Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (22 page)

He had just cleared security at LaGuardia Airport and was going to get on a plane to go back to Buffalo, to start packing up his apartment and wait for his phone to ring. As he was standing in the airport, his phone did ring. It was his agent, Brian Charles.

“Where are you right now?” he asked.

“Just cleared security at LaGuardia,” Schwinden said. “Heading to Buffalo.”

“No you’re not,” Charles said. “You need to go get yourself on a flight to Las Vegas. The Blue Jays just claimed you. They want you out there as soon as possible.”

Schwinden wasn’t looking forward to another odyssey to get to a Triple-A town, but he was relieved that someone had picked him up so quickly. He found a flight to Las Vegas and, a day later, was on the mound in a Las Vegas uniform. But not for very long.

He didn’t pitch very well that day; in fact he was awful: three innings, seven earned runs. Oh well, a bad outing after a long trip. There would be time to settle in. The team was heading for Fresno—forty-five minutes from Visalia, his hometown—and at least there he would get a chance to pitch in front of a lot of family and friends.

“I was still in a little bit of shock going from the Mets, after being a Met my entire career, to finding myself in Las Vegas,” he said. “But I was happy at least about going home and having everyone get a chance to see me pitch. I had about 150 people coming to the game. I was fairly convinced I would pitch a lot better the second time out.”

He never got the chance to find out if he was right. Four days after acquiring him, the Blue Jays put him on waivers. The bad news was Schwinden never got to pitch in Fresno. The good news was he was unemployed for only a few hours.

“Congratulations,” Charles told him on the phone. “You’re now a Cleveland Indian.”

Or, more accurately, a Columbus Clipper. Schwinden got on another airplane, flew back across the country, and presented himself to manager Mike Sarbaugh in Columbus. The Clippers, it turned out, had some guys on the roster he had played with in the past.

“I’d pitched on the East Coast and in the International League my whole career,” he said. “It was just a more comfortable feeling to be back in the East—even if I wasn’t out west for very long.”

His stay in Columbus lasted considerably longer than his stay in Las Vegas: twenty-three days.

He started three times for the Clippers and wasn’t as god-awful as he had been in Las Vegas, but not nearly as good as he’d been in Buffalo, where he had been pitching to an ERA of 2.70 before the
Mets let him go. On June 29, after his third start, the Clippers put him on waivers.

By now, it had all become ritual for Schwinden. He didn’t even try to go anywhere. He just sat and waited for the phone to ring. It rang: this time he was heading for Rochester to join Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He was a Yankee—not the kind who plays in the Bronx—the kind who was wandering the International League in 2012.

He packed again, not even certain what town he would be staying in since the Yankees didn’t have a home. Three days later he pitched for SWB and lasted four innings. In five weeks he had pitched seven times for five different teams—Buffalo, the Mets, Las Vegas, Columbus, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre—in four different baseball organizations.

His outings had ranged from brutal to mediocre—at best. Twenty-four hours after his start for the Yankees, he was on waivers again. That made four organizations that had given up on him in thirty days.

He was a little bit dizzy and a lot discouraged. Understandably.

“The whole thing was draining,” he said. “To begin with, just the process each time: you find out you’ve been waived, and you sit there and wonder what you should do next. Get on a plane and go home? Sit in a hotel room and wait to hear if someone’s picked you up?

“I did a lot of that because my agent kept saying, ‘Sit tight, someone’s going to call.’ He was right—thank goodness—each time, but when you’ve been waived, everyone else kind of moves on without you. I ate a lot of meals alone in a lot of empty food courts and restaurants. It wasn’t for that long a period of time, but it
felt
like a long period of time.

“Then you get word you’ve been picked up, and you have to pack and get to an airport and figure out how to get to wherever your new team is at that moment. I’d go out to pitch, and I wanted to make a good impression on my new bosses, so I was probably trying too hard, overthrowing, getting myself into trouble right away. Then, when I did, I started to think, ‘Here we go again,’ and it would snowball. I almost found myself thinking, ‘Am I going to get waived
again
?’

“Every time you get waived, it feels lousy. It’s even worse when
they take one look at you and say, ‘We don’t want you.’ On the one hand, you tell yourself that it’s good that there are people out there who want you, who think you’re worth a shot. But the negatives during a time like that completely overwhelm any positives you might try to come up with. It was not any fun.”

The day after he was waived by the Yankees, Schwinden was sitting in another hotel room contemplating yet another meal by himself when he got a text from Bobby Parnell, an old friend from his long-ago (at least it felt that way) Mets days. Sitting in the Mets’ bullpen, Parnell had heard about Schwinden’s latest release and that he might be on his way back—remarkably enough—to the Mets, which would mean a return to Buffalo.

“Hearing you might be a Met again soon,” the text said.

Schwinden almost held his breath hoping. It took two more days for the phone to ring again.

This time it wasn’t Brian Charles. It was John Ricco, the Mets’ farm director. “We’d like to bring you back,” he said. “Do you think you can report to Buffalo right away?”

By then, Schwinden was actually
in
Buffalo. He’d driven there from Rochester after the Yankees had released him, since he still had his apartment there and had never had a chance to get back to pick up his things. He had sublet it to Matt den Dekker, a Bisons outfielder, but there was enough room for two.

“I was ecstatic when I got the call that I was a Bison again,” he said, smiling. “I was going back to a place that was familiar, with guys I knew. I felt like I had been on the longest, strangest road trip in history.”

He didn’t even mind it when he walked into the Buffalo clubhouse on July 5 and his new/old teammates kept asking him how many SkyMiles he had rolled up in the previous five weeks.

It had been thirty-seven days since he had pitched for the Mets in Philadelphia and thirty-four days since his first release. He had appeared in “transactions” fourteen times since being sent down by the Mets at the end of spring training.

Perhaps no one in baseball history has ever been happier than
Chris Schwinden to learn he was being sent back to Buffalo. He was home again.

John Lindsey’s spring hadn’t been nearly as hectic as Schwinden’s, if only because his phone hadn’t been ringing at all since he had signed to play in Mexico.

Although the Mexican League is generally considered to be on about the same level as Triple-A, Lindsey didn’t find the pitching to be quite as challenging. Very few of the pitchers in the league had been in the majors—unlike Triple-A, where almost every night you faced at least one pitcher with major-league experience.

“I felt comfortable playing there,” he said. “I could tell right away that the work I had done in the off-season, losing the weight, getting into better shape, had helped me. My dad had been right—my body still had something left to give.”

Lindsey had been a consistent Triple-A hitter for several years, and he was even better playing for Laguna. By mid-June he was hitting .341 and had hit twenty-one home runs and driven in sixty-four runs. He knew that scouts from major-league teams were in the ballpark most nights, so he remained hopeful he would get a call.

Finally, on June 21, he did.

The Tigers wanted to sign him and send him to Toledo. The Mud Hens were struggling and needed an extra bat with some power. In truth, the Tigers were having a tough time getting going at that stage, after being picked in the spring by many experts to reach the World Series. If he played well and Detroit continued to struggle at the plate, who knew?—maybe he would get a chance to build on that one hit he had gotten back in 2010.

“All I knew was I would be going to a ballpark that was an hour away from the big-league team,” Lindsey said. “I didn’t see any way that could be a bad thing.”

Within twenty-four hours of being signed by the Tigers, he was in Toledo. He wondered if he would have trouble adapting to the International League. He’d been in the Pacific Coast League in recent
years, where the pitchers tended to throw more breaking pitches than fastballs because of the altitude. It didn’t turn out to be an issue.

“I’m a fastball hitter anyway,” Lindsey said. “I was very happy to be in a place where they were going to throw me a lot of fastballs.”

Manager Phil Nevin put him in the lineup right away, often having him hit cleanup. Lindsey was comfortable in the Toledo clubhouse right from the start. “One of the advantages of playing in so many places is that you’re used to going to new places,” he said. “Plus, in the minors there’s so much turnover on teams all the time that there are new guys coming in every day. You learn how to get along with people pretty quickly because if you don’t, you aren’t going to have a very happy life.”

Just as Schwinden was delighted to find himself in Buffalo, Lindsey was thrilled to be a Mud Hen. He was thirty-five years old, and he was still playing high-level professional baseball.

“It’s funny, because if you had told me when I first signed that I would play this long, I would have told you no way,” he said. “And if you had told me I would play this long and almost all of it would be in the minor leagues, I’d have laughed at you and said you had no idea what you were talking about.

“That’s the thing about baseball. No one knows. None of us know what it’s going to be like when we start out, and none of us know how tough it’s going to be when the day comes we have to walk away. We all know it’s coming, but we want to push it back—and push it back for as long as possible.”

Lindsey knew his day was coming. But he wanted to keep pushing it back for as long as he could and
hope
he might push it back far enough to get one more shot at making the one-hour trip up I-75 to Detroit.

JAMIE FARR WOULD BE PROUD

If the Durham Bulls are minor-league baseball’s most famous team, the Toledo Mud Hens must be second.

Part of it is simply the team’s name. In recent years, minor-league teams have become much more creative with their names than in the past. Nowadays there are teams like the Savannah Sand Gnats, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the Charleston RiverDogs, and the Augusta GreenJackets.

Toledo had the Mud Hens long before any of those teams—or names—existed. In fact, the name dates to 1896, when the team played in a place called Bay View Park, which was next to some marshland that was inhabited by American coots—also known as marsh hens or mud hens. People in Toledo took to calling the team the Swamp Angels or the Mud Hens. It was Mud Hens that stuck, and it became the team’s official name when it rejoined the American Association in 1902.

Prior to that, the Toledo Blue Stockings had been “promoted” to the American Association in 1884. In those days, before there was what is today’s American League, the American Association was a major league, and minor-league teams were occasionally invited to join. The Blue Stockings had two African Americans on the team, Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother, Welday Walker.

According to historical accounts, the Hall of Famer Cap Anson,
then with the Chicago White Stockings, told management he wouldn’t take the field to compete against the Walker brothers. Soon after, the brothers were gone from Toledo, and the next African American who played major-league baseball was Jackie Robinson—sixty-three years later.

The Mud Hens have been in Toledo for most of the last 110 years. They won a Double-A championship in 1927, when Casey Stengel was their manager. There were two brief periods when they played under other names, and there was no team in Toledo at all from 1956 to 1964—after the Milwaukee Braves moved their Triple-A farm team from Toledo to Wichita. In 1965, the Yankees moved the Richmond Virginians to Toledo and rechristened them the Mud Hens, and there has once again been Triple-A baseball in Toledo ever since. For the last twenty-six seasons, the Mud Hens have been the Tigers’ Triple-A team, which makes geographic sense since Fifth Third Field, their home since 2002, is fifty-eight miles south of Comerica Park, a straight shot up I-75.