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Bottenfield: From All-Star to CCM artist Wednesday, Dec 12, 2007 By Lee Warren |
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In Kent Bottenfield’s case, the itch to play music was present during much of his nine-year major league career, during which he played for the Montreal Expos, the Colorado Rockies, the San Francisco Giants, the Chicago Cubs, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Anaheim Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros. At one point, during the 1996 season, Bottenfield even began to bring his keyboard on the road with him. “Whenever baseball was not going so good, I couldn’t wait to get back to my room to start playing and I started thinking that maybe I could do music someday,” Bottenfield said. “But I felt like God was telling me, ‘You know what Kent? I have you given you baseball right now. You need to set that music aside.’ So I quit music completely and that’s really when my career started taking off.” And take off it did. In 1999, while starting for the Cardinals, he was 18-7 with a 3.97 ERA, which earned him an All-Star game appearance. In 2001, at the age of 32, his career was cut short with a shoulder injury, but not before amassing solid career numbers that included a 46-49 record with a 4.54 ERA. He had a chance to play with many great players such as Gary Carter, Larry Walker, Jeff Bagwell and Mark McGwire. And it all felt like a dream to him. “I felt blessed that I got a chance to live out my dream,” said Bottenfield, who caught the eye of a coach at the age of 8, which catapulted him into the spotlight and eventually a chance to play professionally. “I got to play for 16 years professionally — nine seasons in the major leagues. Not many people get to do that. It’s a rare thing when you think about all the number of people who play baseball and who actually end up in the major leagues. So, I felt totally blessed. I never took it for granted. Never thought it made me any more special than anybody else. I was just a kid living a dream.” Bottenfield grew up in Portland, Ore., in a family that was in church every time the doors were open. He heard the gospel repeatedly, but says he “never made it my own.” After being drafted by the Montreal Expos in 1986 at the age of 17, he slipped into a pew one night in a church in West Palm Beach, Fla. — the place the Expos sent him to play in the instructional leagues — and he heard the gospel again. This time it hit home. “God brought me into a desert,” Bottenfield said. “I was away from my family, my friends, my church and all the people I counted on. And He brought me to that place to tell me that it doesn’t matter who I thought I might be or how well I threw that little white ball. Those things had nothing to do with eternity. They had nothing to do with what He created me for. And it was that moment in my life when I realized I had not made that commitment myself and I received Christ that evening.” As he grew in his faith, Bottenfield wanted his teammates to know he loved them. He didn’t want to view them as just being a notch in his spiritual belt. He’s certain that he wasn’t always successful in doing so, but he gets chocked up when thinking about one teammate and his wife who invited Bottenfield and his wife, Pamela, out to dinner. They asked questions about the faith and about salvation in particular. Bottenfield doesn’t know if they became believers after that, but his compassion for the couple clearly struck a chord with them. In December of 2004, at the age of 36, Bottenfield had a life-threatening heart condition. He says that surviving that incident was life-changing. While he was in the hospital, his doctor, a fellow believer, closed the door to his room one day and encouraged him to get serious about his music career. His wife also reminded him of what God revealed to him in 1996 regarding his music — that it wasn’t the time for it then, but maybe now was the time. Bottenfield’s first CD, “Take Me Back” had been released that same year and he said he had an increased passion for reaching people. In September of this year, his second release, “Back in the Game,” was released and it hammers upon a theme found on his first CD — reconciliation. “I feel that if we are honest with ourselves then 95-99 percent of life should be spent reconciling with God,” Bottenfield said. “We mess up. We mess up even sometimes when we don’t know we’re messing up. We do things out of habit and don’t think twice about it. We strain relationships. We react sometimes out of anger and frustration and we treat people in a way that is not becoming of a Christian. “I believe that’s why Scripture tells us to pray without ceasing. I think that’s a real instruction for us, because we need to. And I think a lot of that prayer [should be centered around] getting back into a right relationship with a holy God.” --30--
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