Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander Joe Blanton is a picture of longevity

If he has some free time this weekend, Dodgers pitcher Joe Blanton could walk out of the team hotel in San Francisco, hop onto the subway and take a 30-minute ride to Walnut Creek to see an exhibition of photography.

He’s in it.

Blanton, 35, is one of the star subjects of “Fantasy Life,” which tells the story of the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 draft class in images rather than statistics. The photos reveal the vulnerability of players trying to navigate a career path in which fame and fortune turn out to be the exception.

“It’s pretty neat,” Blanton said. “It’s cool to see where guys are 10 years down the road. Some are coaches, some are insurance agents, some guys are still playing.

“It’s probably normal for every team, but you get a picture to put with what guys are doing.”

The photographer was Tabitha Soren, a former MTV personality, who met the players in spring training in 2003. Her husband is Michael Lewis, whose book “Moneyball” was published that year. While Lewis focused on the inner workings of the A’s braintrust, Soren was captivated by the newest class of players.

“I was so taken with all the hope and innocence on their faces,” she said. “I also felt like these were the winners. These were the guys that got selected to be professional baseball players. I assumed, naively, that they were all going to end up playing in Oakland, or for a major league team.”

When she learned that most of them would fall short of the majors — one of six MLB draft picks make it, even if only for a day, according to Baseball America — she found that arc so compelling that she committed to track 21 draft picks over time.

It took 13 years. “I wanted not only the ascent, but the stepping away from baseball as well,” Soren said.

Oakland’s top two draft picks in 2002 — outfielder Nick Swisher, followed by Blanton — enjoyed long major league careers. But 16 of the 21 players Soren tracked never made it to the majors. One worked in a coal mine and another struggled with homelessness.

“Most of my players,” Soren said, “they were making $500 a week, for years and years and years.”

Soren laughs off any notion that she is a baseball expert; at first, she said, she would say “outfit” rather than “uniform.” Blanton recalled how Soren explained that she wanted to track not only the careers of the players but “their physical changes, and if they were still in baseball, how the body might progress.”

Said Soren: “One of my theories was that their bodies would change radically along the way, in some way, shape or form. That didn’t actually work out. They all took care of themselves and looked good, week after week, year after year. Those pictures were not very transformative.”

But Blanton had a long memory. In 2013, when he was pitching for the Angels and met her for a photo shoot, he wore a tight shirt, just like she had asked the prospects to wear a decade earlier.

“He had also lost a ton of weight,” Soren said, laughing. “That was his way of making that very obvious.”

Soren is expanding the exhibit into a book, which will include background on each player, some of it written by the players themselves. The book is scheduled for publication next spring.

Blanton announced his retirement in 2014, after making two starts at triple-A. Soren had his career log complete — A’s, Philadelphia Phillies, Dodgers and Angels — when she looked up at a television during a gym workout last summer.

“God, that looks a lot like Blanton,” she thought.

He had come back, to the Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates last season, and to the Dodgers this season, reinventing himself as a relief pitcher. That has Soren wondering how to finish the page in her book on Blanton.

“I’m hoping we don’t go to press too early, because God knows what he could be doing then,” she said. “He could be at his vineyard, or he could be in the World Series.”

bill.shaikin@latimes.com

Twitter: @BillShaikin