Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (46 page)

Duke had gone through that experience in March 2012, when the Houston Astros had released him. “The worst part of it was they were absolutely right to do what they did,” he said. “I deserved it.”

His release, on March 27, came less than three years after he had been a National League All-Star. It came two years after the Pirates had paid him $4.3 million to be an important part of their rotation.

“It was a quick climb and a long fall,” he said. “I’ll say this much: I’ve learned a lot about baseball and about myself during the fall.”

Duke had grown up in Waco, Texas, and was considered a prospect in part because he was left-handed and in part because he had almost uncanny control for a teenager. But he wasn’t a flamethrower. He was more like Tom Glavine (one of his boyhood heroes), someone who could spot his pitches with remarkable consistency. That was good enough to get him drafted but not enough to make anyone think he was destined to be an All-Star.

“It really changed when I was in Single-A ball in Hickory [North Carolina] in ’03,” he said. “I found a routine that worked for me. I wasn’t technically perfect by any means; in fact I probably threw across my body too much. But I could stand on the mound and know exactly—I mean exactly—where just about every pitch I threw was going to go. I felt like I could do it in my sleep.”

He wasn’t sleepwalking when he pitched to a 1.46 ERA in two minor-league towns in 2004. That earned him a spot in Indianapolis in 2005, a quick rise for any pitcher but remarkable for someone whose fastball rarely touched ninety.

Two important things happened in Indianapolis: he continued to pitch lights out, making the call when Pérez threw his tantrum the easiest decision the Pirates could possibly make. And he met a Butler University journalism/theater major named Kristin Gross.

“She was the on-field MC for all the various promotions,” Duke said. “I asked her out three times. She said no three times. Finally, she said yes and stood me up. I asked her what the deal was, and she said
no way did she want to date a baseball player. I finally said, ‘Look, have dinner with me one time, and if we don’t have fun, I promise I’ll leave you alone.’ ”

She said yes … and she didn’t date a baseball player for that long, because she ended up marrying him. By then he was a star.

Duke pitched in Pérez’s place on July 2 and struck out nine Milwaukee Brewers but left with the game tied and ended up with a no-decision. His next five starts were not no-decisions, they were all wins—making him the second Pirates pitcher
ever
to start his career with a 5-0 record. His ERA for the month of July was 0.87 and included a 3–0 shutout of the Cubs when his opponent was Greg Maddux.

“It was dizzying,” Duke said. “Remember, I was two years removed from pitching in low Class A, and now I’m an important part of the Pirates’ rotation. At that point, it all seemed very easy.”

He finished that season 8-2 with an ERA of 1.81. The Pirates were a bad team—they had just completed their thirteenth straight season with a losing record. Duke and Ian Snell, another young pitcher, became their poster boys for 2006. It was a lot to handle—especially on a team that still didn’t have enough players to compete seriously.

Duke didn’t pitch poorly the next few seasons, even though he had losing records. But he wasn’t as dominating as he had been as a rookie.

“Part of it was just the normal hitters-adjusting-to-a-new-pitcher thing that happens. But somewhere along the line I lost that routine I had. I was trying to copy it, copy myself basically, but I wasn’t doing it. When I struggled, like most people do, I tried to change things, and that wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t as if I pitched really horribly; I just didn’t pitch as well as I had when I first came up.”

In 2009, Duke’s salary in his first year of arbitration soared to $2.2 million. Even though his final record that season was 11-16 (with another bad team), he was a workhorse—pitching 213 innings. He also made the All-Star team as the Pirates’ lone (required) representative.

“I still remember looking around that clubhouse saying, ‘What
am I doing in here with
these
guys?’ ” he said, laughing. “I took a lot of pictures and a lot of videos just so I could prove later on that I’d actually been there.”

A year later his salary almost doubled to $4.3 million, but he didn’t pitch as well. His ERA by season’s end was 5.72, and rather than continue to pay him big money without knowing what they were getting, the Pirates traded him to Arizona during the off-season.

It was there that the injury bug began to bite him: he had broken a bone in his foot the previous season, and he rushed through his rehab to be ready for spring training in 2011 with a new team.

“I thought they were right on the verge of doing something good,” he said. “I’d been with a losing team for a long time, and I was excited about potentially being with a winner. I wanted a taste of winning. The break was between the fourth and fifth metatarsals, and I probably came back too fast … I had trouble pushing off on the foot.

“It’s not as if I throw all that hard to begin with,” he said. “Then I got hit with a line drive during spring training, and that set me back too. I had no endurance. My velocity dropped, and my ERA went up. Bad combination. I went from starting to being the second lefty out of the bullpen. I hadn’t pitched in relief my entire pro career. I wasn’t awful. But I wasn’t very good either.”

He signed a two-way minor-league/major-league contract with the Astros for 2012, thinking he might have a chance to claim a spot in their rotation. But from the moment he reported to camp, nothing went right.

“They were looking for something to make me the pitcher I had been,” he said. “Every day it seemed like a different coach was telling me to try something different. Move here, move there. Try this delivery. I really wanted to say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ But I wasn’t in a position to do that.

“When they released me, based on my performance, I had no argument with it.”

He and Kristin sat down after he got home. Maybe, Zach said, it was time to move on to the next thing. She had a better idea: Why don’t you contact Tony Beasley?

Beasley had been Duke’s manager in both Hickory at Single-A and Altoona in Double-A and had been the Pirates’ third-base coach in 2008 and 2009. Now he was managing the Washington Nationals’ Triple-A team in Syracuse. Duke sent him a text.

Within a couple of hours, the team had been in touch with his agent to offer him a minor-league contract to go play for Syracuse.

“Somebody wanted me … that was the best part of it,” Duke said. “People hadn’t exactly been lining up in the winter before I signed with the Astros, so I wondered if someone would want me after I got released. That’s the great thing about sports: it only takes one person to believe in you.”

There was a bonus to signing with the Nationals: their minor-league roving pitching instructor was Spin Williams—who had been with the Pirates when Duke was there. “Spin had seen me when I was at my best,” Duke said. “I decided I needed one set of eyes on me and that maybe I should try to go back to doing exactly what I was doing when I was at my best with the Pirates.”

Duke got in touch with Kevin Roach, the Pirates’ video coordinator, and asked if he could find some video of him dating to 2005. Roach sent it to Williams, and Duke reported to the Nationals’ extended minor-league camp in Viera, Florida.

“Spin looked at the video and so did I,” Duke said. “Then we started working in front of a mirror, literally trying to replicate what I’d been doing. Everyone pitches differently. What works for one guy doesn’t work for another. You can’t teach someone perfect technique, because there’s a human factor involved. No two guys are built the same or pitch the same.

“I went back to pitching the way I pitched best. I had to find out where to stand on the rubber again and realize it was okay to throw a little bit across my body. It came back fairly quickly once I started back down the road.”

After a few weeks, Duke was ready to report to Syracuse. He continued to work with Chiefs pitching coach Greg Booker, and Williams stopped in occasionally to check on him. The self-confidence came back.

“I needed to reconfirm in my brain that this was the best way for me to pitch,” he said. “I needed to trust what I was doing again. I’d lost trust in myself.”

He smiled. “I feel like I’ve restarted my career. I’d gotten beaten down. I wondered if this was what I should be doing. Now I feel like it is.” He paused. “Of course if it wasn’t what I should be doing, I’d have no idea what else I could do. This
is
what I do.”

By mid-August there was no doubt that the Chiefs’ two best pitchers were John Lannan and Zach Duke. They were close in age—Duke twenty-nine, Lannan about to turn twenty-eight—but Lannan was being paid $5 million in 2012 and had successfully started—and won—games in the majors twice that summer. Duke was guaranteed $100,000 on the minor-league side of his contract and hadn’t been in the majors all year.

Lannan knew he was going to be called up September 1—especially since the Nationals would need an extra starter when Stephen Strasburg was shut down.

Duke could only hope.

“The key, though, is that I
have
hope,” he said. “That’s a long way from where I was in March.”

A BAD CALL

Mark Lollo had also come a long way since March. But he wasn’t convinced he had gone in the right direction.

As the International League season wound down, Lollo had gotten both good news and bad news: The good news was that he would be the crew chief for both a first-round playoff series and the Governors’ Cup finals. That was a nice honor and a pretty strong indication of what International League president Randy Mobley thought of his work.

The bad news was he hadn’t been called back to the majors. By September, all the big-league umps had taken their vacations, and only an injury might get an umpire a call-up game. If that happened, Lollo knew it would be one of the guys clearly ahead of him on the list who, by now, had considerably more major-league experience than he did.

On August 29, Lollo was in Gwinnett. Hurricane Isaac had been pounding the Southeast and the Gulf Coast, and Lollo was on the phone with Mobley discussing contingency plans if the doubleheader that had been scheduled in Gwinnett that day (to make up for a rainout the night before) could not be played.

Once they had made their plans, Mobley asked Lollo how he was doing. He was, naturally, aware of the fact that Lollo had gotten
called up for only two games because he had to rework umpiring schedules whenever someone went up.

Lollo admitted he was a little bit nervous. It was still only his second year, but he wondered if his going in the wrong direction was coincidence or if it meant something. That was when Mobley offered help.

“You want me to see what I can find out?” Mobley said.

Lollo thought about it for a moment. “Sure, that would be fine,” he finally answered. “I’d appreciate it.”

Two days later he had gotten the surprise phone call from Cris Jones, his supervisor. Lollo knew that Jones had watched him work five times during the season, and he told him he had comments based on those games. Nervously, Lollo told Jones he was eager to hear them.

“Not now,” Jones told him. “We [the umpiring supervisors] have meetings over the weekend, and I’ll talk to you about it more thoroughly next week.”

Lollo pressed Jones. “I’d like to know what you think now,” he said.

Jones sighed and said okay.

“To be honest with you, Mark, you’re at the bottom of the [call-up] list,” he said.

Lollo had known he wasn’t in the top ten based on assignments and had suspected he might not even be in the third group of five.

“So I’m in the bottom tier,” he said.

“No,” Jones said. “You
are
the bottom. You’re rated last. Eighteen out of eighteen. Based on the observations we’ve done this year, you are not where we want you to be.”

That stung. Lollo didn’t think it was right or fair. “I felt like I’d had a very good season,” he said. “Now I’m being told that, based on five games, I’m on the bottom rung.”

There was more.

The supervisors had concerns about his weight and what it might mean in the future. There was also the issue of time off: Two years earlier in the Arizona Fall League, Lollo had missed two days after the
death of an uncle with whom he had been close. He had also missed two weeks in the fall of 2011 while his second child was being born.

“There are concerns about your commitment,” Jones said. “The amount of time you’ve missed throws up a red flag.”

“Commitment?” Lollo said, starting to get angry. “Because I missed some Fall League games to see my child born? Because I missed two days to go to my uncle’s funeral, you question my commitment?”

“I thought it was more than two days,” Jones said. “Maybe our records are wrong.”

“Two days,” Lollo said. “That’s it.”

“Maybe we got bad information on that.”

Lollo asked Jones if his rating was based strictly on Jones’s opinions or if there was a consensus.