If something goes wrong in the open ocean,” he said, “I’m the only one out there to fix it.”
All that was left to do: Learn how to sail.
He found an ad for a sunset cruise on Craigslist and emailed the captain, offering a few hundred dollars for a crash course in commanding a boat. After a few hours, he felt comfortable enough to do it himself. “It was like learning to hit a fastball and lay off a slider,” he said. “You can hear coaches talk about it all day, but you’ll only learn how to do it if you face it in a game.”
Jaso named his boat Roaming Rose and began taking day trips to the Gulf of Mexico in early 2018. One day that spring, he was working on his boat when he was struck by a sudden and strange sensation. “I thought, something is very strange right now,” he said. “Like I forgot something. And then it hit me: I should have been in spring training. I started laughing because I realized: I didn’t miss him at all.”
He made his first big trip a few weeks later. He sailed south to Key West and stayed on board for three weeks before departing for the Abaco Islands in the northern Bahamas, anchoring in a sheltered bay for the better part of a month. He took off when he heard of a big storm moving across the Atlantic. He avoided most of the wind and rain on the five-day sail home, but on the final night, he said he encountered violent winds and lightning.
On deck, he had one hand on the wheel and one on his bag. His life jacket was tied tightly in case he was thrown overboard. He watched the lightning marble the sky and felt its gusts shake the boat. He notified the Coast Guard of his location and called his brother as backup. After a few hours of white hooking, he returned to land.
“Right now, you’re terrified and you want to be as far away from danger as possible,” he said. “But once it’s over, you appreciate where you are more. There is that euphoria that comes over you when the storm clouds part. It’s like holding your breath underwater and then coming up to the surface and taking your first sip of air.”
When Jaso described the experience to Fernando Perez, a friend and former teammate, Perez wasn’t the least bit surprised. “Playing professional baseball is kind of a drug,” said Perez, who is now a video analyst for the San Francisco Giants. “When you retire, you have to find another high. The remedy John found was to be in the middle of nowhere and stay alive. That first storm didn’t scare him. He liked to be caught.”
For the first two years after retirement, Jaso spent about six months of the year on his boat. He was otherwise based in Saint Petersburg. Although he said he doesn’t follow baseball anymore, he tries to catch a game or two every year. In 2018, during a Rays win over the Boston Red Sox, he tried to go down to the dugout to say hello to some former teammates. But an usher saw his tie-dyed, sleeveless T-shirt and lack of ticket and she shook him back in the cheap seats. Finally, another usher recognized him and let him down.
He has also traveled extensively in Europe, discovering his passion for exploring his father’s ancestral land in the Basque Country of northern Spain. And he has driven a caravan to Australia and Indonesia. But the boat was his greatest pleasure. “I want my life to be simple and it doesn’t get simpler than being on a sailboat,” he said. “You treat the boat right and she treats you right. That’s all there is.”
Before the pandemic, he tied Roaming Rose to Turks and Caicos. With travel restrictions, he was stuck there for almost two years. When he was given permission to return and take delivery of the boat in 2022, he brought his girlfriend, Jayden Davila, along for a three-month voyage around the Caribbean. They docked in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
“John is a pretty laid-back person in general,” Davila said. “But there’s another level of peace and happiness for him when he’s on board. Even when there were problems—and something was wrong—he liked to deal with them. When things are quiet, he sometimes randomly picks up his guitar and starts playing. It’s really a beautiful existence for him out there.”
Jaso still lives primarily in St. Petersburg, where he manages a number of investment properties. But it is rarely in one place for long. This winter, he’s snowboarding in Colorado and Wyoming. By spring, it will be back on the boat.
“When you travel, you return to something primitive,” he said. “Remove yourself from the physical world — this concrete, electronic world. And you return to that sense of wonder. It’s the same feeling you get when you hold a newborn baby, look into their eyes and feel the world disappear around you.
“Sometimes it’s easy to forget that we all come from the same place. When you’re out there on the water, you remember.”
