Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (2 page)

In every minor-league ballpark, there is no such thing as nothing going on between innings. Fans expect entertainment that goes beyond hits, runs, and errors, and they get it.

There are all sorts of contests for fans to participate in, and there is always some kind of entertainment going on to distract those in the stands. To put it in perspective, one of the biggest disappointments of the 2012 season in Durham was when George Jetson Night was rained out.

In Allentown, one of the more popular fan-participation contests is called Whack an Intern. And yes, it is family entertainment … not what you might otherwise think. A large box with four holes cut in the top is brought out to the third-base line. Four of the Pigs’ summer interns crawl beneath the box. Two fans are selected and handed plastic bats. Each time an intern pops his head out of one of the four holes, the fans attempt to whack him. The fan who connects most is the winner.

While almost everyone in the ballpark was paying rapt attention to Whack an Intern, the reliever called into the game by manager Beyeler jogged in from the left-field bullpen. When the public address announcer introduced him, there wasn’t a hint of a reaction from the crowd. The plastic bats ruled at that moment.

The relief pitcher was Mark Prior, who had last pitched in a major-league baseball game on August 10, 2006. In the almost six years since then, he had pitched a total of forty-eight innings (an average of just eight innings per season) in the minor leagues, for three different organizations—San Diego, Texas, and the New York Yankees. He was thirty-one years old, and there was no way his presence on the
mound, throwing his warm-up pitches, was going to distract anyone from the announcement of who had won Whack an Intern.

This was remarkable only if you happened to remember who Mark Prior had once been. In 2001, coming out of USC, he had been the No. 2 pick in the amateur draft in all of baseball. The only reason he wasn’t No. 1 was that he had notified the Minnesota Twins—who owned the No. 1 pick—that he didn’t want to play for them. The Twins drafted local hero Joe Mauer instead … a pick that ended up working out just fine for them.

Prior signed with the Cubs for a $10.5 million bonus, a record for a first contract that wasn’t broken until 2009, when Stephen Strasburg signed with the Washington Nationals for $15 million. Prior was in the majors by 2002, and a year later, at the age of twenty-two, he won eighteen games for the Chicago Cubs and finished third in the Cy Young Award voting in the National League. He and Kerry Wood had led the Cubs to the National League Central title, and to within one win of the team’s first World Series appearance since 1945.

Prior was the pitcher on the mound during one of the more infamous moments in Cubs history—when Steve Bartman made his grab at Luis Castillo’s foul ball in the eighth inning of game six of the League Championship Series that year. If Moises Alou had caught the ball, the Cubs, leading 3–0 behind Prior’s pitching, would have been four outs from the World Series.

The Cubs never got there, though, and Prior never became the star he was universally expected to become in the eyes of those who knew baseball. In 2003, Prior was to the game what Stephen Strasburg was to baseball in 2012—except that he’d never had Tommy John surgery on his pitching elbow.

For Prior, the injuries began a year later; a torn Achilles started it, and then they came one after another. He stayed healthy enough to win eleven games with the Cubs in 2005 but went on the disabled list with a strained shoulder in August 2006, after having been on the DL for two months earlier in the season. When he did get on the mound
that year, he was as miserable as he had been brilliant three years earlier: a 1-6 record with a 7.21 ERA.

After deciding against surgery in the off-season, he pitched one inning in the minor leagues the next year before being forced to undergo surgery. The Cubs released him at the end of 2007, which started his minor-league odyssey: San Diego for two injury-plagued seasons, during which he never pitched; Texas for one; the Yankees for one. He pitched a total of twenty-one times in those four seasons, never staying healthy long enough to make a serious run at getting back to the majors.

He had signed with the Red Sox in May 2012 and had been working in extended spring training in Florida to get his arm in shape. Now, exactly one month after his signing, the Red Sox had sent him to Allentown to join the PawSox. His hope was to get to Boston as a middle reliever. That would be a victory—even if it was a long, long way from the days when he had been called “the future of pitching.”

On this evening in Allentown, Prior’s reality was Whack an Intern.

The names are there every single day in the newspapers, listed under the heading “Transactions.” The type size for the list of transactions is a small font used for statistical data, commonly known as agate. On almost any given day of the year in baseball, lives change … and those changes are recorded in the agate.

Scott Elarton. Brett Tomko. Chris Schwinden. Scott Podsednik. Nate McLouth. John Lindsey. Charlie Montoyo. Ron Johnson. Mark Lollo.

Nine names that serious baseball fans might—or might not—recognize. Three pitchers, two outfielders, a designated hitter, two managers, and an umpire. Each spent all, or most, of the 2012 baseball season playing in the International League at the Triple-A level, with the exception of McLouth, who went from the majors to “released” to Triple-A and back to the majors again.

All, with the exception of Lollo—umpires don’t rate making the agate when their lives change—have appeared in the agate multiple
times during their careers. Schwinden appeared eleven times … during 2012 alone. Their stories are symbolic of what life is like for
most
baseball players. Only the most gifted and fortunate make it to the major leagues and then stay there until the day they retire.

Jeff Torborg, who spent most of his playing career as a backup catcher and then went on to manage the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, New York Mets, Montreal Expos, and Florida Marlins, was asked once during the winter meetings if a trade about to be announced by the Mets was the “big one” (there had been rumors about a major trade throughout the week).

“To the guys involved it is,” Torborg answered.

Mark Prior appeared in agate type three times during 2012: “Signed to a minor league contract by the Boston Red Sox”; “Called up to Triple-A Pawtucket from extended spring training”; and, finally, in August, “Released by the Boston Red Sox.”

In every baseball season, there are thousands of these “transactions” that go virtually unnoticed. Every once in a while someone will glance at the agate section and see a name like Prior’s—or Miguel Tejada or Dontrelle Willis—and think, “So that’s what happened to him,” and then move on with his daily routine.

But every single one of those transactions is life changing for those involved. It can be the zenith or the nadir for a baseball player: a moment of overwhelming joy or gut-wrenching disappointment. It means families being uprooted—sometimes for no apparent reason—and it always has repercussions that go beyond the player himself. When someone gets called up, it means someone gets sent down, and three or four guys who
think
they should be called up are left to deal with yet another letdown and to ask the most ever-present question that floats through Triple-A clubhouses: “Why not me?”

A season of Triple-A baseball is filled with hundreds of stories. Some are more compelling—or surprising, poignant, funny, or remarkable—than most. This book is about a handful of men who run the gamut of life in Triple-A; men who have been stars and have fallen; men who have been rich and then far from rich; men who have aspired to those heights and never quite reached them.

Elarton. Tomko. Schwinden. Podsednik. McLouth. Lindsey. Montoyo. Johnson. Lollo.

Scott Elarton was a first-round draft pick coming out of high school—someone who won seventeen games for the Houston Astros at the age of twenty-four and then crashed to earth, brought down by injuries and by, as he puts it, “living the major-league life.”

Brett Tomko was good enough to win a remarkable hundred major-league games, but in 2012, at the age of thirty-nine, he found himself looking for work at the Triple-A level because he wasn’t ready to give the ball up just yet.

Chris Schwinden started 2013 with exactly a hundred wins fewer than Tomko … but his odyssey in 2012 was one matched by few players
ever
in baseball history.

Even those who have had success—great success—can find themselves wondering what they have done to deserve the karma that seems to chase them. In 2005, Scott Podsednik experienced a moment only a handful of players have ever gotten to experience: he hit a walk-off home run in a World Series game and sprinted in from center field to join one of sport’s most joyous celebrations after the final out in the Chicago White Sox’ four-game sweep of the Houston Astros. Seven years later, during 2012, he walked away from the game twice—only to return twice, believing if he could just stay healthy he could still contribute on the major-league level.

Nate McLouth believed the same thing, even after he was released in May 2012 by the Pittsburgh Pirates. His journey took him from the top to the bottom and back again, all in a season. His was one of the stories that keep minor leaguers going.

Players aren’t the only ones who live the minor-league life dreaming of the majors. Charlie Montoyo, the Durham Bulls’ manager, has spent most of his twenty-six professional baseball years in the minors—interrupted only by a one-month stint in Montreal, during which he got to the plate five times.

Ron Johnson also played in the major leagues: for twenty-two games on three different occasions. Then he worked his way through the minor leagues to make it to Boston as a first-base coach in 2010,
only to find himself victimized by the post-collapse purge of 2011. He returned to Triple-A, in Norfolk, where he cheerfully tells those who complain about life at that level, “If you don’t like it here, do a better job.”

Both Montoyo and Johnson know firsthand that traveling on Triple-A buses or staying in three-star motels is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone, which is why you aren’t likely to hear either one of them complain … ever.

Umpires live the same life—except that they don’t have any home games. Like players and managers and coaches, they have beaten the odds by getting to Triple-A, but they are still not where they want to be. The big money and the luxurious life for them also exist only at the big-league level. Mark Lollo was generally considered the top umpire in the International League in 2012. He had worked major-league games and felt he was on the cusp of achieving that goal. But he still wasn’t there, and whether he would get there was not something he could control. Which made for a lot of tossing and turning at night.

Each, in his own way, defines the struggle of people who are extremely good at what they do—but
not
as good as they want to be at given moments. Often, when Triple-A players do finally get to the majors—or back to the majors—it is so overwhelmingly meaningful that tears, not words, explain how they feel.

And on some occasions, it takes only a few choice words to explain what it means to a player to climb that mountain. As Nate McLouth stood in left field at Camden Yards on a brisk October night, just months after being released by the Pittsburgh Pirates, tossing a ball with center fielder Adam Jones as the Orioles prepared to play the Yankees in game one of the 2012 American League Division Series, his thoughts were very simple.

“This,” he thought, “is pretty cool.”

It is stories like the one McLouth wrote in 2012 that keep baseball players grinding through those moments when they see their names
not in lights but in agate. The grind is different for everyone, and it is almost always agonizing for one reason or another.

Pitching for the Oakland Athletics, Brett Tomko won his hundredth game as a major leaguer in September 2009 and walked off the mound in Texas thinking he had blown out his shoulder and would never pitch again. Trying to throw a fastball past Chris Davis, he had felt something pop in his shoulder at the start of the ninth inning and had finished the game throwing strictly breaking pitches because he thought his arm might fall off if he tried to throw a fastball.