Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (35 page)

“I had to step out for a second to gather myself because seeing that score go up was kind of a shock,” he said. “I needed a minute to take a deep breath.”

He used it well. On a 2-2 count, Yankee reliever Scott Proctor threw a fastball on the inside part of the plate, and Longoria crushed it on a rope down the line, headed toward the low barrier in left field. It looked a lot like the shot Mark McGwire had hit in 1998 for his
historic and steroid-aided sixty-second home run. The ball just cleared the fence as pandemonium broke loose in Tampa.

“It was all a little surreal the way everything happened so fast in that last inning,” Longoria said ten months later. “It was one of those things that will be tough to repeat. People still stop me in the street to talk about it, and it’s still cool to me.”

On this sultry evening in Durham, Longoria was a long way from that home run, but he was even farther from where he had been in his previous lifetime in Durham at $2,400 a month.

Not long after the 2012 season ended, just a few weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday, Longoria signed a contract extension that guaranteed he would be with the Rays at least through 2022 and would be paid at least $136 million.

In short, if he ever landed back in Durham on rehab, he could rent out not just one suite of the Washington Duke—but the entire hotel.

CHARLOTTE

Evan Longoria’s walk-off home run was one of those baseball moments that will be replayed for years to prove just how dramatic the game can be at its very best.

But it wouldn’t have happened if not for Dan Johnson. And, in truth, what Johnson did was far more stunning than what Longoria did. Longoria is a star, a multimillion-dollar player. If you were casting the hero of a baseball movie, he would have Longoria’s profile.

Not so much Dan Johnson.

While Longoria was being given the royal treatment in Durham, Johnson was playing two and a half hours down I-85 in Triple-A Charlotte. Actually, he was playing two miles into South Carolina, just off I-77 in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which was where Knights Stadium was located.

“Right now that night in Tampa feels like it was a long time ago,” Johnson said shortly after batting practice one evening. “I really believed going into this season that if I stayed healthy I’d be playing in Chicago. Well, I’ve stayed healthy …”

But staying healthy had not gotten him a roster spot with the White Sox, the team he had signed with after being released by the Rays. And so, he found himself playing every day, as he had hoped—but in Charlotte, not as he had hoped. The only games he had missed
had been when manager Joel Skinner rested him, kicking and screaming because he hated missing even one day in the lineup.

“Look at that wind,” he said, sitting in the dugout in Norfolk on a warm August afternoon on one of the 7 days (of 144) that he wasn’t on Skinner’s lineup card. “Blowing straight out to right field. Perfect night for me and I’m going to be watching.”

He had spent some time in Skinner’s office earlier that afternoon pleading his case. Skinner wasn’t budging. The Knights were comfortably in first place, and he wanted to keep all his players fresh for the August stretch run and the September playoffs. That said, Skinner was hoping Johnson wouldn’t be around for the playoffs.

“He’s been good every day,” he said. “He could definitely help in Chicago in September. If nothing else, his history says he’s a guy you want around when the games get tense.”

Johnson’s history as a clutch hitter was remarkable—all the more so because he had been hounded by injuries almost from the time he first made it to the major leagues in 2005.

Until then, his career had stayed on a consistent upward curve. He had grown up in Blaine, Minnesota, a town of about twenty thousand people, where hockey was far more popular than baseball. But Johnson had always wanted to be a baseball player.

“I played hockey, liked hockey, wasn’t bad at hockey,” he said. “But I remember telling my first-grade teacher I wanted to be a baseball player. It was just what I always wanted to do.”

Even though the baseball season wasn’t very long in Blaine, Johnson was good enough to be recruited by a number of Division I schools. At one point he thought about going to Iowa State but made a last-second decision to go to Butler. He was an all-conference player as a freshman but left after one year to transfer to Iowa Western Community College.

“Too much academics at Butler,” he said, smiling. “Being honest, I knew I wanted to play baseball, and at Butler you spend a lot of time in class and studying. I wanted to focus more on baseball.”

After a year at Iowa Western, he transferred to Nebraska, where
he played well enough to be drafted in the seventh round by the Oakland Athletics. In 2005, after a sizzling start at Sacramento, he got called to the majors, where he was the starting first baseman for most of the season, hitting .275 with fifteen home runs and fifty-eight RBIs. He went into 2006 penciled in as the starting first baseman.

That was when the injury bug bit him. Or, more specifically, got in his eyes. He was cleaning out his locker at the end of spring training when he found an old tube of suntan lotion. “I was carrying a bunch of stuff into the training room to dump, and I didn’t realize it was open. Some of it got into my right eye. I didn’t know it at the time, but it chemically burned the eye. After a while I realized my tear ducts were affected—I couldn’t cry. I could still see well enough to hit an occasional fastball, but that was about it.”

He was hitting .237 when he got sent down to Sacramento, and it wasn’t until after the season that he went to the Arizona Eye Institute and got a proper diagnosis. That allowed him to report to spring training in 2007 completely healthy. It didn’t last. Late in a spring training game he got his foot stepped on at first base, and when he twisted in pain, he tore the labrum in his hip. Back to the disabled list. He came back to have a reasonably good season—eighteen home runs, sixty-two runs batted in—but a year later the A’s re-acquired Frank Thomas, who could only play first base or DH—which left Johnson as the odd man out. The A’s released him in April, and the Rays signed him and sent him to Durham, where he spent most of the season.

At the end of that year his agent came to him with an offer: a Japanese team was willing to pay him $1.2 million—which was almost four times the money he was making on a split contract with the Rays and more than double what he had made in Oakland.

“I jumped at it,” he said. “All I asked was, ‘When do I leave?’ That’s the kind of money that changes your life.”

Some American players thrive in Japan. Johnson wasn’t one of them. He thought the strike zone was too big and felt as if umpires went out of their way to make it even larger when he was at the plate.
“Late in the season one of the umpires told my interpreter that I was just now at the point where I had paid my dues, so they were going to be fair to me.

“I hit twenty-four home runs, but I struck out a lot. It also seemed like I would suddenly be on the bench when I got close to numbers where incentive bonuses kicked in. My family enjoyed it there. I just didn’t enjoy the baseball very much. By the end of the season I knew I wanted to come home—regardless of the money.”

He re-signed with the Rays for 2010, knowing he would be sent to Durham at the start of the season. Aided, no doubt, by a smaller strike zone, he was having a monster season when he was called up to the Rays in August. In ninety-eight games in Durham he hit thirty home runs, drove in ninety-five runs, and was hitting .303 when the call back to the majors finally came. Although he didn’t hit for average down the stretch, he continued to hit for power, hitting seven home runs and driving in twenty-three runs in the last six weeks.

His return to good health, and his combined thirty-seven home runs and 118 RBIs in the majors and minors earned him a one-year $1 million contract with the Rays for 2011. The Rays had lost Carlos Peña, their starting first baseman, to the Cubs in free agency, and it looked as if there would be plenty of playing time for Johnson.

“It was all set up for me—finally,” said Johnson, who was thirty-one on opening day of the 2011 season. “I was healthy, I had a good contract with the potential to get a better one, and I was finally solidified in the lineup.”

The season started well. On April 8, Johnson hit a three-run, eighth-inning home run with the Rays trailing the White Sox 7–6 that proved to be the game winner. That was a continuation of his knack for getting big hits in big spots. In 2008, shortly after being called up to the Rays, he had hit a walk-off home run in a pivotal September game against the Red Sox. He had done the same thing against the same team late in 2010 after that season’s call-up from Durham.

But the good start—and the good health—didn’t last. Six days after the home run against the White Sox, he was hit in the hand by a
ninety-six-mile-an-hour fastball thrown by Twins closer Matt Capps. “He nailed me with it,” Johnson said. “It really squared me up. But I figured it would just be sore for a couple of days and that would be it. Nothing was broken.”

The injury appeared to be just what Johnson had thought—a painful bruise and nothing more. Johnson kept playing. But he had no power, and as his batting average slipped, he got anxious at the plate. His ability to draw walks and not swing at bad pitches had always been a strength. Now he wasn’t walking very often (he went from walking once every thirteen at-bats to once every twenty-one at-bats), and his batting average dropped like a stone.

“I wanted to play through it,” Johnson said. “The doctor told me I’d gotten hit on a nerve and it was kind of a use-it-or-lose-it deal. I could play or I could have major surgery and hope it got fixed. I wanted to play. But I literally couldn’t control my hand when it was on the bat. It just wasn’t strong enough.”

He was sent down to Durham in May, and things didn’t improve. “It got to the point where I couldn’t carry groceries in from the car,” he said. “So I went for another MRI.”

This time he was told that the hand would heal on its own but it could be a couple of months or it could be a couple of years. “That was scary,” he said. “I was in the twilight zone.”

As the summer wore on, the hand began to feel better. He managed to hit thirteen home runs in Durham and was a September call-up to Tampa. By then, Casey Kotchman had established himself as the starting first baseman, and Johnson was used sparingly as a pinch hitter. That was his role on the last night of the season with the Rays tied with the Red Sox for the wild card spot.

Sam Fuld had pinch-hit for catcher Kelly Shoppach in the bottom of the eighth and drawn a two-out, bases-loaded walk to cut the Yankees’ lead to 7–1. “At the time I didn’t think much of it,” Fuld said. “I mean, we were still so far behind, but at least we had a chance right there to cut into the margin.”

By the end of the inning, Longoria had hit his three-run home run, and the margin was down to 7–6. As the Rays came to bat in the
bottom of the ninth, manager Joe Maddon told Johnson he would bat fifth in the inning if the Rays could get that far.

“I went up to the [indoor batting] cage to get some swings and get loose,” he said. “I wasn’t there for very long when one of the security guys came in and said, ‘Hey, Dan, you’re up.’ ”

Yankees reliever Cory Wade had needed only eight pitches to retire Ben Zobrist on a fly ball and Kotchman on a weak grounder to third. Down to his last out, Maddon decided to push all his chips in and bring up a power hitter, Johnson, to hit for a line-drive hitter, Fuld.

Johnson sprinted down the runway, grabbed a bat, and walked into the cauldron of noise that Tropicana Field was at that moment. Because the Trop is, without question, major-league baseball’s worst venue, the Rays almost never sell out—even in a pennant race—and this game was no exception. A crowd of 29,518 was in the ballpark, but they were all now on their feet believing that if Johnson, who was hitting .108 for the season in the major leagues, didn’t get on base, the Rays’ season would be over since the Red Sox were still winning in Baltimore at that moment.

Johnson had not hit a major-league home run since the three-run shot against the White Sox on April 8. He was comforted somewhat by the sight of Wade on the mound. “I’d played with him in the minors during the season,” he said. “I knew he liked to throw his changeup as an out pitch, and I figured at some point I would see one.”

Wade had been in Durham until the Rays had released him in June and he had signed with the Yankees, who had sent him to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre until calling him up in September.

The count went to 2-2. The noise was overwhelming. Johnson almost didn’t hear it.

“I’m not sure why, but when I get in situations like that, a kind of calm comes over me,” he said. “That’s the way I had felt in those other situations when I’d hit walk-off homers—very calm.”

On the next pitch, Johnson was convinced that Wade would try to get him out with a changeup. He guessed right. Wade threw a
changeup high in the zone but on the outside of the plate, or maybe a little bit outside. Johnson swung at it anyway.