Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (38 page)

“What I do know is that he never called, he never asked to come and see Bridget. One card—he sent one card—and that was it. After she came home, still nothing. He lives so close I can see his house from my barn. For a long time I had trouble letting go of that. It took a lot of talk and a lot of counseling to get to the point where I could just say to myself, ‘Let him live in his own personal hell, we’ve moved on.’

“I’ve done that now. Bridget is doing great. Her prosthetic has been great, she’s back riding horses regularly, she’s just a terrific and happy kid. It was a horrible, awful thing we lived through, but we lived through it. Most important, she lived through it.”

Johnson can’t talk enough about the way the Red Sox treated him in the aftermath of the accident—not only financially, but with constant moral and emotional support. He didn’t return to the team for the rest of the 2010 season, and Theo Epstein told him if he wanted to take 2011 off with full pay, that was fine with him and with the club.

Johnson chose to go back to work in 2011. Bridget was back in school and doing fine, and he was a baseball guy. For most of the season, the Red Sox appeared to be a lock for the playoffs. Then came the collapse that set up the home runs by Dan Johnson and Evan Longoria that sealed Boston’s fate on the last night of the season.

Two days later, Terry Francona—who had managed the Red Sox to two World Series titles in eight seasons and had helped break the Red Sox’ dreaded “Curse of the Bambino” in 2004—“resigned.” He and the team had agreed that the option on his contract for 2012 would not be picked up.

Johnson knew his days in Boston were numbered even before Francona was let go. “You go into the last month of the season with an eight-game lead and don’t make the playoffs, heads are going to roll, especially in a market like Boston,” he said. “Once Tito [Francona] left, I was pretty certain it was just a matter of time for me.”

The time was six days. After what he had been through the year before, getting fired hardly seemed catastrophic to Johnson. Disappointing certainly—he’d been in the Red Sox organization for twelve years—but hardly something he couldn’t handle. He went home and thought about taking a season off from the game to spend more time with his family.

That notion lasted about six weeks. In early November, soon after Dan Duquette had been named as the new general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Johnson’s phone rang. It was Duquette, who had hired Johnson to manage in the Red Sox’ system when he had been the general manager there in 2000. Now he wanted to know if Johnson would like to manage in Norfolk.

It meant going back to the minor leagues—to the long bus trips, the roadside motels, and the 4:00 a.m. wake-ups to deal with airport security for a commercial flight. But Johnson didn’t have to think about it twice. “I’m in,” he said.

The 2012 season had been hectic, especially since four of the five pitchers who had been in the Orioles’ rotation at the start of the season had been sent to Norfolk during the season—not because of rehab assignments, but because they hadn’t pitched well enough.

“Buck and I have a routine,” Johnson said, talking about Orioles manager Buck Showalter, who almost always called him directly when he was thinking about a call-up or sending someone down. “He calls and says, ‘RJ, you got a minute?’ I just say, ‘What do you need?’ and then he asks me what I think. We’re usually on the same page, but every once in a while he wants to try something different. I don’t argue. He’s the boss.”

In the background, as Johnson talked about Showalter, his office television was tuned to the game between the Orioles and the Tigers that was going on in Detroit. Johnson was watching with more than passing interest at that moment. Wei-Yin Chen, the Orioles’ starter that afternoon, had been jumped on for five runs in the first inning.

“He comes out early, and Buck has to stretch the bullpen out; he’s going to be on the phone in a couple of hours looking for a pitcher,” Johnson said. “The good news is whoever it is will get out of the bus trip to Gwinnett.”

He looked away from the game for a moment and saw Joel Skinner, the Charlotte manager, poking his head inside the door.

“What do you think, they gonna bang it?” Skinner asked.

“Bang it” is baseball slang for calling a game off. It had been raining steadily all day with no apparent end in sight three hours before game time.

“If they do, it won’t be until the last possible moment,” Johnson said. “I wish they’d do it right now so we could get on the road to Gwinnett.”

Skinner made a face. “Nine hours from here, right?”

“We can make it in a little less if we’re lucky,” Johnson said. “The good news is we’ve got a great bus. Makes life a lot easier.”

He offered Skinner a seat. Managers at the major-league level rarely socialize with one another beyond the occasional conversation around the batting cage. On the minor-league level it is more relaxed. It may have to do with a feeling of shared suffering.

Skinner wanted to be certain that Johnson understood he hadn’t been trying to embarrass Johnson’s team the night before in spite of the final score. Johnson waved him off. “I get it,” he said. “I know you aren’t taking extra bases or stealing on me with that kind of lead.”

Johnson shook his head. “It’s tough, though, down here sometimes. The other night I cost one of my guys a run on his ERA when we had a big lead. Guy gets to first on a bleeder, might even have been an error, but they called it a hit. We’re up 13–1, I think, so I’m not holding the guy at first base and he takes off—steals second. Next guy hits a roller through the middle for a hit, and they get a run. I know what happened, but the big club doesn’t. I felt badly about it.”

In the minors, players and managers
do
worry about every individual statistic because it not only can make a difference in how the team views someone but can help or hurt a player in negotiating a contract.

A few weeks earlier, the Durham Bulls had been hosting the Rochester Red Wings in about as routine a July game as can be played at the Triple-A level. In the sixth inning, Henry Wrigley, who had started the season in Double-A Montgomery before being promoted to Durham in May, singled. Wrigley, who was about to turn twenty-six, was at Triple-A for the first time and had been making the most of his chance, hitting .343 since his call-up.

He took a long lead off first base, and pitcher Brendan Wise threw over. Wrigley took off for second, and first baseman Chris Parmelee made a bad throw that couldn’t be handled by shortstop Pedro Florimón. The ball went off his glove, and Wrigley slid in safely.

Brent Belvin, the official scorer, looked at the play live and then on a replay and decided that Wrigley would have been out if Parmelee’s
throw had been accurate. So he gave Parmelee an error and charged Wrigley with a caught stealing. Both players would have been much happier if he had credited Wrigley with a stolen base, but Belvin didn’t think that was the right thing to do.

The next evening, Wrigley sat in the Bulls’ dugout complaining—half kidding, half serious—about the ruling. “I thought I was there before the throw,” he said to a group of listeners including, most importantly, Bulls PR director Zach Weber. “That extra bag [steal] could make a difference when I’m negotiating my contract next year. It could be worth a couple of thousand dollars.”

He was smiling when he said it, and everyone listening laughed at the exaggeration. But Weber had been around enough players to know it wasn’t just a casual joke. “If you want, I can ask Brent to take another look at it,” he said to Wrigley.

“Yeah, that would be good,” Wrigley said. “Because if I’m there and you have to assume a perfect throw and tag, I should get the bag.”

“That’s right, you should,” Durham radio play-by-play man Patrick Kinas said. “It’s worth checking.”

Belvin did look at the replay again later that evening. He saw the same thing he saw the night before: the throw arriving well ahead of Wrigley but off-line. He told Weber he couldn’t change the ruling. The easiest thing for an official scorer to do is to rule in favor of the player—especially someone on the home team whom he may have to deal with in the future. The good ones aren’t influenced by that.

Wrigley’s caught stealing stood. So did Parmelee’s error. The error apparently didn’t bother the Twins. They called Parmelee up to the majors the next day. Wrigley finished the season with one caught stealing and zero stolen bases. Apparently, he was right—he could have used the extra bag.

About an hour after Joel Skinner left Ron Johnson’s office, the rain in Norfolk began to slacken. By game time a crowd of 3,801—about half of what the Tides would normally draw on a Sunday evening—had found its way into the ballpark, and the rain had stopped. In all, it
wasn’t an uncomfortable evening. The game-time temperature was a balmy seventy-six degrees with a comfortable breeze.

The Tides beat the Knights 5–4 in a game played in a brisk two hours and thirty-two minutes. By 9:30, they were on their bus en route to Gwinnett, meaning they would be at their hotel by about 6:30 in the morning.

The Tides were now two games over .500 and still in contention for a wild card berth in the IL playoffs. All that said, Johnson—and Skinner—would have been just as happy if the game had been banged. Skinner had a long way to travel before he slept; Johnson had much longer to travel. After what he had lived through, nine hours on a “great bus” was fine with him.

COMEBACKS

There are no favorites in Triple-A baseball. No one sits around in March picking the teams that will win the International League North, South, and West Division titles. It isn’t just that winning is not the top priority in the minor leagues; it’s that there’s no way of projecting what a roster is going to look like in August. In all likelihood, if a team plays well in April and May, some of its key players won’t be with the team by June. And, if the major-league team has injuries, a Triple-A team’s best players are going to be in the big leagues, and no one is going to bat an eye worrying about how that will affect the Triple-A club’s chances of winning.

“If you think about it, you don’t want your team to be stable,” said Wally Backman, the manager in 2012 of the Buffalo Bisons. “I want to see my guys moving up—preferably not because of injury or poor performance; but it’s a fact of baseball life that those things happen.”

Backman’s roster certainly wasn’t stable. By mid-August he’d had twenty-two players called up to the New York Mets at some point during the season. In Norfolk, Ron Johnson occasionally had trouble recognizing all his pitchers because they were shuttling back and forth to Baltimore so often. Durham’s roster seemed to change daily too, as the Rays searched for more hitting and healthy bodies with their disabled list overflowing with important players.

If there was one team in the league that would have been voted
Least Likely to Succeed at the start of the season it was the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.

This was unusual because the Yankees had traditionally signed a lot of veterans for their Triple-A team, even though they were often higher priced, for two reasons: those with more experience were most likely to be ready for the major leagues if needed, and George Steinbrenner, when he was still “The Boss,” had always wanted his minor-league teams to have good records, regardless of cost—even if no one working for him thought it was important. In fact, Steinbrenner often threw tantrums over poor spring training performances.