A Former Baseball Player Recreates Himself at Rutgers
Forced off the field by injury, law student discovers a passion and success in a legal career
‘The injury devastated me since I had been working all my life to get to that point. We all recognize that pro baseball is a business, and when you’re not on the field, they can’t evaluate you. It gives others a chance.’-- Harold Brantley
When the National League’s Miami Marlins drafted him in 2009, Harold Brantley felt ready to realize his boyhood fantasy of playing major league baseball.
He’d be following in the footsteps of his uncle. Cliff Brantley, who pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1990 to 1992, and taught his nephew, a speedy outfielder from Maryland, the finer points of the game, especially the importance of mental toughness. It was an asset few major league hopefuls could claim.
“He was absolutely instrumental to me in pursuing my baseball career,” the younger Brantley says. “We’d talk constantly about acting and thinking as a professional. He always told me your mental game must be stronger than your physical game.”
So when the Marlins offered him a contract, following three years of strong Big East competition at the University of Connecticut, where he batted .312 as a junior, Brantley felt prepared. His decision to put off completing his degree was an easy one.
“I was chasing a dream and the dream was coming true,” Brantley says. “Playing pro ball was what I always wanted to do and I wanted to pursue it then.”
Yet, it was not to be. A severe injury to his throwing arm forced him off the diamond for months of rehabilitation. He began to consider alternatives. Surprising even himself, Brantley quickly became fascinated with the legal system during a business law elective course – his first exposure to the legal profession – while back at UConn to complete his communications degree during baseball’s offseason.
He gave baseball one final try before he reached that decision, but today Brantley, 26, is a third-year student at Rutgers School of Law in Newark, set to embark on a career with a major international law firm.
“The injury devastated me since I had been working all my life to get to that point,” he recalls. “We all recognize that pro baseball is a business, and when you’re not on the field, they can’t evaluate you. It gives others a chance.”
Still, the minor league experience and the mental toughness he’d developed kept alive hope that he could rehab and come back. He had climbed from the Florida Gulf Coast League to the Marlins’ Class A affiliate, Jamestown, N.Y., where he hit an impressive .302 in 2010, before the injury sidelined him.
Released by the Marlins’ organization in 2011, the 5-foot, 10-inch, 185-pound Brantley, who holds the Maryland high school career record with 27 triples, signed on with Gateway Grizzlies (Collinsville, Il) of the independent Frontier League, but his experience there at age 24 (relatively old for a minor league prospect) told him his pro career had ended before he was officially released.
“It was extremely difficult, but because I knew I had given it everything I had, I was at peace with it,” says Brantley, who, in anticipation, had already applied to law schools.
His passion for the law, triggered by that undergraduate law course, made it easier for Brantley to push baseball aside and immerse himself in the intensity of law school. “One thing I figured out early is how to focus. I am totally able to block out everything else and concentrate, like I did when playing baseball,” says Brantley, who lives with his wife in West New York, near his extended family.
Brantley is reaping the rewards. Maintaining a 3.71 GPA, he earned a New Jersey Supreme Court clerkship following his first year at Rutgers. He then spent the past summer as an intern in the New York office of O’Melveny & Myers, where he begins as an associate attorney following spring graduation.
“Talk about hitting a homerun,” says Brantley. “I’m extremely lucky to have gotten an offer and excited about the opportunities that I might have.”
Brantley’s love for baseball and his family ties will keep him closely connected to the game, too. He’s preparing to play next year in a Bergen County amateur league, still roots for the Marlins because of the opportunity they gave him and remains in regular contact with first-cousin Cliff Brantley Jr., now under contract to play for the Gulf Coast League affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays.
With Cliff Jr. now living that boyhood dream, the cousins have plenty to discuss.