Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (16 page)

As Rosenfield talked, Joe Gregory walked in. There was a problem. Like all minor-league teams, the Tides are always looking for promotions that might bring a few more fans to the ballpark. The team draws reasonably well—in 2012 it would average sixty-four hundred fans per home game—but every little bit helps.

That night’s promotion was the Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Show.

Seriously.

The show involved a guy in a cowboy outfit along with four border collies who were ridden by four capuchin monkeys. The collies and the monkeys, starting from just behind second base, chased four cattle across the outfield grass into a pen on the other side of the center-field fence.

Repeat: seriously.

The problem had nothing to do with the act itself. It was pretty harmless stuff, and the animals all clearly knew what was expected of them. The problem was the heat: it was late June in Norfolk, and the temperature was approaching a hundred degrees with the humidity dripping off everyone.

The show toured the country, apparently doing well enough that it continued to receive invitations to minor-league ballparks. This minor-league ballpark was a little bit different, though: it was located less than a mile from the international headquarters of PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The folks from PETA were not happy with the notion of the animals being used to entertain fans in the brutal heat. They had organized a protest for outside the ballpark prior to the game, not exactly the way the Tides wanted their fans welcomed on a night when staying indoors had to be very tempting even if you already had tickets for the game.

Gregory reported that he had just consulted with the police about
where the protesters would be allowed to picket and that it was pretty clear to him that the police wanted to give the protesters a wide swath. The last thing anyone wanted was to see arrests. There was one piece of good news: it would be very hot for the protesters too. They might not last that long.

There was one other not-so-minor issue: three hours before game time there weren’t enough Tides in the building to field a team.

The Tides had played the previous night in Columbus and had been scheduled to fly home at 6:30 that morning—plenty of time, at least in theory—for a 7:15 game against the Syracuse Chiefs.

The trouble began when their flight was canceled due to “mechanical difficulties.” Concurrent with this, the East Coast had been hit by a severe storm on Friday night, one that was causing huge travel delays all over the place. With many flights already grounded, finding a way to get thirty-one people—twenty-five players, a manager, three coaches, a broadcaster, and a trainer—back to Norfolk wasn’t easy.

After a great deal of scrambling, the Tides had been rebooked on six different flights—three that went to Norfolk and three that went to Richmond. The airport in Richmond was eighty-seven miles from Harbor Park, no more than a ninety-minute trip under normal circumstances … but on a summer Saturday with people in the storm-ravaged Washington, D.C., area fleeing to the beach from houses without power, the trip would take considerably longer than that.

Players came stumbling into the clubhouse throughout the afternoon. Manager Ron Johnson stood in the hallway between his office and the players’ lockers and shook his head. “I hope we can field a team tonight,” he said—joking, but not joking. The last group wasn’t due at the stadium—if nothing else went wrong—until 6:30.

“It’s Triple-A,” Johnson said. “This stuff happens down here. I always say to everyone, myself included, ‘If you don’t like it, do a better job.’ ”

Johnson’s job had been made a bit more difficult not long after his plane—one of the ones that landed in Norfolk—arrived. En route to the ballpark he received a text from Baltimore: Two Orioles pitchers, Dana Eveland—who had started the game—and Tommy Hunter—who
had relieved him—had been knocked around by the Cleveland Indians that afternoon. Each had given up five runs: Eveland in three and two-thirds innings; Hunter, even worse, in one and two-thirds innings.

“Need González up here ASAP,” Johnson’s text said.

Miguel González was supposed to be Norfolk’s starting pitcher that night. He arrived in the clubhouse a few minutes after Johnson and was about to get dressed to begin preparing for the game. Johnson stopped him. There was no time to congratulate him or wish him luck.

“Go back to the airport,” Johnson told him. “They want you up in Baltimore.”

González was twenty-eight and had bounced around the minor leagues for most of seven years before signing with the Orioles in the spring. The plan was for him to pitch in Double-A, but he had quickly impressed the team enough to get promoted to Norfolk in late April and Baltimore in June. That call-up had come because the bullpen needed some extra help. When González arrived, Orioles general manager Dan Duquette had been pleasantly surprised by his variety of pitches and his poise.

The Orioles were already desperate for starting pitching. Virtually their entire rotation had struggled since opening day. After consulting with manager Buck Showalter, Duquette decided to send González back to Norfolk to “stretch his arm out”—get him in the starting rotation down there to build his arm strength so he could potentially come back up to start in Baltimore when needed.

Now, less than a month later, González was needed—this time as a starter. He would start in Eveland’s spot in five days—but he had to get to Baltimore right away because the team was flying to the West Coast the next afternoon after a day game against the Indians, and management wanted González on the flight so he could begin to get ready for his debut as a starter.

While González raced to the airport, Johnson went and found the relief pitcher Óscar Villarreal to tell him he would be starting the game that night. “I told him if he can get us into the fourth inning, I’ll be thrilled,” Johnson said. “After that, it’s all hands on deck.”

Johnson had no issues with the notion that his starting pitcher had been snatched from him a couple of hours before game time. Even though he had spent the previous two seasons as the first-base coach in Boston, the minor leagues had been his home in one form or another for more than thirty years. There wasn’t much that was going to happen that would be new to him.

“When Buck [Showalter] calls and says, ‘RJ, you got a minute?’ I know what’s coming,” he said, laughing. “He needs something or someone up there, and he wants to know who the best guy is at that moment. My job is to make sure I get the right guy there. If I’m not doing that, what good am I to him and to the club?”

When Rosenfield walked down the hall that afternoon to see how Johnson was doing and to check on the whereabouts of the baseball team, Johnson laughed as Rosenfield sat down across from him.

“This could be a long one, boss,” he said. “We might need more than one position player to pitch before we’re done.”

Rosenfield and Gregory had talked to the Syracuse people about delaying the start of the game and they had agreed. It was now an eight o’clock start—which helped Johnson, although it didn’t mean he had a starting pitcher.

“This is why you’re better off traveling by bus,” Rosenfield said.

“I agree,” Johnson said. “I’d much rather ride a bus for eight or nine hours, especially a comfortable one, than get up at four o’clock in the morning for a flight that may or may not take off on time—or may not take off at all.”

“I’m making the schedule for next year right now,” Rosenfield said. “You want bus trips to and from the Midwest and the North too?”

“Absolutely,” Johnson said. “The more bus trips the better. Flying commercial, especially on days like this, is no fun. At least on the bus we know almost exactly when we’re going to arrive.”

Travel is one of the biggest differences between life in the minors and life in the majors. Major-league teams travel on charter airplanes, and players pass their luggage to a clubhouse attendant after the last game in a city and don’t see it again until they walk into their hotel
room. Almost everywhere that hotel is a Four Seasons or a Ritz-Carlton. In Triple-A, everyone carries his own luggage, and most of the hotels don’t have bellmen. Or room service.

“It isn’t as if there’s anything wrong with the way you live in Triple-A,” Dontrelle Willis said, sitting at the opposite end of the hallway from Johnson’s office. He had been one of the lucky Tides who had been on a flight that connected in Atlanta and had landed in Norfolk by mid-afternoon. “It’s just the way you live in the major leagues isn’t real. Real people don’t live like that. But major leaguers do.”

Willis had not only been a major leaguer; he had been a star. He had been the National League Rookie of the Year in 2003, when he won fourteen games for a Florida Marlins team that had gone on to win the World Series. Two years later, still only twenty-three years old, Willis won twenty-two games and finished second to Chris Carpenter in the National League Cy Young Award voting.

He was a genuine phenom: a gangly lefty with a delivery that made it tough to follow the baseball as it came out of his hand. He was also a remarkably good hitter for a pitcher, so good that he didn’t always hit ninth in the order.

“I think I was good, but I probably wasn’t as good as it seemed in ’05,” he said. “I got a lot of run support that year [his ERA was 2.63, so his success wasn’t
just
about run support], and we had a good team. I look back on those years in Florida and realize how lucky I was to be there and to get the chances I got.”

If Willis was bitter about the twisted road his career had traveled since the twenty-two-win season, it didn’t show as he sat in the middle of the Norfolk clubhouse. He talked easily, almost happily about the struggles he had faced in the five seasons since being taken from the Marlins.

Even though he had pitched reasonably well in 2006 and 2007, his numbers—both in wins and in ERA—hadn’t come close to 2005. Prior to the 2008 season he was traded, along with Miguel Cabrera, to the Detroit Tigers in a blockbuster trade that was also a Marlins salary dump. The Marlins got back six low-priced prospects in exchange for Cabrera and Willis (Willis had signed for $6.45 million
prior to the season). Even though Willis had pitched to a 10-15 record in 2007, the Tigers believed his best years were still ahead of him. He was still only twenty-five, and he had already won sixty-eight games in the majors. They signed him to a three-year deal worth $29 million.

And got almost nothing out of it. Willis pitched for the Tigers for just under two and a half years. During that time he won two games, meaning he cost the Tigers $14.5 million per win. He struggled with injuries, with wildness, and with an anxiety disorder that landed him on the disabled list twice. Willis went from being a star to a mystery almost overnight.

The Tigers finally gave up on him in June 2010, trading him to the Arizona Diamondbacks. He lasted six weeks in Arizona before being released. He signed with the Giants, and then, at the end of that season, his Tigers contract over, he signed with the Cincinnati Reds. He began the 2011 season in Louisville and pitched well enough to get called back to the majors in July.

“I can honestly tell you I’ve had some great moments in baseball,” he said. “I’ve been part of a World Series champion; I won twenty [twenty-two] games in a season; I’ve been paid a lot of money. I’m not sure anything ever meant more to me than being told I was going to Cincinnati.

“I’ve thought about it, and the reason it meant so much was simple: it was
hard
. For a long, long time baseball was easy for me. I was in the majors at twenty-one. I was Rookie of the Year.” He smiled. “Heck, I could even hit.

“Then it got hard—very hard. I couldn’t get the ball over the plate. I couldn’t get people out anymore. I couldn’t stay healthy, and I couldn’t stay in the big leagues. I had to
work
to get back to the point where someone thought I could pitch in the majors again. When everyone in that clubhouse came around to congratulate me, I cried. It meant that much to me.

“When I got to Cincinnati, Joey Votto was the first guy to come over to my locker. He said, ‘How great does it feel to come all the way back?’ I kind of laughed, and he said, ‘No, I’m serious. Tell me how you did it. I can’t imagine how tough that must have been.’ ”

Willis didn’t pitch especially well with the Reds the second half of 2011. He was 1-6 with an ERA of 5.00, but he was good enough that he kept getting the ball, starting thirteen games. That was why the Phillies, in their constant search for pitching depth, had signed him prior to the 2012 season. When he didn’t make the team out of spring training, Willis faced the same dilemma that Scott Podsednik faced: go back to the minors and try to work your way back
again
or go home. His daughters were five, three, and one. Home beckoned. The Phillies released him, and he took off the uniform for—he thought—the last time.

“I enjoyed being home,” he said. “But I’m like everybody else. The itch doesn’t just go away. I’ve played sports for as long as I can remember and always been pretty good. As great as it sounds to say, ‘I’m going home to spend time with my family,’ it isn’t that simple.”

Which is why, when the Orioles called and asked if he’d like to go to Norfolk, Willis said yes. He knew Baltimore needed starting pitching and thought he might have a chance to get back to the majors fairly quickly.

Only it hadn’t worked out. To begin with, the Orioles had thought they were signing a reliever; Willis thought he was going to start. Willis pitched in relief once, got hurt, went home again for a while, then came back to Norfolk after a renegotiation of his role. He finally got a start. It didn’t go well—two and two-thirds innings, four earned runs. By late June, no one seemed certain what his status was. Johnson had told him he would be on call that night in the bullpen.

“Which is fine with me,” he said. “I need to get innings right now one way or the other.”

He pushed back from the table where he was sitting. He was holding a baseball in his hands, just as he had done most of his life.

“I still love coming to the yard every day,” he said. “I love the camaraderie of the clubhouse, and I understand it won’t be long now before I’m one of those guys sitting around telling war stories. I can say I’ve been to the pinnacle, and that feels good. But when the day comes that I don’t believe I can make it back and pitch in the big leagues, I’ll go home. I know it won’t be easy, but that’s what I’ll do.”