sportsjabber.net

An e-mail requesting an internship arrived at the Agriculture Department this summer with an impressive resume: Princeton University degree in operations research and financial engineering, 3.8 college GPA, 1520 SATs.

Ross Ohlendorf didn’t mention his 95 mph sinking fastball, but it probably wouldn’t have hurt his chances. Department officials were impressed that the Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher wanted to work for them in the offseason.

Doug McKalip, confidential assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, recalled the secretary’s reaction when told of Ohlendorf’s e-mail: “Are you serious? A major league player wants to do this?”

Good location is key to both pitching and landing a job, and Ohlendorf had mastered that this summer, arranging to catch Vilsack’s opening pitch at a Pirates game in Pittsburgh because of the pitcher’s interest in agriculture.

“I talked to him briefly afterward and told him my family raised longhorns,” Ohlendorf recalled in an interview at his USDA office. “A little while later, it came into my head that it would be a great opportunity to intern here in the offseason.”

He followed that up with an e-mail to McKalip.

Ohlendorf said he and his father are involved in their longhorn cattle business outside Austin, Texas — the pitcher works on the ranch’s Web site, even during the baseball season — and that he’s been developing an interest in how government works.

“So this was a really good opportunity to combine the two,” he said.

Now, Ohlendorf shows up every day at the office for his internship in a kind of throwback to earlier times when baseball players had to supplement their income working offseason jobs.

Except that Ohlendorf isn’t getting paid, and he usually takes afternoons off to work out. He typically logs a little more than 20 hours a week, and plans to extend his eight-week internship, which began last month, by two weeks.

Ohlendorf, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound right-hander, shares a small office with another USDA employee. His work is mainly focused on animal identification — the nationwide tracking system intended to pinpoint an animal’s location after a disease is discovered.

“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he said. “In addition to learning a lot of things and meeting a lot of neat people, I’ve gotten to do some cool events too.”

He mentioned one at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building,
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