Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (15 page)

WALLY BACKMAN: SECOND CHANCES

The toughest place to be in the International League in the month of April is Buffalo. Syracuse, Rochester, and Pawtucket aren’t exactly balmy, but there is nothing quite like Buffalo. That’s why in 2012 the Buffalo Bisons—the Mets’ Triple-A team—frequently offered two-for-one deals to their fans early in the season: come to one game, get tickets to another.

Snow on opening day in Buffalo isn’t uncommon. In 2012, the temperature was a relatively mild forty-three degrees when the Bisons took the field to play the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The Yankees were baseball’s version of the Flying Dutchman in 2012—a team, like the hero of the Wagnerian opera, without a home. Only true love could free the sea captain from his curse to sail the seas forever. For the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team, it would be a little simpler: once the Yankees finished renovating the ballpark in Scranton, the team would have a home in 2013. That wasn’t going to help those on the team in 2012, though: about half of their home schedule would be played in Rochester; the rest of their “home” games would be played in the opponent’s ballpark with the Yankees batting last.

Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had hoped to put the team in Newark for the season. The independent league Newark Bears played in a thirteen-year-old sixty-two-hundred-seat stadium that would have fit the Yankees’ needs just fine. It would have had the
added benefit of being only a few miles from Yankee Stadium when players went up or were sent down.

That, however, was the rub. Because the ballpark was less than seventy-five miles from Citi Field—the Mets’ home ballpark—the Mets invoked their territorial rights and refused to allow the Yankees to put the team there. The number of fans who might have passed on buying a ticket to a Mets game to go see Scranton/Wilkes-Barre play in Newark could probably be counted on both hands. But the Mets, who had serious attendance issues and even more serious financial woes, weren’t taking any chances.

“I’m not angry,” Cashman insisted during spring training. Then he smiled. “But payback can be a bitch.”

Cashman’s Triple-A players would never have the chance for payback. Like the legendary Flying Dutchman, they were doomed to wander the International League throughout 2012.

Unfettered by the weather—or perhaps encouraged by the fact that there was no snow—10,495 showed up to celebrate opening day for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Coca-Cola Field. The ballpark, opened in 1988, seats 18,025, making it one of the largest minor-league stadiums ever built. It is not to be confused with Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, which was built twenty years later. Seven of the fourteen ballparks in the International League had corporate names. Naming rights have become a major source of revenue for sports franchises at every level of play. Some I-League teams hung on to their stadium names because of tradition; others did so because no one had made them an offer.

The Bisons opened their home season with a 12–3 victory. It was the home debut for Wally Backman as the team’s manager. Backman had managed seven minor-league teams in eleven years, after having been a major-league manager for exactly five days in November 2004, when the Arizona Diamondbacks had fired him before he ever put on a uniform.

“I’ve climbed all the way up the mountain, gone all the way back to the bottom, and now I’m trying to climb back up again,” he said, sitting in his office one afternoon, an ever-present pack of cigarettes
on his desk. Once it seemed that every manager at every level of baseball smoked. Now managers like Jim Leyland of the Detroit Tigers (who spent years sneaking into the runway next to the dugout to smoke) and Backman are exceptions, not the rule.

Backman was in the third year of his return to the Mets’ organization. He had been brought back into the fold by team COO Jeff Wilpon, in part because he’d had success as a minor-league manager but also because he was a link to long-ago past glory in New York.

Backman had hit .320 in 1986 as the team’s spark-plug second baseman, leading off against right-handed pitching as part of a very successful platoon with Tim Teufel—who was also back with the Mets, as a coach at the major-league level. In all, Backman had played fourteen big-league seasons after being the Mets’ No. 1 pick in the 1977 amateur draft.

He had gotten into managing in 2002 and had immediate success with the Birmingham Barons, the White Sox’ Double-A team. At the end of the 2004 season, after managing that year in the Diamondbacks’ system, he was named manager of the Diamondbacks. It seemed to make perfect sense: smart, tough, spark-plug players often make good managers. Backman reminded people a little bit of Earl Weaver—except that he’d had a much better playing career than the Orioles’ Hall of Fame manager.

But Backman never got a chance to prove how good he could be at the big-league level. On the day he was introduced by the Diamondbacks, a
New York Times
story revealed that Backman had dealt with legal and financial issues that the Diamondbacks apparently were not aware of when they offered him the job.

He had filed for bankruptcy and had been arrested twice: once for DWI and once for an altercation inside his home that involved his wife and another woman. He had served one day in jail after a judge suspended the rest of a one-year sentence. Initially, the Diamondbacks stood by their hire. But five days later they announced Backman had been fired and said they had failed to do a proper background check on him and he hadn’t made them aware of his past.

Backman bounced from the top of the mountain to the bottom in a matter of days.

“I made mistakes and I had to learn from them,” he said, eight years removed from the non-stint in Arizona. “It was hell to go through. I paid a major price, but I always believed I was tough enough and good enough to come back from it.”

He had to go all the way down to independent league ball for three seasons, managing the South Georgia Peanuts in the South Coast League for a year and then the Joliet JackHammers of the Northern League for a year and a half. He hit rock bottom—or rockiest bottom if there is such a thing—when he was fired midway through his second season by the JackHammers, who, for all intents and purposes, were out of money and about to go bankrupt.

“I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do next,” he said. “Part of me just wanted to go home [to Oregon] and stay there with my family. They were the ones who were still standing next to me when the Arizona thing happened.”

He smiled and lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair, put his feet on his desk, and shook his head. “I spent a lot of time standing in the middle of Times Square with traffic coming at me in both directions and no one with me except my parents, my wife, and my kids standing by me. It wasn’t a good feeling.”

In the fall of 2009, Backman was scheduled to make an appearance in New York. Many of the 1986 Mets still make a decent-to-good living off their roles on that team. While Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, and Gary Carter were the stars, Backman is remembered just about as fondly as any of them.

En route to the airport, Backman, almost on a whim, decided to call Jeff Wilpon, who had succeeded his father, Fred Wilpon, in running the Mets’ day-to-day operations. Even before his plane took off, he got a call back. When Backman told Wilpon he was on his way to New York, Wilpon said, “Why don’t we try to get together and talk while you’re here?”

Jeff Wilpon had been just out of college and already working for
his dad when the Mets won the World Series in 1986 and had warm memories of Backman. What’s more, with the Mets struggling, bringing people back into the organization who brought back memories of that time seemed like a good idea.

Backman ended up being offered the job as manager of the Brooklyn Cyclones—the Mets’ short-season class A team. Technically, the job was near the bottom of the organization’s totem pole, but the Cyclones are very important to the Wilpons because of Fred Wilpon’s emotional attachment to the Dodgers.

“Managing the Cyclones is a little different than managing your typical [low-A] rookie-league team,” Backman said. “For one thing, most of the Mets’ best young prospects get sent there, so they’re keeping a close eye. What’s more, the team is kind of the Wilpons’ baby, and since it’s right there in New York, they expect a lot—in terms of development
and
wins.”

The Cyclones went 51-24 under Backman. The Mets were impressed enough that he was one of the finalists for the managing job at the big-league level after Jerry Manuel was fired at the end of that 2010 season. Terry Collins ended up getting the job, but Backman was promoted to Double-A Binghamton. A year later, when his former platoon mate Teufel was promoted from the managing job in Buffalo to the Mets’ coaching staff, Backman was moved up to Triple-A—one step from the big leagues—again.

“My second trip back up the mountain,” he said, smiling. “I think I’m as capable as a lot of guys managing in the big leagues. But I like what I’m doing here.”

He put out the cigarette and stood up. At fifty-two, Backman is rounder and grayer than he was as a player, his hairline beating a retreat in the wrong direction. But the gleam in his eyes hasn’t changed.

There are a lot of jokes made about the weather in Buffalo. Backman didn’t mind the cold at all. He was a long way from the low point he had hit back in 2004.

“It’s baseball,” he said. “It’s what I do. It’s what I love.”

He picked up a bat and walked out the door. It was time for batting practice.

ALL ROADS LEAD TO NORFOLK

Once upon a time, putting together a baseball schedule for an entire season was a long process that involved hundreds—if not thousands—of pieces of crumpled paper and hours and hours of painstaking work.

Nowadays, computers have made life much easier for schedule makers.

Except in the International League. There, the schedule is still done by hand, and it is done by one person—the same person who has put together the schedule since 1969.

Dave Rosenfield has run the baseball team in Norfolk since 1963. He ran it when it was a Chicago White Sox affiliate and a Philadelphia Phillies affiliate in the Carolina League; he ran it when it became the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Mets; and he runs it now as the Baltimore Orioles’ Triple-A affiliate—although he did finally turn day-to-day general managing duties over to Joe Gregory in 2011.

Gregory was thirty-two when he got the job, which made him exactly fifty years younger than the eighty-two-year-old Rosenfield, who still holds the title of executive vice president and is in his office every day. Gregory and manager Ron Johnson still run most decisions by Rosenfield, and he is a constant presence in every corner of Harbor Park, which has been the Tides’ home since 1993.

Rosenfield also puts together the entire league’s schedule every year, as he has done since the Tides came into the league forty-five years ago. Each season he has to figure out how to schedule 144 games for fourteen teams, making sure they can get where they need to go in time for each game, while having only eight off days during the entire season.

“It isn’t that hard when you’ve been doing it as long as I have,” Rosenfield said, sitting in his cluttered office one afternoon with several legal pads spread in front of him on which he had been piecing together the 2013 schedule. “I actually kind of fell into doing it after my first year here.

“They handed us the schedules at the [Carolina] league meetings. We were moving into the league for the ’64 season. I looked at the schedule and noticed that Winston-Salem, which was where the league offices happened to be, had thirty-two weekend home dates. We had seven. I was sitting in the back of the room, and Bill Jessup, who was the president of the league, was going on about the schedule, and I must have been shaking my head noticeably, because all of a sudden he stopped and said, ‘Hey, new boy, you think you can do it better?’

“I looked at him and said, ‘A monkey could do it better.’

“He kind of glared at me for a second, pointed his finger at me, and said, ‘You’ve got two weeks.’ I went to work, presented him the schedule in two weeks, and the teams voted unanimously in favor of my version. After that, I did it every year. In fact, when we moved to the International League, I kept doing the Carolina League schedule in addition to ours for several years.”

Rosenfield isn’t a name-dropper; it’s not his way. But he’s known so many people for so many years there are few names that come up without his having some sort of story to tell about them. He’s a natural-born storyteller, not surprising since his mother, Therese Lyon, was an accomplished actress.

She appeared on Broadway in a play written by Groucho Marx called
Time for Elizabeth
. She was also in
The Music Man
and, in 1947, had a role in Charlie Chaplin’s
Monsieur Verdoux
.

“Charlie Chaplin and Groucho Marx, now
that’s
name-dropping,” Rosenfield said with a laugh on a hot summer afternoon. “She didn’t even start acting until she was forty-nine. My dad was a co-founder of Piggly Wiggly, and she decided it would be fun to try acting. I was her youngest kid, eighth one.”