Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (11 page)

As 2012 began, Montoyo had never failed to reach the postseason while managing in Durham. He had reached the playoffs in each of his first five seasons, winning the Triple-A National Championship in 2009. The Rays had played their first season in 1998 and for ten years had been one of baseball’s worst teams. But in 2008 the young players they had acquired with high draft picks through the years began to pay dividends, and they won the American League East title and made it to the World Series. They made the playoffs again in 2010 and in 2011, all the while managed by Joe Maddon, who had been hired at the end of the 2005 season, when the Rays finished 67-95.

The team had been sold by then, and new management was in place. After two more horrific seasons (61-101 and 66-96) under Maddon, the Rays took off. The young talent moving through the farm system made the managing job in Durham one of the better ones in Triple-A. Montoyo was grateful to have good players, although he was always aware of the fact that he was expected to deliver those players to the majors with good attitudes, good fundamentals, and an understanding of how Maddon wanted the game played.

Montoyo’s success, along with the fact that players universally sing his praises after playing for him, has made his a name that has come up when teams are talking about hiring a manager. Still, he’s a realist: the guy in front of him in Tampa isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Maddon is only fifty-eight and considered one of the game’s best managers.

That means another organization is going to have to go looking for someone and think, “Hey, that guy in Triple-A with no major-league experience might be the answer.” Montoyo knows his best shot to make it to the majors is the Ron Johnson route—as a coach. One reason that most Triple-A managers coach third base is to prepare themselves for possibly being a base coach in the major leagues. Even so, Montoyo doesn’t give “the jump,” as it is called in Triple-A, much thought—especially once spring training is over and he heads back to Durham.

“When I was a player, there were guys who became obsessed with why they weren’t in the big leagues,” he said. “They would sit around and wonder why someone else got called up instead of them or what needed to happen to get them up to the majors.

“The same is true when you’re managing. It doesn’t do any good to sit around and wonder, ‘When is my chance going to come? Is my chance
ever
going to come?’ Some guys get it when they least expect it. Some guys never get it.

“All I know right now is I have a job and I like my job. I get paid okay, and I like going to work every day. I don’t even look at the standings during the season. Believe me, I know when we’re winning and when we’re losing, and our local media guys always let me know where we are in the standings. In the past, when we’ve been closing in on clinching the division, our radio guy always lets me know, ‘Five more games to clinch, four, three,’ so I know what’s going on. But I never go out of my way to find out.

“Getting a big-league job often has as much to do with being in the right place at the right time as it does with doing your job well. Just like playing. I always tell my players if they don’t get discouraged
because they’re here and keep giving everything they have every day, their chance will come. I tell myself the exact same thing.

“I have one goal in life right now: take care of my family. That hasn’t been easy since Alexander was born. As long as I can do that, I’m fine.”

Of the fourteen men managing in the International League in 2012, two had been managers at the major-league level: Dave Miley, who was in his seventh season managing the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees, had managed the Cincinnati Reds from late in 2003 until midway through 2005 and had been fired after compiling a 125-164 record. Joel Skinner, in his first season managing the Charlotte Knights—the White Sox’ Triple-A team—had been an interim manager in Cleveland in 2002, going 35-41. That record was good enough to get him interviewed for the job at season’s end but not good enough to get him hired.

Every manager in the league hoped his time would come—or come again—when he would be in the majors.

Seven of the fourteen had played in the majors, ranging from Montoyo’s twenty-two days as a .400 hitter to Lehigh Valley manager Ryne Sandberg, who was in the Hall of Fame. If anyone in the group was considered a lock to manage in the majors someday, it was Sandberg.

“First of all, the guy’s really good,” said Pawtucket’s Arnie Beyeler. “Second of all, the back of the bubble gum card matters.”

Among the facts on the back of Sandberg’s bubble gum card were sixteen major-league seasons, almost all of them with the Chicago Cubs; ten trips to the All-Star game; nine Gold Gloves as the National League’s best defensive second baseman; seven Silver Slugger awards as the best hitter at his position; and the 1984 National League MVP. Most important of course was the last notation: inducted into the Hall of Fame, 2005.

Sandberg had already been mentioned as a future Cubs manager
and had been interviewed prior to the 2012 season for the St. Louis Cardinals job after Tony La Russa retired. He was in his second season at Lehigh Valley, and most in the league didn’t expect him to be around much longer. Sure enough, at the end of 2012, he was named the Philadelphia Phillies’ bench coach. With Charlie Manuel turning sixty-nine before the start of the 2013 season, most looked at Sandberg as the Phillies’ manager-in-waiting. The wait was shorter than he expected: Manuel was fired in August 2013 and Sandberg was named to take his place.

“I really admire the fact that he’s paid his dues managing in the minors,” Beyeler said. “A lot of guys with his background think being in the minors is beneath them. They’ll either take a coaching job in the majors or just wait for the phone to ring. Ryne was willing to start at the bottom and work his way up. I think in the long run it’ll make him a better manager when he gets up there—which he will, very soon.”

Sandberg had managed at Class A, Double-A, and Triple-A for the Cubs and had made no secret of the fact that he dreamed of managing the Cubs. But he was passed over for Mike Quade when Lou Piniella retired in 2010 and again at the end of the 2011 season, when new general manager Theo Epstein hired Dale Sveum. Some thought Epstein passed on Sandberg because he didn’t want to ask a Cubs icon to manage such a bad team. The Cubs were certainly bad in 2012—they lost 101 games under Sveum. Others thought Epstein wanted “his own guy,” and no one would ever see Sandberg as anybody’s guy but his own.

Now that Sandberg is managing in the big leagues, his players would be well advised not to bring what Tony La Russa called the “major-league attitude” with them to the ballpark each day because it won’t go over well with the manager.

As his players made their way onto the field for pregame stretching one afternoon in Allentown, someone asked Sandberg how he dealt with a player who was late for stretching. Sandberg looked as if he had been asked if he had ever considered trying to fly to the moon.

“That would never happen,” he said quietly, but with steel in his voice. “My players know better.”

Clearly, Sandberg could care less what the back of his bubble gum card says. Managing—at any level—is a lot more serious than that. In 2012, there was a sign over the door that leads from the tunnel to the IronPigs’ dugout on the third-base side of Coca-Cola Park. It said: “Play like an asshole today.”

It is something just about everyone in Triple-A aspires to do.

SENT DOWN … CALLED UP …

When the 2011 baseball season ended, Washington Nationals pitcher John Lannan was excited. He was also a bit apprehensive.

“I felt like I had lived through a lot of bad times with our team,” he said. “I thought we were on the verge of something good happening. I also knew they were planning to do a lot in the off-season. I guess I didn’t understand quite how much.”

Lannan had turned twenty-seven the day before the Nationals’ season finale. He had pitched to a record of 10-13, hardly anything to write home about, but his ERA had been 3.70 in thirty-three starts—the best numbers of his career. He was durable, he was left-handed, and he had battled back after a slump in 2010 that had resulted in being sent briefly down to Double-A—after beginning the season as Washington’s opening-day starter for the second year in a row.

“Being sent down was a little bit of a shock to my system,” he said. “But I was pitching poorly, and I needed to work on my mechanics and try to get myself straightened out. I knew what they were trying to do, so it didn’t bother me very much. I didn’t like being there, but I understood the reasoning behind it.”

Lannan had made it to the majors quickly after being drafted out of Siena College by the Nationals in 2005. Because the team had so little pitching, a lot of young pitchers were rushed to the majors to see what they had. Lannan was twenty-two when he got the call in the
summer of 2007. He had started the season with the Nationals’ Class A team in Potomac but had moved quickly up the ladder through Double-A and Triple-A. When his ERA through six starts at Triple-A was 1.66 he found himself in Washington.

“It happened very fast that year,” he said. “But to me it was, ‘Okay, this is the way it’s supposed to be.’ I had a lot of confidence in myself. It wasn’t as if I started the year thinking I’d be in the majors by July, but I did believe I was going to be in the majors in the near future.”

What was hard to believe was where he found himself in his third major-league start. He had gotten a win in his second outing, and his turn came up again on August 6 in San Francisco. As luck would have it, Barry Bonds was sitting on 755 home runs—meaning he was tied with Hank Aaron for the all-time lead in home runs. Lannan didn’t really care if Bonds had taken steroids in order to catch Aaron; all he knew was he didn’t want to give up No. 756 and become a footnote in baseball history.

Four times Bonds came to the plate that night. Once, Lannan walked him. The other three times he got him out: on a foul to third base; a double-play ground ball; and a strikeout on a 3-2 pitch in the seventh inning.

“The last at-bat is pretty vivid in my mind,” he said, smiling. “The place was packed, and here I was a couple of weeks out of the minors. Everyone was standing and it was a 1–1 game. When I got him, I walked off the mound wondering if the whole thing was a dream. I mean, seriously, a year earlier I’d been pitching for the Savannah Sand Gnats, and now I was striking Barry Bonds out when he was trying to break the all-time home run record. Are you kidding?”

Lannan became a regular in the Nats’ rotation for the next four years except for the brief stint in Harrisburg in 2010. He had been arbitration eligible for the first time in 2011, meaning his salary had taken a huge jump from the $458,000 he had made in 2010 to $2.75 million in 2011. He was arbitration eligible again for the 2012 season. The previous year, he had accepted the Nats’ salary offer without going to arbitration. When the team offered $5 million, Lannan
and his agent countered by asking for $5.7 million. When the team refused, that meant Lannan’s case would be heard by an arbitrator who would pick one salary or the other. There was no compromise.