Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (4 page)

Dismuke appeared again, this time walking directly toward Boscan.

“Skip wants to see you, JC,” he said. He wasn’t smiling. Boscan panicked. Maybe Brundage had gotten the good news out of the way first, and now he was going to let Boscan know that the team needed him in Double-A to work with a young catcher. Or, maybe he was being released.

Brundage was, in fact, preparing that kind of speech for Boscan. “I was going to look very sad and tell him that sometimes things don’t turn out the way you want them to in baseball,” he said. “But when he walked in here, he was shaking. I couldn’t go through with it.”

The entire Gwinnett staff was in the room when Boscan walked in.

“Have a seat, JC,” Brundage said, trying to look grim.

Boscan sat on the couch across from Brundage’s desk.

“You ever been to the big leagues?” he asked—knowing the answer.

“No,” Boscan said, shaking his head.

Brundage couldn’t keep up the charade.

“I was going to mess with you, JC, but I can’t do it,” he said, feeling himself start to choke up. “This is your day. You’re going up.”

Boscan burst into tears. Everyone else in the room was fighting to hold tears back.

“I’ve been a minor-league manager a long time,” Brundage said. “I can honestly say that was the best moment I’ve ever had.”

After Boscan had thanked everyone and shaken everyone’s hand and been hugged all around, he walked out of the office. Brundage’s
office is in a hallway that leads to the clubhouse area where the players’ lockers are located. When Boscan turned the corner to reenter the locker area, the entire team was waiting for him.

“It was like the last scene in
The Rookie
,” he said. “The whole team was in on it. They all knew and they were all waiting there for me. The feeling I had when I saw them all and they all started clapping and then cheering and hugging me is something I’ll never forget for as long as I live.”

Boscan was in the agate the next day around the country, one of seven players mentioned in the same paragraph, amid the call-ups made by all thirty major-league teams.

“
ATLANTA BRAVES—CALLED UP CATCHER J. C. BOSCAN FROM TRIPLE-A GWINNETT
.”

This book is about J. C. Boscan.

And all those like him.

STARTING OVER

There is no aspect of baseball that has changed more in recent years than spring training. Or, more specifically, spring training facilities.

Once, the winter homes of most baseball teams were old, dank, and cramped—minor-league facilities that served for six weeks each year as the headquarters for an entire baseball organization. The ballparks were older too, havens for fans who wanted to get close to players, but often creaking from age with outfield fences that looked as if they had been constructed shortly after Abner Doubleday invented the game.

Even in Vero Beach, where in 1947 the Brooklyn Dodgers set up what was then the model for a spring training facility—Holman Stadium and the facilities around it became known as Dodgertown—there was the feeling of being in a time warp. The dugouts never even had roofs. They were just open-air cutouts along the baselines where players either sunbathed or baked—depending on one’s point of view—during games.

Through the years, almost all the older facilities have disappeared. Dodgertown sits empty now during the spring, used on occasion by local high school teams while the Dodgers train in a brand-new multimillion-dollar headquarters built for them in Arizona. Because spring training has become a big business, local governments in both Florida and Arizona have lined up to build modern baseball palaces
for teams, complete with every possible amenity players could ask for—from massive weight-training areas to sparkling training fields to sun-drenched stadiums that look like miniature versions of the big-league parks the teams play in once the season begins.

There is no better example of the modern spring training facility than Bright House Field, which has been the spring home of the Philadelphia Phillies since 2004, when it was built for $28 million to replace Jack Russell Memorial Stadium, which had been the Phillies winter home since 1955. Jack Russell, as it was known in the Clearwater area, was the classic old spring training spot: the stadium was made of wood, and the paint was peeling in every corner of the old place when the Phillies moved out.

The old spring training clubhouses—in baseball no one talks about locker rooms, they are clubhouses—were cramped and crowded with players practically on top of one another, especially at the start of camp, when between fifty and sixty players might be in a room designed to hold no more than thirty to thirty-five lockers.

Jack Russell was one of those dingy old clubhouses. The Phillies’ clubhouse at Bright House Field could not be more different. It is spread out and spacious with room—easily—for fifty lockers. There are several rooms off the main area that are strictly off-limits to anyone but Phillies personnel, meaning players can rest or eat their post-workout or postgame meals in complete privacy without tripping over unwanted media members or anyone else who might have access to the main clubhouse area.

Even though he had been out of baseball for most of four years, Scott Elarton felt completely comfortable walking into the Phillies’ clubhouse in February 2012. Many of the players had no idea who he was because professional athletes’ memories rarely extend back more than about fifteen minutes. In baseball world 2012, Cal Ripken Jr.—who retired in 2001—was an old-timer who played in a lot of games, Willie Mays is a distant memory, and Babe Ruth is the name of a league for teenage players.

Elarton had won fifty-six games as a major-league pitcher in spite of numerous injuries, including seventeen for a bad Houston Astros
team in 2000. But he hadn’t been in a major-league baseball clubhouse since 2008 and even though he stood out at six feet seven, a lot of players had no idea who he was.

“It’s not like anybody looked at me and thought I was some hotshot prospect,” he said with a laugh. “I probably look every bit of thirty-six.”

Seven months earlier, even Rubén Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ general manager, hadn’t recognized Elarton. That was in August, when Elarton had called to him while standing on the field during batting practice prior to a game between the Phillies and the Colorado Rockies. Elarton was watching BP with his seven-year-old son when he noticed Amaro standing a few yards away and, on a complete whim, decided to try to talk to him.

“I had taken my son to the game because I was friends with several guys on the Phillies: Raúl Ibañez, Roy Oswalt, Cliff Lee,” Elarton said. “They set us up with tickets. The town we live in is about an hour from Denver, so we drove over. They’d also arranged for us to have field passes, which I knew would be cool for Jake. We went onto the field, and we were standing with all the other people with field passes behind this barrier they set up so that you don’t get too close to the players or bother them while they’re hitting.

“I’d seen that barrier a couple thousand times in ballparks—but always from the other side. I had never even thought about what it might be like to be on the field like that in street clothes and
not
be a player. I felt completely humiliated. I just hated being there.

“Then I saw Rubén standing nearby. I’d never met him, but I certainly knew him. So I called his name. He looked over at me, and I could tell right away that he had no idea who I was. But he’s a polite guy, so he walked over to where we were standing.”

Elarton was right; Amaro hadn’t recognized him. “I knew who Scott Elarton was,” Amaro said. “He’d pitched too long for me not to know who he was. But he had lost some weight since I’d last seen him pitch, and it had been a few years. But when he said, ‘Rubén, I’m Scott Elarton,’ it came right back to me.”

Elarton had lost weight—a lot of weight. After he had stopped
playing in 2008, he had ballooned from 260 pounds to just under 300 pounds after having surgery on his foot. “I didn’t exercise at all for a while after the surgery,” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything at all to stay in shape. On the day I got on the scale and weighed 299, I knew I had to stop. I didn’t want to see 300. So I started working out. I started throwing batting practice to the high school team in my hometown. By the time we went to Denver that day, I was probably down to 225.”

After Elarton had introduced himself and introduced his son, he said something to Amaro that surprised him—even as he spoke. To this day, he isn’t quite certain why the words came out of his mouth.

“Rubén, do you think there’s any chance I could make a comeback in baseball?” he said. “Do you think I could pitch again?”

Amaro was, to say the least, surprised by Elarton’s question. Perhaps the only person more surprised was Elarton. “I’m still not honestly sure what possessed me,” he said, shaking his head. “The thought never crossed my mind until the question came out of my mouth. Maybe it was standing behind the barrier that way. Something clicked in my brain that said, ‘I don’t like the view from here.’ Or the feeling I had standing there.”

To Elarton’s further surprise, Amaro didn’t answer him with a response along the lines of “Are you insane?” or even a polite blow-off. Instead, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you’d like, I’ll send someone to watch you throw once the season’s over.”

Elarton couldn’t ask for more than that. “Great,” he said. “How should I get in touch with you?”

Amaro gave him his card, and they shook hands again, leaving Elarton standing there wondering what in the world he had just gotten himself into.

As it turned out, Amaro was as good as his word—better than that, in fact.

Elarton had gone home to Lamar, the town of just under eight thousand where he had grown up, and had begun throwing on a regular basis with Josh Bard, a former major-league catcher who lived
nearby. He wasn’t counting on a call from Amaro—or even 100 percent certain he wanted one—but he wanted to be ready just in case. He could feel the adrenaline each time he threw to Bard, and as the season wound down, he began to believe—“maybe just a little bit”—that he wasn’t entirely crazy.

Shortly after the World Series ended, Amaro called. He was going to be in Denver for a banquet in which Shane Victorino, then with the Phillies, was scheduled to receive an award. If Elarton was still interested and could make the drive to Denver, he would watch him throw the morning after the banquet.

Elarton and Bard made the drive early on a November morning, and Amaro met them at a local school. Amaro stood and watched as Elarton began to throw. After about five minutes he asked him to stop.

“I remember thinking, ‘Am I really that bad?’ ” Elarton said. “I had kind of talked myself into believing I was throwing pretty well, and when Rubén told me to stop after five minutes, my heart sank. I thought I had wasted my time, his time, and Josh’s time.”

Not exactly.

“I don’t know what you’ve been doing, but you look completely different than I remember from the last time you were pitching,” Amaro said. “You look comfortable, your ball has movement—I really like what you’re doing. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to shoot some video while you keep throwing.”

It was more than okay with Elarton. Amaro had him throw about fifty pitches in all. Encouraged by what Amaro had said early on, Elarton thought Amaro would tell him that he’d be in touch. That would leave him with some hope.

Amaro didn’t do that. “I’d like to sign you,” he said. “If you give me your agent’s information, I’ll get in touch and we’ll work out a deal.”

Elarton was almost dazed. If nothing else, he had gotten himself out from behind the barrier.