Closer to home: Christensen hangs up cleats, joins family business

No one should be surprised that McKay Christensen gave up a professional baseball career in the prime of life so he could take a real job working alongside his father and become something more than a baseball player. After all, this is the same guy who once passed up a million-dollar signing bonus from a professional baseball team to serve a church mission in Japan.

You can find him now on the job in Lehi planning the Traverse Mountain development, where he works and lives with his wife and two children. He gave up money, fame, prestige and a game for all of this.

"It wasn't," he explains, "what I wanted to do with my life."

Imagine that.

He began his baseball career with great fanfare; he left with barely any notice. Christensen, once a prize recruit of the BYU football and baseball teams and Major League Baseball, ended his eight-year professional baseball career in April of 2004 at the age of 28, almost exactly 10 years after he was made the sixth pick of the draft.

One day he was collecting three hits in five at-bats and driving in the winning run for the Cincinnati Reds' Triple A farm team, the Louisville Bats; the next day he was calling it quits and preparing to move to Utah. "It came as a complete surprise," Bats manager Rick Burleson told the Louisville Courier-Journal. "There was nothing I could say to change his mind."

Looking back, Christensen says, "Baseball has a way of swallowing up years of your life, and I didn't want it to swallow any more years. I didn't want to be a baseball player always. I didn't want it to be the only thing I did in my life. I know it's not typical for most people, but most people don't understand what baseball is really about. It's consuming. It requires a huge sacrifice. It's hard to ever become anything other than a baseball player. I knew a lot of guys who, when they were done with baseball, had nothing to go to."

As a kid, Christensen enjoyed riding in a truck with his father, Steve, while he oversaw his real estate development business. During baseball's off-season, Christensen continued to work with his father, who, along with his brothers, Jim and LaVar, were successful developers in their hometown of Fresno, Calif., before moving one by one to Utah.

"It's in my blood," says Christensen, who is working on the master plan for a development that will include up to 8,000 units and 4 million square feet of commercial real estate. "I've always loved building and developing. I've grown up with it."