Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (48 page)

“I sat there for about two minutes thinking how disappointed I was that I didn’t get to pitch one more time,” Elarton said. “And then it was over. I got dressed, said some quick good-byes, and I was probably in the car within fifteen minutes of Ryno finishing up. I had a long way to drive.”

He had 1,606 miles to drive to get to Lamar. His goal was to be there in time to pick the kids up from school on Wednesday, as they had requested/ordered him to do. “I stopped in a motel and slept for four hours,” he said. “Other than that I just kept on going.”

And so, when Kenan and Chloe Elarton walked out of school on Wednesday afternoon, their dad was waiting for them—just as he had promised.

It wasn’t a perfect ending to the season, but it was a perfect start to the off-season. Or whatever came next.

Chris Schwinden was in Allentown that same final day, sitting in the cramped visitors’ clubhouse across the hall from the IronPigs’ clubhouse. He felt none of the swirling emotions Elarton did as he waited out the last rain delay of the season.

There were reasons for this: For one thing, he would turn twenty-six on his next birthday, not thirty-seven. For another, he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. He had ended his season four days earlier on a satisfying note in Rochester, pitching six strong innings (three earned runs, four hits, and five strikeouts) to get the win.

The victory meant he finished the Buffalo portion of his season with an 8-6 record and an ERA of 2.70. During the thirty-five days he had wandered in the Triple-A desert, he had pitched 22.1 innings and given up twenty earned runs. In 106.1 innings in Buffalo he had given up thirty-two earned runs.

Buffalo, as it turned out, was the promised land.

“Some of it was comfort, some of it was getting my confidence
back, some of it was being able to develop my changeup as a strikeout pitch,” he said, sitting in the first-base dugout on the other side of the infield from where Elarton would soon come out to ponder the rain and his future. “In the end, though, all it means is I’ve got something to take with me to spring training next year. I still know I’m not the pitcher I need to be to have success in the majors. Triple-A, yes; the majors, so far, no. I haven’t won a game there, and I haven’t pitched very well there.

“I need to show them that they can give me the ball every fifth day and expect a quality start out of me. Of course, after this year, I’m going to have to earn my way back up there. I know I’ve fallen back in the pecking order some, but I think I showed them I still have the potential to be a good pitcher.

“I just need another chance.”

He smiled. “I guess that’s what everyone says, isn’t it? ‘Give me one more chance.’ Well, I can say it too. I hope I get it.”

John Lindsey’s season ended on an uptick. He had finished 2011 wondering if it might be time to retire. He finished 2012 convinced he still had a chance to get back to the major leagues one more time.

On the penultimate day of the season, a cool, overcast day in Toledo, he hit a three-run fifth-inning home run off Columbus’s Eric Berger with a sellout crowd of 9,831 in the ballpark. Even during a 60-84 season, the people of Toledo flocked to Fifth Third Field right until the end.

The home run led the Mud Hens to what would be their last win of the season, an 8–5 decision over the Clippers. The home run was the fifteenth Lindsey had hit since he had arrived in Toledo in June and Phil Nevin had slotted him into the cleanup spot in the lineup. “The guy can flat out hit,” Nevin said. “It would help him if he had a natural position defensively, but at this point in his career he really doesn’t. But if you need a bat, he’s going to give you one.”

The Tigers were healthy for their September stretch run, and
Lindsey didn’t harbor any fantasies about a late call-up. But he did believe he had revived his career with the season he’d had—starting out in Mexico and ending with success in Triple-A.

“I had to work my way back into a major-league organization,” he said. “No one wanted to sign me in the spring. Now I feel like someone is going to give me a chance in spring training next season. I’d like to get into some exhibition games, show people I can hit major-league pitching, at least put that in their minds even if I don’t make a team out of camp.

“A year ago I was close to retiring. Now I feel like I’m not that far from the majors. I honestly believe it can happen again. I’m just going to go back and do what I did last off-season, because I think the weight I took off made my bat quicker and kept me fresher during the season.

“Funny thing is, if they looked at the numbers I had this year and I was going to be twenty-six instead of thirty-six, I’d probably be thought of as a pretty hot prospect. I understand how it works. I have to make sure
not
to think about things like that. They just get in the way. I’ll just go someplace and try to keep putting up numbers—wherever I might be.

“At least now I feel confident that I’ll get a chance. That’s all I’ve ever asked for in the game—a chance.”

Lindsey had earned that—for at least one more year.

While Elarton, Lindsey, and Schwinden were nearing the ends of their seasons, there wasn’t a lot of suspense to the Triple-A pennant races as the season wound down around the league.

The International League division races were all decided before the final weekend—well before it in both the South and the West. Indianapolis won the West by a whopping fourteen-game margin over Columbus, finishing at 89-55, the league’s best record. Charlotte won almost as easily in the South, finishing nine games ahead of Norfolk with an 83-61 mark. In the North, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre stumbled a little down the stretch—the long season of travel perhaps catching
up—but still finished a comfortable five games ahead of Pawtucket with a final record of 84-60.

The only real suspense was for the wild card spot, with Pawtucket, Lehigh Valley, and Norfolk still having a shot going into the final week of the season. But the PawSox went on a six-game winning streak during the final week, making it impossible for either Lehigh Valley or Norfolk to close ground. They clinched the last playoff spot with two days left in the season, when thirty-eight-year-old Nelson Figueroa pitched eight shutout innings in a 2–0 win over Scranton/Wilkes-Barre (which was playing its first game without the six September call-ups) to raise his record for the season to 12-5.

That meant the playoffs were set: Charlotte would play Indianapolis, and Pawtucket would play Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Unlike in the majors, where wild card teams don’t play a team from their own division in the first round, the playoff matchups are locked in before the season begins. The North champion was scheduled to play the wild card team regardless of what division that team came from.

Minor-league playoffs, especially at the Triple-A level, don’t have the urgency that major-league playoffs have, in large part because teams often strip the Triple-A club of key players before or even during the playoffs if they have a need.

“It isn’t as if you don’t want to win,” Pawtucket manager Arnie Beyeler said. “Of course you want to win. And when you get to hold a championship trophy at any level of baseball, it’s a special feeling. But it isn’t as if this is what you’ve been building to all season. It isn’t the same kind of climax I would think they feel up in the majors.”

The series are all best of five, with a two-three format. That means the wild card team—in this case Pawtucket—gets to play its first two games at home. Again, an advantage more at the Triple-A level than in the majors.

“You get down 2–0 and go home knowing you have to win three, it’s going to be tough,” Charlotte manager Joel Skinner said. “You shouldn’t be feeling let down, but it’s human nature. Guys are tired; some are unhappy they aren’t in the majors. It’s just not as easy to get up one more time when you get in a hole like that.”

Scranton/Wilkes-Barre found itself in that sort of hole after losing the opening two games in Pawtucket. Returning to their “home” in Rochester, the Yankees found themselves down 3–1 going to the bottom of the ninth inning of game three. Clearly, it was time to call it a season. Somehow, they rallied one more time. After they had scored a run off Tony Peña Jr., Pawtucket manager Beyeler called in veteran Pedro Beato to try to finish off the Yankees. Beato got the second out of the inning, but with the score 3–2, two men out, and a man on first Melky Mesa turned on a Beato fastball and hit it out of the park for a walk-off, two-run homer, keeping the Yankees’ season alive.

That
moment was cause for a celebration at home plate because it happened with such stunning swiftness. Mesa was surrounded by the time he reached the plate, and suddenly—or so it seemed—the Yankees had life.

“It’s a team that won’t die,” manager Dave Miley said with a satisfied smile after the game.

At least until the next night. On a cool, cloudy night, with an announced attendance of 442 fans milling around Rochester’s Frontier Field, the PawSox shelled Yankees starter Vidal Nuño for seven runs in the second inning and cruised to a 7–1 win from there—Nelson Figueroa again the winning pitcher.

That put the PawSox into the Governors’ Cup Series against Charlotte, which had beaten Indianapolis in four games. The teams had split two games in Indy before the Knights, playing in front of crowds not much bigger than the ones in Rochester, won the last two games at home to reach the finals.

The championship series didn’t take very long. Again, the PawSox were untouchable at home. By the time the teams got back to Charlotte, the Knights not only were down 2–0 but knew they had to face Figueroa, who had been virtually unhittable the last month of the season after being traded by the Yankees to the Red Sox, meaning he had moved from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to Pawtucket. A crowd of 1,102 showed up for game three, and the Knights never had a lead. Figueroa was again brilliant, and the PawSox clinched their first Governors’ Cup since 1984 with a 4–1 victory.

Figueroa had pitched in parts of nine seasons in the majors and had probably never pitched better than he did during the last six weeks of the 2012 season. But it wasn’t enough to merit another call-up.

“It’s a nice feeling,” Beyeler said of winning the title. “I’m sure we’ll all remember that we were a part of this.”

On the night the championship was clinched, seven of the twenty-five players in uniform had been playing in Pawtucket on opening day in April. All were excited to win and to have their picture taken with the trophy.

And, if truth were told, they all would rather have been someplace else that night.