Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (32 page)

Herrmann’s manager, Mike Sarbaugh, had never had to worry much about the escalator when he was a player. “Once I got to Double-A, I began to notice there were a lot of guys who had more talent than I did,” he said. “The problem was I had gotten hooked on the game by then.”

If Ryne Sandberg in Lehigh Valley ran the International League’s tightest clubhouse, Sarbaugh probably ran the loosest. A few feet from the door of his office, in the open area where players often sat to eat before and after games, there was a Ping-Pong table. At almost any hour of the day, there was a game going on because the team ran a never-ending Ping-Pong tournament during the season. Players came and went, and the Ping-Pong tournament continued, much like Nathan Detroit’s longest-running floating craps game in the musical
Guys and Dolls
.

This was proof, if nothing else, that there was more than one way to run a successful minor-league team. Sandberg, the Hall of Famer, had been a winner wherever he managed and was generally considered the most likely of the fourteen International League managers to run a big-league club someday soon.

Just behind him on that list was Columbus’s Sarbaugh, whose career had peaked in 1994, his final season as a player, when he made it to Triple-A Charlotte for four games and five at-bats. He had gotten one hit and retired the following spring when he was offered a coaching job at Class A Kinston in the Carolina League by the Indians.

“Baseball got me into college [Lamar University] because I was a decent high school shortstop,” he said. “I was figuring I’d go to a DIII school and play baseball and soccer, but a college friend of my dad’s, Ron Rizzi, who was a Pirates scout, knew Jim Gilligan, the coach
at Lamar, and recommended me. I signed there without ever having seen the school.

“Even so, I never figured I would stay in the game after I graduated. Both my parents were teachers, and I figured I’d be a teacher and a high school coach. That’s why I majored in kinesiology. It was something I figured I’d use as a teacher and as a coach. The only sport I really dreamed about playing professionally was basketball. I thought I’d play in the NBA. By high school I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”

Sarbaugh was crushed when no one drafted him coming out of college. By then he was hoping at least to get a shot to play professionally. “I went home and was trying to decide what to do next,” he said. “Get a job? Go to grad school? Sulk?”

While he was weighing his options, he got a phone call from Walter Yauss, a Brewers scout who had seen him play in college. The Brewers were short an infielder on their Helena, Montana, rookie-league team. Yauss asked Sarbaugh if he would be interested in signing with the Brewers and going to Helena.

“I jumped at it,” Sarbaugh said, laughing at the memory. “My bonus was a plane ticket to Helena. My salary was $850 a month.”

Sarbaugh worked his way up to Double-A over the next few years but understood he had hit his ceiling when he got there. That’s why when he was offered the coaching job he took it.

“I knew I was on shaky ground as a player,” he said. “I was twenty-eight and, at best, a Double-A talent. It’s funny because when I signed with the Brewers out of college, I figured I’d do it a year and then go teach. When I took the coaching job, I figured I’d do it a year and then go teach. Now I’m twenty-three years out of college and I’m still here.”

But he does teach. He met Nicole Paul on a blind date not long after he had become a coach, and they were married in 1998. They settled in Shillington, Pennsylvania—not far from where Mike grew up in Lancaster. Every off-season since, Mike has gone home to teach. He has a full-time job at a middle school and also subs at the high school level.

“It just seemed like a natural thing for me to do,” he said. “A teacher’s lounge isn’t unlike a baseball clubhouse. There’s a lot going on in there, and you have to hope that personalities will mesh well.”

Sarbaugh got his first chance to manage in 2004, in the rookie-level New York–Penn League running the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. They won the league title. Two years later, promoted to single-A Kinston—where he had previously been on championship teams as a player and as a coach—he won the Carolina League title as a manager. In 2009, the Indians moved him up to Columbus, and the Clippers had won both the Governors’ Cup and the Triple-A national championship game in 2010 and 2011.

It wasn’t so much the winning that had put Sarbaugh into conversations as a future major-league manager as the way he handled his players. Even though he had turned forty-five before the start of the 2012 season, he looked as if he could still be playing. His players liked the fact that he was always straight up with them but didn’t feel the need to micromanage them.

“The hardest part, day in and day out, is knowing you’ve got twenty-five guys in the room who all think they should be in the majors,” he said. “They should feel that way—whether it’s true or not. When a guy gets sent down or doesn’t make the team out of spring training, I always sit down and say to him, ‘What do you think you need to work on to get up there?’ I let him tell me. Usually, they know exactly what it is. And then I say, ‘Okay, let’s see if we can work on that and get you up there.’ Are they all going up? Of course not. But my job is to help them make the best of things, regardless of what direction they’re heading in.”

At that moment the Clippers were headed in the right direction. After struggling for much of the season, they had won eight straight games and, at 57-50, had become a factor in the wild card race. Indianapolis still led the West Division by nine games at 66-41, but the Clips were only two games back of Pawtucket for the wild card spot.

“Winning is a lot more fun than losing—that’s obvious,” Sarbaugh said. “But it still isn’t the primary job. Managing games comes second. Managing people comes first.”

Sarbaugh sat back in his chair just as the phone rang. The rain, he was told, should slacken enough to allow the game to start on time.

“That will make everyone very happy,” Sarbaugh said. “The less these guys sit around and think about things right now, the better.”

The trading deadline was five days away. Which meant that August 1—the day Triple-A managers dread most—wasn’t far behind.

HOT SUMMER NIGHTS IN DURHAM

Charlie Montoyo sat in a chair next to the desk in his office, having given up his usual pregame spot behind his desk to his nine-year-old son, Tyson, who was engrossed in a computer game his father had no chance of understanding.

For Montoyo, the best part of June and July is that his family flies east to join him in Durham. On a typical day, when the team is in town, Tyson goes to the ballpark a few hours before game time with his dad. Samantha and four-year-old Alexander usually come later.

Most Triple-A managers join the major-league club in September once their season is over, helping out around the ballpark since there are extra players to work with when the rosters expand. It is considered a perk—a chance to enjoy big-league life for a few weeks after a season of long bus rides and motels.

Montoyo is an exception. As soon as his season ends, he flies back to Arizona to rejoin his family—which has to head home in mid-August so the boys can start school. In spite of his heart issues, Alexander is now going to school. Montoyo doesn’t want to be away from his boys for one minute longer than he needs to be, and the Rays understand.

The 2012 season had been—from a baseball perspective—Montoyo’s most difficult. The Bulls had opened the season at home and gone 5-2 before going on one of those Bataan Death March road
trips that International League teams face a couple of times every season. They had gone from Gwinnett to Charlotte to Pawtucket and then to Norfolk. That meant a six-hour bus trip to Gwinnett, a relatively easy three and a half hours to Charlotte, a 4:00 a.m. wake-up to fly to Pawtucket, and then eleven more hours on a bus to get to Norfolk to play the next night. They had lost thirteen of fourteen on that trip and then tacked on three more losses when they finally got home, meaning they had lost thirteen in a row and sixteen of seventeen. That left the Bulls at 6-18, and in a hole from which they would never completely climb out.

A couple of times in early July they had gotten to within four games of .500 before sliding back—often on nights when Montoyo had to hold pitchers out of games or use backup catcher Craig Albernaz to mop up games on the mound. The Rays had placed nine important players on the disabled list at one time or another during the season, which meant they were constantly pillaging Montoyo’s roster for replacement players. That, plus their never-ending search for bullpen help, meant that Montoyo found himself looking at a different group of players on an almost nightly basis. By the end of July the team had been involved in 112 transactions—players going up to the majors or coming back to Triple-A; others going down to Double-A or coming up to Triple-A; a few being released; a few more going on or off the DL. There had also been a fifty-game suspension for drug use involving Tim Beckham, who had been the No. 1 pick in the entire draft in 2008 but was now struggling to get his life together while playing in Durham.

Through it all, Montoyo’s demeanor never changed.

“That’s the great thing about Charlie,” catcher Chris Giménez said. “He’s trying to get the team to win every night, but he’s still managing us as individuals. We all know that his door is always open for us whenever we want to talk about anything. And he’s not going to bury anyone. If you’re on his team, you’re going to play. That makes life down here a lot more bearable for everyone.”

Montoyo completely understood how tough it was for someone like Giménez to be on the Tampa-Durham shuttle. Giménez had
started the season in Durham and had been called up in mid-April. In late May he was back in Durham being kidded by his teammates because when he rejoined the team in Indianapolis he didn’t have any of his Durham equipment with him. So he warmed up in Rays gear before games.

“They started calling me ‘big-league Jimmy,’ ” he said, laughing on a hot summer night. “It’s kind of stuck. Of course that’s not the kind of big leaguer I want to be.” He shook his head. “I know how this sounds when I say it, but I swear to God when I was up there I couldn’t get anything to fall. But that’s the way it works. No one is looking at the type of outs you make up there. I get it.”

Giménez, who was twenty-nine, and fellow catcher Stephen Vogt had both been on the shuttle all season because the Rays’ catching situation was in flux. Vogt, who was twenty-seven, had been sent to the minor-league camp midway through spring training but then had been called up to the team before opening day; the Rays had decided they needed more offense in their lineup after outfielders Sam Fuld and B. J. Upton went on the DL.

Vogt had been drafted out of Azusa Pacific University in the twelfth round in 2007 as an outfielder but had been converted into a catcher. He’d come back from major shoulder surgery in 2009 to be the Rays’ Minor League Player of the Year in 2011. He was sitting in the training room in Durham getting ready for the Bulls’ last preseason workout when coach Dave Myers came in and told him he needed to get dressed and get to the airport because he needed to catch a plane to Tampa.

Vogt was stunned and thrilled. It would turn out to be the first of three times he would get the call to Tampa during the season—meaning he was sent back down twice. He spent the majority of the season in Durham, getting only twenty-five at-bats in the major leagues—without a hit.

“I honestly believe I’ll get another chance,” he said one night. “Just being in the major leagues was great. I want to go back and prove that I can stay there. I’ve come a long way in a fairly short time—especially
after my surgery.” In 2013 Vogt
did
get another chance—in Oakland.

There were two disappointed people on April 4, the day Vogt was called up: Jeff Salazar, who thought he had made the team but found himself on the way back to Durham; and Montoyo. Montoyo was out for his daily five-mile run when the call came from Tampa for Vogt. Normally, Myers would have waited to let Montoyo get back to give a player the news he was going to the majors for the first time, but there was no time because Vogt had to leave for the airport right away.