Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (13 page)

Most players get emotional when they are first called up and can remember almost word for word how they found out they were being sent to the majors. Harper talks about it as if describing how he ordered breakfast.

“Tony called me in and said, ‘The team is in California, you’ve got a flight in an hour,’ ” Harper remembered. He smiled. “He also said, ‘You might be back.’ I understood what he was saying, that I was going up because guys were hurt, but to me that was just a challenge. I knew I had to go up and prove that I belonged.”

Often when a player is called up to the majors for the first time, his teammates give him a send-off in the clubhouse—nothing formal, just everyone gathering around to offer congratulations. At some point, someone almost inevitably says, “Don’t come back.” But often as not, players do come back.

No one in Syracuse expected Harper back anytime in the near or distant future. He was one of those for whom promotion to the big leagues was only a question of when, not if.

“If he plays in the minor leagues again, it’ll be on a rehab assignment” after an injury, Lannan said. “He wasn’t doing anything more than passing through.”

Harper’s Triple-A career lasted twenty-one games. He hit .243 with one home run and three runs batted in—hardly statistics that jumped off the page. No one really cared. There wasn’t any doubt about Harper’s talent. Lannan’s prediction proved correct: Harper didn’t come back. In Washington, he hit .270 in 139 games with twenty-two home runs and fifty-nine runs batted in, setting all sorts of records for a player not yet twenty. He played a sometimes spectacular outfield, showed his speed by stealing eighteen bases, and showed his youth by occasionally making base-running gaffes brought on by overeagerness and a belief that his speed would always allow him to take an extra base. In November, he was voted Rookie of the Year in the National League.

Even though he was overshadowed by another rookie, the Angels’ Mike Trout—who is fifteen months older than Harper—he more than lived up to the hype. And, he met the goal he set for himself on
that March morning when Davey Johnson told him he was going to “play some games” in Syracuse: “Go down there and try to get out of there as soon as I could. Make them
want
me up here.”

“Here” was Washington. It is where Harper will be for many years to come. But Harper’s journey was certainly not typical … for him, making them want him was much easier than for most.

LIFE ON THE ROLLER COASTER

On April 26, the Buffalo Bisons were en route by bus from Allentown back home to Buffalo to begin a series the next night against the Rochester Red Wings.

It was a rare daytime bus trip. The Bisons had wrapped up a series the night before with a 12–1 win over Lehigh Valley, and since the twenty-sixth was one of their eight scheduled days off during the season, they spent the night in Allentown before busing home.

The bus had stopped at a McDonald’s so everyone could get something to eat. Twenty-five-year-old pitcher Chris Schwinden, who had been called up to start four games for the Mets at the end of the previous season—and then sent back down to Buffalo to start 2012—was standing in line waiting to order. Schwinden’s new season in Buffalo had gone well so far: he had started four times and was pitching to an ERA of 2.05, even though his record was only 2-2. He had been beaten 1–0 the last time he had pitched and was scheduled to open the series against Rochester the following night.

That changed when manager Wally Backman tapped Schwinden on the shoulder. “Just got a call from New York,” he said. “You’re going up. They need you to pitch in Colorado tomorrow. You need to get to the airport as soon as we get to Buffalo.”

Schwinden had gotten a text the night before that Mike Pelfrey had come out of his last start complaining of shoulder soreness and
had wondered if he might be a candidate for the call-up if Pelfrey couldn’t take his next start.

“It’s not as if you root for a guy to get hurt,” he said. “But guys
do
get hurt, and when someone does, that can mean you get your chance. That’s what had happened when Boof Bonser got hurt in Buffalo the year before. So here was my shot.”

Schwinden had been disappointed but not angry when he had been sent down at the end of spring training. “When I looked back on it, there really wasn’t much I could have or would have done differently,” he said. “I thought I pitched well, but there was nothing I could do to make my twenty days of experience in the majors come close to Miguel Batista’s twenty years in the majors.” (Schwinden wasn’t exaggerating: Batista had first pitched in the majors in Pittsburgh in 1992, and the Mets were his twelfth team.)

“What helped in Buffalo was the weather. It was miserable—cold, windy. That’s perfect for a pitcher. The last thing you want is to foul off a fastball when it’s forty degrees outside. That’s one reason why a lot of pitchers are most effective in April—especially up north.”

Of course going to pitch in Colorado wasn’t exactly an ideal way to get another crack at the majors. The logistics of getting from Buffalo to Denver weren’t all that easy to begin with, and then there was the issue of pitching in Denver’s thin air. Even though run scoring had gone down in Coors Field once the Rockies had started putting their baseballs in a humidor so they wouldn’t fly quite as far, it was still very much a hitter’s park. But Schwinden wasn’t concerned with that. He just wanted to pitch—in
any
major-league park.

Which he did the next evening. He wasn’t awful—in fact he was the Mets’ best pitcher that night in an 18–9 loss. But he wasn’t good either, giving up five earned runs in four-plus innings, hurting himself in the fifth inning with a throwing error that led to a three-run home run.

“Easiest throw in baseball,” he said, shaking his head. “Pitcher to the first baseman. It’s also the hardest throw in baseball because you know it’s the easiest. I psyched myself out that night. Everyone kept telling me I had to keep the ball down in that ballpark—which I
knew. But I got too focused on it. I do get pitches up; I’m not a groundball pitcher. It became kind of a mental barrier for me right from the beginning.”

Given the performance of their other pitchers that night, the Mets decided to give Schwinden another start five days later in Houston—another hitter’s park, though not to quite the same degree as Colorado.

The results were identical: four innings pitched, five earned runs, meaning his ERA stayed exactly the same: 11.25. The only difference was that he was tagged with the loss.

And with a ticket back to Buffalo.

“Didn’t shock me,” he said. “It was disappointing, but I could hardly blame them. I tried to take the approach I took when I got sent down at the end of spring training: Be the best pitcher down there. Be the first guy called back up.”

It took only fourteen days for him to get called back up. The irony was that it was an injury to Miguel Batista that put him on a plane to Toronto to rejoin the team. He sat in the bullpen on the night of May 20 and flew with the team from there to Pittsburgh. That was when Terry Collins told him he was going back to Buffalo. The team had decided it needed an extra bat—in the person of Vinny Rottino—on the bench rather than an extra arm in the bullpen.

There wasn’t much Schwinden could do except pack his bags again and head back to the airport. This time he hadn’t done anything to get sent back except for not being a very good hitter.

When a player is sent down to the minors—or comes up to the majors—the team handles all his travel. Mets traveling secretary Brian Smalls told Schwinden he couldn’t get him on a nonstop flight to Buffalo, so he was sending him through JFK in New York and then on to Buffalo. Tired and a little bit discouraged, Schwinden said fine and headed to the airport. He got to JFK and was told that his flight to Buffalo was delayed for two hours. He sat and waited until he was told the flight was canceled.

He called Smalls. “Get your bags back,” he said. “We’ll send a car for you.”

He was now eight hours by car from Buffalo. That was twice as far as he had been when he was in Pittsburgh. “Vinny [Rottino] took a car service from Buffalo to Pittsburgh that same day,” Schwinden said. “Took him four hours door-to-door.”

It took an hour for Schwinden to recover his bags and get to the car, meaning it was nine o’clock by the time he got out of JFK. It was raining, not hard, but enough to make the night even more depressing than it already had been. Schwinden sat back and decided to try to sleep. He was dozing off when the driver woke him.

“One of the [windshield] wipers is broken,” he said. “I’m going to have to pull off and get it fixed. Can’t drive all the way to Buffalo like this.”

Schwinden looked up and realized the driver had gotten off the highway and was in the Bronx. He could see the lights of Yankee Stadium, where the Yankees were in the process of losing to the Kansas City Royals in front of a crowd announced at only 32,093 on a murky, not-made-for-baseball evening.

The driver found a gas station where it took about forty-five minutes to find new wipers and replace them. It was close to eleven o’clock by the time they were clear of New York and heading west on the New York State Thruway. By now it was raining hard. Schwinden settled back to try to sleep again.

Nothing doing.

“Flat tire,” he said. “I swear to God you couldn’t make it up if you tried.”

The car limped to the side of the road. The driver was an older man, and after holding the umbrella and the flashlight for him for a couple of minutes, Schwinden realized it was going to be the Fourth of July before he got to Buffalo if he waited for him to change the tire.

“Hold the flashlight,” he said finally and got down on his hands and knees to change the tire.

Finally back in the car, Schwinden sent a text to Joe Gocia, the Bisons’ trainer, to find out what time the team was due at the ballpark the next day.

“By then I should have known what was coming,” Schwinden said, laughing.

“Game is at one o’clock,” Gocia responded. “And you’re starting.”

It was two o’clock in the morning when both driver and passenger decided they’d had enough and the car pulled in to a roadside motel outside Binghamton—still several hours from Buffalo. Schwinden asked the driver to have someone pick him up at 6:00 a.m. so he could get a few hours of sleep. He finally reached his apartment at 9:30 in the morning—eighteen hours after leaving Pittsburgh.

“I actually didn’t pitch too badly,” Schwinden said with a laugh. “Went five innings, gave up two earned runs. I was just glad to have my feet on the ground and not be in a car or an airport.”

He was back in an airport a week later, this time headed to Philadelphia. The Mets had called again. Schwinden pitched in relief on May 30 at the tail end of a 10–6 loss, giving up two runs in two-thirds of an inning. He knew that another trip back to Buffalo—which would be the fourth time he’d been sent back to Triple-A since the end of spring training—was likely.

Except it didn’t happen. On June 2, the Mets designated him for assignment—meaning he was off the forty-man roster and would almost certainly (barring an injury that might make the team change its mind) be put on waivers or released within ten days.

“I was stunned,” Schwinden said. “I couldn’t believe that just like that I was no longer a Met. They were the only organization I’d ever been in. I went from being in the major leagues one day to wondering if I was going to have a job the next.

“It was discouraging, but more than that it just caught me completely off guard. All I could think was, ‘Okay, what happens now?’ ”

The answer would make the eighteen-hour trip from Pittsburgh to Buffalo feel as if it had been a weeklong vacation in Hawaii.

Although May and June would turn out to be roller-coaster months for Chris Schwinden, he could at least say he had a better
April than most players who are sent down to the minor leagues at the end of spring training.

The early weeks of a Triple-A baseball season are not often filled with glad tidings. There are a handful of players who are happy with where they are—players who have been promoted from Double-A; a few pitchers who know they will be called up when their team needs a fifth starter after the frequent off days of the first couple of weeks; the Bryce Harpers and Mike Trouts of the world who know their call-up can come at any minute and may come before April is over—depending on injuries.