Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (10 page)

A month after he was fired in Boston, Dan Duquette, the new general manager in Baltimore, called Johnson. The two men had worked together when Duquette had been the Red Sox’ GM. He needed a manager in Norfolk. Was Johnson interested?

Johnson thought about it briefly, discussed it with his wife, and
made a quick decision. “I’ll take it,” he told Duquette. “I’m not sure why I’ll take it, but I’ll take it.”

Actually, he knew exactly why he was taking it: it was baseball and he was a baseball guy.

“I get paid to go to the ballpark and put on a uniform every day,” he said. “How can I possibly complain?”

It was after midnight as he spoke, a half-eaten plate of food in front of him. He was about to go home for a few hours of sleep. There was another game the next day.

Johnson would be there, in uniform—six hours before first pitch—to get ready for another day in baseball.

No sport is more wedded to ritual than baseball. The day after the World Series ends each year, the question “When do pitchers and catchers report?” is asked as part of the ritual of the off-season. Of course most baseball people don’t acknowledge that there is an off-season. They refer to the winter months as “the hot stove league”—a nickname for yet another baseball ritual that dates to the days when people literally sat around their stoves to keep warm and talk about the trades their team might make while the snow was still falling outside.

Ritual.

For established major leaguers, the ritual of spring training is often a family affair. Cars are packed up for long drives to Florida or Arizona. Kids get their homework assignments for several weeks, or, these days, parents hire tutors to work with them while they miss school for a month to spend time in the sun as their classmates shiver in colder climates in late February and through spring break into March.

It is different for those who have spent all or most of their careers in the minor leagues. Their February ritual almost always involves saying good-bye to their families for six weeks. Maybe they can steal a week away during spring break, but often as not the work involved—not to mention the money involved—in the travel isn’t worth it.

For baseball teams, spring training is an all-hands-on-deck affair. Nowadays, they all have massive, modern complexes that have enough fields to accommodate everyone under contract—the fifty or sixty players who are invited to major-league camp and about two hundred more who report to the minor-league facility.

The players invited to the major-league camp work with the major-league manager and his coaches and with a number of people who will be working in the minor leagues once the season begins: the Triple-A manager and his coaches (most teams have two, some three) and various instructors who rove the minor leagues at all levels during the season, not only working with players, but also reporting to the major-league front office on their progress.

For those who know they will begin the season in the minor leagues, spring training is a time to savor, not just because everything is fresh and the weather is warm, but because you live the life of a big leaguer for six weeks.

“Lots more room in the clubhouse, and the food is a lot better,” Durham manager Charlie Montoyo said on a bright February Sunday, sitting inside the Tampa Bay Rays’ clubhouse in Port Charlotte, Florida.

Montoyo had just been through the good-bye ritual with his family, which was never easy. It was easier this time because his four-year-old son, Alexander, who had already been through three heart surgeries and was facing a fourth in the future, was healthy and doing well. It didn’t make leaving easy; it just made it a little less worrisome.

“I miss them [his wife and two sons] a lot,” he said. “But I remind myself I’m not the only one dealing with missing my family. It’s part of the deal when you do this for a living.”

Montoyo was about to start his sixth season as the manager of the Durham Bulls—arguably the most famous minor-league baseball team in history. The Bulls were immortalized in Ron Shelton’s 1988 movie,
Bull Durham
, and remain the one minor-league team even casual baseball fans can name off the tops of their heads.

Much has changed in Durham in the quarter century since the
movie was filmed there. For one thing, the Bulls no longer play in the Class A Carolina League, several long steps from the majors. (Nuke LaLoosh being called up to “The Show” direct from the Bulls was one aspect of the movie that is extremely unlikely to ever happen.) Since 1998, the Bulls have been the Rays’ No. 1 farm team, which means that most of the Rays’ current stars have passed through Durham at some point.

The Bulls no longer play in Durham Athletic Park, although it still exists and hosts high school, college, and American Legion games. Their new park, which is a mile down the road from the old place, is called Durham Bulls Athletic Park. In Durham, most people just refer to it as the Dee-BAP. It opened in 1995 and is a modern, redbrick facility that seats ten thousand people. The famous snorting bull—“Hit Bull Win Steak”—was moved to the new ballpark, where it now sits atop and behind the left-field wall, known as the Blue Monster, because it is a blue copy of Fenway Park’s Green Monster. In tribute to twenty-first-century diets, the grass that the bull is standing on reads, “Hit Grass Win Salad.” About one or two players a year hit the bull and collect their steak. To the best of everyone’s recollection, no one has cashed in on a salad yet.

The Bulls have retired two numbers in their history, which dates to 1902: One is the number 18 worn by the Hall of Famer Joe Morgan when he played for the team in 1963 on his way to starring first in Houston and then as a two-time MVP in Cincinnati. The other is the number 8 worn by Crash Davis.

Davis did, in fact, play for the Bulls in the 1940s and spent three years in the major leagues prior to that, playing for the Philadelphia Athletics. That’s not why his number is retired, though; it’s retired because Shelton and Kevin Costner made it—and him—famous.

Montoyo has seen
Bull Durham
and appreciates the unique history of the team he manages. Most days, though, he drives to the ballpark from his two-bedroom apartment, sits in his small office under the first-base stands, and makes out a lineup—knowing that the players available to him that day may not be available the next day.

“I’ve loved baseball since I was a kid, and I still love it,” he said. “But at this point in my life, I’m forty-six and I have two kids to raise. Baseball’s my job. The best thing I have going for me this year is that I have a two-year contract. That’s the first time since I got drafted out of college that I’ve had that kind of security. That’s important to me.”

Montoyo has coached and managed in the Rays’ farm system since he “got retired” as a player in 1996. He was talented enough as a kid growing up in Puerto Rico that he was offered the chance to move to California to play junior college baseball by a man named Don Odderman.

“He was Puerto Rican and he looked for kids he thought had a chance to make it in baseball in the U.S. and he financed them,” Montoyo said. “It was kind of a scholarship program. A number of good players came to the U.S. because of him.”

Odderman set Montoyo up to play at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. His coach picked him up at the airport and drove him to the house of a local family that hosted some of De Anza’s players. Montoyo was eighteen and spoke no English. The family he was staying with spoke no Spanish.

After two years at De Anza, he was recruited to play at Louisiana Tech. “I felt like I had to learn a third language when I went down there,” he said. “Southern. People would say to me, ‘Well, I’m fixing to go now,’ and I’d say, ‘What is it you’re going to fix?’ ”

He majored in business at Louisiana Tech but didn’t stick around long enough to get a degree. The Milwaukee Brewers drafted him in the sixth round in 1987, and since playing baseball was his goal, he left school to play rookie ball in Helena, Montana. From there he moved up the minor-league ladder from Beloit to Stockton to El Paso to Denver. Prior to the 1993 season the Brewers traded him to the Expos, which made sense for Montoyo because the Brewers had Pat Listach, who had been the American League’s Rookie of the Year in 1992, playing second base, meaning Montoyo was more likely to get a shot in the majors with another team.

Sure enough, his shot came late in the 1993 season. On September 7, Montoyo arrived at the ballpark in Ottawa, which was then the
Expos’ Triple-A team, at about two o’clock in the afternoon and was called into manager Mike Quade’s office.

“You want to play tonight?” Quade asked him.

Montoyo was surprised by the question. “Of course I do,” he answered.

“Well, then you better get going,” Quade said. “The game in Montreal starts at seven-thirty.”

It took Montoyo a split second to understand what Quade was saying.

“Seriously?” he asked.

Quade just nodded.

“Naturally, I got lost on the way,” he said. “There was no GPS or anything other than a map or asking directions. I pulled in to a gas station looking for help. I spoke Spanish and English, and they spoke French. It didn’t work so well.”

Montoyo finally got to Olympic Stadium at about seven o’clock. He got into uniform and sat on the bench—“pretty much in awe”—as the game against the Colorado Rockies moved along. In the eighth inning, with the game tied, manager Felipe Alou turned and pointed at Montoyo.

“Grab a bat,” he said, which is baseball for “you’re pinch-hitting.”

Montoyo is fluent in three languages: Spanish, English, and baseball. He grabbed the first bat he could find.

Montoyo came up against the Rockies’ reliever Gary Wayne with the go-ahead run on second base and two men out. He promptly singled up the middle, driving in what proved to be the winning run. “The best thing was Felipe sent me up there so quickly I had no chance to think about how scared I was,” Montoyo said. “If I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the bat off my shoulder.”

Montoyo spent the rest of the season with the Expos—twenty-two days in all. He had five at-bats and two hits—the second one driving in two runs, meaning he had three RBIs in five at-bats. As it turned out, that was the beginning and the end of his career as a big-league ballplayer.

He played in the minors for three more seasons. He was a player-coach
at the Double-A level in 1996 and was fairly certain he wasn’t going to be offered any kind of playing contract for the next season. “I actually thought I might get cut in spring training in ’96, but they sent me to Double-A,” he said. “I hit behind Vlad Guerrero [who would go on to hit 449 major-league home runs] for a lot of that season in Harrisburg and got back to Triple-A for a little while before the end of the season.

“But the Expos had some young guys coming along, so I knew I was probably done,” he said. “I knew I wanted to stay in baseball. The question was, how?”

The answer was the Rays. Tom Foley, whom Montoyo knew from his time in the Expos’ organization, had been hired as a field coordinator by the Rays and was looking for someone to manage the Rays’ Class A team in Princeton, West Virginia, during the 1997 season. The Rays would not start playing in the American League until 1998, but they had minor-league teams playing a year earlier. Montoyo had just turned thirty-one. He had played for ten years, including his stint in Montreal in 1993. As a minor leaguer, including six seasons in Triple-A, he had hit .266. Only as a major leaguer did he hit .400—leading to his oft-repeated line about being the game’s “last .400 hitter.”

“I knew another chance might not come down the pike to make the switch,” he said. “So I told Tom I’d love to come and work for him.”

He has been with the Rays’ organization ever since, moving steadily up the minor-league chain from Princeton to Hudson Valley (upstate New York); Charleston, South Carolina (where he met his wife, Samantha); Bakersfield, California; Orlando; Montgomery, Alabama; and finally Durham in 2007. He had just won the Double-A title in Montgomery in his third year managing the Biscuits in 2006 when he got the Triple-A job in Durham. He was an instant success there, winning the division title in 2007 while continuing to receive rave reviews from his players and those running the Rays’ organization.

By then he was a father, his son Tyson having been born in 2003.

Shortly after the end of his first season in Durham, Alexander was born with the heart issues that made hospitals a too-familiar place for the Montoyo family. Alexander had open-heart surgery to try to correct or at least control the symptoms of the condition when he was one month old. Although he was healthy enough to go to school during 2012, he faced at least one more heart catheterization and, depending on the results, the possibility of still more surgery.

“Whenever I think about him going through it again, I want to cry,” Montoyo said softly. On his desk in Bulls Athletic Park are photographs of his family, including several of Alex right after his first surgery. Underneath one is a caption that says, “Prayer with faith can change things.”

Montoyo never prays during a baseball game. He saves it for more important things.