Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (24 page)

“He was angry; he vented. A couple years later I heard from him. He said, ‘I hated you at the time, but you did the right thing for me.’ ”

Nevin retired in 2007, tried broadcasting for a while, but missed being in uniform. That was how he came to manage the independent league team in Orange County in 2009. A year later the Tigers hired him to manage their Double-A club in Erie, before promoting him to Toledo in 2011. Although the Mud Hens had been 67-77 in Nevin’s first season and were struggling in his second, Nevin was still considered a prime candidate to succeed Jim Leyland whenever he decided to retire as the manager in Detroit. For the moment, that wasn’t Nevin’s main concern. Finding a pitcher who could keep the Louisville Bats in single digits on a July night in Toledo was far more important to him.

“We’ll be okay tonight,” he insisted. “The guy we’ve got pitching gets people out.”

That guy was Adam Wilk, and Nevin was right. For seven innings, Wilk shut the Bats out. The Mud Hens, in front of a packed house of 11,500 on a gorgeous night, built a 4–0 lead. Even with the team struggling, Toledo still loved its baseball team.

The highlight of the evening came when John Lindsey, still very much enjoying being in Toledo after his stint in Mexico, hit a long home run over the left-field fence in the bottom of the first to put Toledo up 2–0. The ball flew out of the ballpark and landed on Monroe
Street, which runs directly behind the fence. A man passing in his car at that moment apparently saw the ball clear the wall and bounce, because he stopped his car, jumped out, chased the ball down, picked it up, got in his car, and drove away.

It had to be one of the most unexpected souvenirs in baseball history.

Sadly for the Mud Hens, their worn-out bullpen couldn’t hold the lead for Wilk. The Bats scored eight runs in the final two innings, even though the Hens came within one out of holding on for the win. The final score was 8–4.

The next day, the teams were scheduled to play a six o’clock game. Most minor-league teams move their Sunday games to evening starts in July and August to dodge the heat. On this afternoon, a daytime start would have worked just fine since the temperature was in the eighties in the afternoon.

The first two men to reach the Toledo clubhouse that day were Lindsey, who had hit the Monroe Street homer the night before, and hitting coach Leon Durham. The two were markedly different men whose careers had also been markedly different.

Durham had been a No. 1 draft pick for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1976 and had been in the big leagues before his twenty-fifth birthday. He had played in the majors for ten years, mostly with the Chicago Cubs. He had been in 1,067 games and had been to bat 3,587 times—hitting 147 home runs and driving in 530 runs. His nickname was Bull, because he was big and strong and had the kind of personality that came right at you.

He was about as no-nonsense in dealing with his hitters as anyone you might meet in any walk of life. Outside the office he shared with pitching coach A. J. Sager, there was a whiteboard. On it, Durham had written his theory of hitting for everyone to see: “You can’t make a living looking to hit a breaking ball. You
can
make a living looking to hit a fastball … Look for a fastball.”

Lindsey had hit a lot of fastballs in the eighteen years he had played professional baseball. He had been drafted in the thirteenth round in 1995 and hadn’t gotten above Class A ball until 2003. In
all, he had played in 1,787 minor-league games in fourteen different cities—several for more than one stint—and had 6,347 at-bats. He had hit 268 home runs and had driven in 1,195 runs. All impressive numbers—none of them in the major leagues.

His major-league career consisted of the one month he had spent with the Dodgers in September 2010.

Through all the stops and all the letdowns, Lindsey had managed to keep an upbeat outlook on both baseball and life, even though his father’s warning to him when he first signed (that getting to the majors would prove to be harder than it looked) had turned out to be more accurate than either man could have known at the time.

It took Lindsey seven full seasons even to reach Double-A ball. He had issues with injuries but also struggled at times at the plate when he was healthy. After he had hit .208 in 1999 (and had been forced to have shoulder surgery after hurting himself diving back into a bag on a pickoff play), he wondered if it wasn’t time to look into going to college.

“I was talking to my uncle about it all one day, and he said, ‘When was the last time you had your eyes checked?’ ” Lindsey said. “I’d had them checked, and I was twenty-twenty. He said it might not be that simple and sent me to a specialist he knew at Mississippi State [Lindsey is from Hattiesburg]. Sure enough, I
was
twenty-twenty, but I had an astigmatism that was causing me to react just a split second too slowly at the plate. He gave me some lenses to correct it, and I began to see things more quickly.”

Even then, his progress was slow. He finally made it to Double-A in 2003 after hitting .297 with twenty-two home runs and ninety-three RBIs at high-A San Bernardino a year earlier. He had two solid years at Double-A San Antonio, a Seattle farm team, and signed a free-agent contract with the Cardinals prior to the 2005 season. But the Cardinals released him in spring training, and at the age of twenty-eight Lindsey didn’t have a job.

By then, Lindsey was convinced his dad had been wrong when he said baseball was a big pond. “Baseball,” he said, “is an ocean.”

He turned to independent league ball, signing with the New Jersey
Jackals of the Canadian-American Association. He played well enough there to be signed by the Marlins, who returned him to high-A ball for the rest of that season. The next spring, again without a contract, he was back in New Jersey.

His time with the Jackals extended his career and also produced a nickname that stuck with him: “the Mayor.” The Jackals’ radio play-by-play man was Joe Ameruoso, who was old enough to remember that John Lindsay had been mayor of New York City from 1966 through 1973. Lindsay had been reelected in 1969 in large part because of the good feeling in the city generated by the Mets’ miracle run to a World Series title. Lindsay had clung to the Mets for dear life after losing the Republican primary. Running on a third-party ticket, he was reelected three weeks after the Mets won their championship.

In spite of the different spelling, Ameruoso started calling Lindsey “the Mayor.” The nickname not only stuck, but teammates—who have never heard of New York City’s John Lindsay—use it today.

With or without holding political office, Lindsey played solidly in 2006, hitting .311, but by the end of the season he had decided to retire and go to college. Major League Baseball has a program that helps players pay for their college education after they retire, but they must be enrolled within two years of having last been on the payroll of a major-league baseball team—whether they are in the majors or the minors. But independent league ball doesn’t count, so Lindsey had until the fall of 2007—two years after he had last been under contract to the Marlins—to enroll.

“I didn’t want to commit myself to another season of independent league ball, because it would have ended too late for me to enroll before the deadline,” he said. “I was thirty and I was playing independent league. It just seemed like time.”

He had actually enrolled at Pearl River Community College when he got a surprise call from the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lorenzo Bundy, who had been a minor-league instructor when Lindsey was with the Rockies, and Mike Easler, one of the Dodgers’ minor-league hitting instructors, had recommended trying to sign Lindsey to a minor-league
contract. Both men saw him as a solid minor-league hitter who was a good clubhouse influence on younger players.

Lindsey still didn’t have any children at that point in his life. He decided if Bundy and Easler thought he was worthy of another chance, there must still be something in him that perhaps even he wasn’t seeing. What’s more, he knew if he was under contract to a major-league team in 2007, he could still get his education paid for at the end of the season (or begin a new two-year window of eligibility) if things didn’t pan out.

So he accepted the invitation to Dodgers camp in the spring of 2007. He was assigned to Double-A out of camp but played well enough to quickly be called up to Las Vegas—where Bundy was managing. Twelve years after signing his first pro contract, he had finally made it to Triple-A. He was bigger by then and stronger and a smarter hitter. In a little more than half a season in Vegas, he hit .333 with nineteen home runs and eighty-eight RBIs. A year later, in a full season, he hit .316 with twenty-six home runs and a hundred RBIs—the best numbers he had ever had at any level in his career.

He spent the next year in New Orleans, having signed with the Marlins again, but returned to the Dodgers a year later. With the Triple-A team now in Albuquerque, he had his strongest season ever: hitting .353 with twenty-five home runs and ninety-seven RBIs. Even so, there was no sign at all that he was ever going to get the call to the majors. That is, until he was summoned to Tim Wallach’s office in Round Rock, on the penultimate day of the season.

That moment was different from J. C. Boscan’s in Gwinnett, because no one in the clubhouse had been clued in beforehand. And yet all the elements of
The Rookie
were there again. No one in history had spent more time in the minor leagues before getting a major-league call-up than Lindsey. The celebration was spontaneous but unrestrained.

“If you know John Lindsey at all, you know why guys would react that way,” said Phil Nevin. “He’s one of those people who is impossible not to like.”

Lindsey’s major-league stint was cut short soon after he got his “Carlos Lee” hit, when he was hit on the right hand by a pitch and broke it. He was back in Albuquerque the next year but found himself out of work at the end of the 2011 season. Again, retirement crossed his mind. Again, he began thinking about college. Again, he decided to heed his father’s words. He spent the off-season working out harder than he had in years. He lost thirty pounds and, after his half season in Mexico, had been signed by Toledo in June. “I’ll tell you what,” Nevin said. “The guy can still hit.”

At thirty-five, Lindsey still didn’t believe he had used it all up. “I’m an accident away,” he said, repeating the minor-league mantra. “It happened once. I still believe it can happen again.”

Still believing is what keeps everyone in Triple-A coming back—day after day, year after year.

The day after Lindsey’s home run and the bullpen’s late meltdown, it was a surprisingly comfortable summer Sunday in the Midwest—largely because the humidity was low enough that being in a ballpark wasn’t at all unpleasant.

Two hours before the Toledo Mud Hens were scheduled to host the Louisville Bats, a middle-aged man stood on top of the Mud Hens’ dugout wearing a white straw hat with a Greg Norman shark logo on it, a yellow shirt, blue shorts, and flip-flops. He was giving his testimony—at length—and about three hundred people sat in the sun and drank in every word.

“I was born again on November 6, 1983,” Frank Tanana was saying. “That was the day I gave my life and my soul to Jesus Christ.”

Tanana was thirty years old when he was born again both as a Christian and as a pitcher. He had made it to the major leagues as a twenty-year-old flamethrower with the California Angels and had eighty-four wins by the time he was twenty-five years old. In those days there weren’t pitch counts or inning counts or young pitchers being shut down at 160 innings to protect their arms. You just went out and threw until your arm fell off—which, in many cases, it did,
at least as far as throwing ninety-five-plus miles an hour was concerned.

In his first full season in the majors, 1974, Tanana pitched more than 268 innings. He turned twenty-one in July of that year. A year later it was 257 innings, and the year after that, when he was 19-10, it was 288 innings. These days, for a young pitcher to pitch 288 innings in
two
seasons is considered a tad risky.