Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (50 page)

“Well, I’m here, which is good,” Lollo said. “But I’ve been told I’m probably going to be released at the end of the season.”

Tomko was stunned. He thought Lollo was a good umpire and a good guy. As a player, he never really thought much about umpires either moving up or being moved out.

“It really hit me,” he said. “Here I was thinking I might be at the
end, but knowing I was going to go home and look at my options. He didn’t have any options. They just said, ‘You’re gone,’ and it might be because one guy just didn’t like him for some reason. I honestly felt awful after we talked. I kept looking at him all through the game thinking about how unfair it was.”

Lollo was working first base because he’d had the plate during the All-Star game, meaning the lead umpire for the PCL, Eric Loveless, would work the plate. Loveless had never made the call-up list, and like Lollo he had been told he wasn’t coming back for 2013.

That meant there were three men in the game who knew this was their last night on a baseball field: Loveless, Lollo, and Aces catcher Ryan Budde, who had decided at the age of thirty-three that it was time to move on with his life. Budde had been to the majors four times between 2007 and 2010, playing in twenty-nine games during that time. He had gone 7 for 33 and hit a home run. He had decided that playing on a championship team in a championship game was a good way to go out.

Budde had a choice. The two umpires did not.

Steve Hyder had made his choice on opening day of the PawSox season. He had decided not to make a snap decision even after he was passed over for the job as the No. 1 radio voice for the team during the winter. He had wondered even before that happened if he wanted to come back for 2012, after he’d had a heart attack in 2011, not too long after going through a second divorce.

He had walked onto the field before the team’s opener at McCoy Stadium on April 5 and felt no buzz. A year earlier he had thought it was his health. Now he felt fine physically but empty emotionally.

“I waited to make a decision because I wanted to see if being healthy would make a difference,” he said. “Maybe if I’d gotten the No. 1 job, it would have been different, but I didn’t. That hurt. I thought I had earned it. They disagreed. I just decided on opening day this was going to be it. I’m fifty-one. There has to be something else out there for me.”

Hyder worked hard throughout the season on his personal journal, hoping he would be able to make a book out of it after his last game. He already had a title: “The Real McCoy.”

Now, with the last game of his career looming, Hyder had no intention of turning back, even though he had a good deal of trepidation about starting over.

“I love baseball, and I’ve loved the job and the relationships I’ve had,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I don’t think anyone can stay in the minor leagues full-time in any job for very long. It’s too draining and, if you want to move up the way most of us do, too frustrating.

“I’m glad I’m going out as part of a winner. It was fun to see the team win the championship. It’s amazing to think sixty-nine different guys wore the uniform during the season and only seven were still left the night they won. I’m happy my last game is going to be the last game of the season for everyone. Makes it a little bit easier to take.

“Even so, when I walk out of the ballpark tonight, I know I’m going to have a melancholy feeling. It would be impossible not to feel that way.”

As it turned out, Randy Mobley’s hopeful weather report was accurate. The rain began to clear at about six o’clock, and the game actually started on time. In spite of the weather, 8,606 fans showed up.

As part of the pregame ceremony, Scotty McCreery, the
American Idol
winner for 2011, who had grown up thirty-one miles from Durham in Garner, North Carolina, was scheduled to throw out the first pitch. Since the Aces were the home team, Brett Butler needed a volunteer to catch for McCreery.

Brett Tomko put his hand up right away.

“I remember I had caught a first pitch a few years earlier when I was in Kansas City from David Cook, the year he won
American Idol
,” Tomko said. “I figured, ‘What the heck,’ it might be the only way I get to see the field. So I told Brett I’d do it.”

He caught McCreery’s pitch, and soon after, the Aces began teeing
off on Nelson Figueroa’s pitches. Figueroa had been the PawSox’ ace down the stretch and throughout the International League playoffs, but this simply wasn’t his night. He was gone after two innings with his team trailing 6–0. The irony was that Pawtucket had a better record (38-26) playing in Bulls Athletic Park than any other visiting team in the International League.

Not on this night. The lead grew to 8–0, and the game crawled along. By now, with the outcome not in any serious doubt, everyone pretty much wanted to go home. The evening had turned out quite pleasant—a cool sixty-nine degrees at game time with almost no wind—but as the sky darkened, clouds could be seen on the horizon, and it was apparent the window for playing baseball wasn’t going to be open too much longer.

The rain was starting to come down by the time the PawSox came up in the ninth, trailing 10–3. Even with a seven-run lead, Butler sent Jonathan Albaladejo to pitch the ninth, in part because he thought he deserved to be on the mound for the last out—he had done so forty-two times during the season, twenty-five times in save situations—and in part because there was certainly no reason to rest him. His next outing wouldn’t be until March.

Andy LaRoche led off the inning with an infield single. Bryce Brentz struck out. The rain came down harder. No one wanted the season to end in a rain delay. Dan Butler lined a double into the right-center-field gap, and LaRoche was running all the way—perhaps not the best idea with his team down seven. Center fielder A. J. Pollock ran the ball down in the wet outfield and hit shortstop Taylor Harbin with a perfect relay throw. Harbin turned and saw LaRoche rounding third. He fired the ball to Ryan Budde as LaRoche pounded toward the plate.

Because the ball had been hit in the gap, the umpires had rotated positions, with Loveless covering third in case Butler tried to go to third and there was a play there. Lollo came sprinting down from first to cover for Loveless at the plate. As a result it was his call as the ball and LaRoche arrived at almost the same time.

Lollo thought he saw Budde get the tag on LaRoche a split second
before LaRoche hit the plate. Except his angle wasn’t as good as it might have been if he hadn’t had to come down from first base to cover the plate.

“I missed it,” he said. “LaRoche said to me, ‘He never tagged me,’ and I realized too late he was right. If I’d been in a slightly different position, I think I would have seen it, but because I was coming from first, I didn’t get the best possible angle. I felt sick about it when I realized too late that I’d missed the call.

“My last call ever—and I missed it.”

Everyone agreed it was a tough call to make, especially coming from first, and that the play was hardly a game decider. Two batters later, Che-Hsuan Lin hit a line drive almost directly at left fielder Keon Broxton for the final out, and everyone sprinted for the clubhouses as the sky started to explode with rain. The game had taken three hours and twenty-nine minutes. The Triple-A baseball season ended at 10:37 p.m. as the rain swept through the ballpark.

An hour later, at an after-party thrown by the two leagues, Lollo encountered LaRoche and apologized to him.

LaRoche grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “If you’d called me safe, we’d probably be back at the ballpark right now in a rain delay,” he said. “It’s not as if we were going to score seven and tie the game. Don’t give it another thought.”

But Lollo did, even though others echoed LaRoche’s sentiment.

“It’s hard to get out of my mind,” he said. “That was my last call as a professional umpire. It wasn’t the way I wanted to go out.”

He went out hustling to make a tough call. There’s no shame in that. Whether it is your first call or your last call.

M
C
L
OUTH

On the night of October 7, almost three weeks after the minor-league season had ended, Nate McLouth jogged from the first-base dugout inside Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the direction of left field, hearing a loud roar as he and his teammates took the field for game one of the American League Division Series against the New York Yankees.

Oriole Park, which had been a mausoleum on many game nights during the previous five seasons, was packed with 47,841 fans, and almost all were on their feet as the Orioles took up their defensive positions.

It occurred to McLouth that he had come a long way from the afternoon in late May when he had sat in Pirates manager Clint Hurdle’s office and had been offered a choice: go to the minors or be released.

He had chosen to be released. After a nervous week of waiting, he had gotten the call from the Orioles—who wanted to sign him and send him to Norfolk as potential outfield insurance after Nick Markakis, their starting right fielder, had broken his wrist the same day that the Pirates formally released McLouth.

McLouth had struggled early in Norfolk, but beginning with Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Night in late June, he had gotten hot in the sizzling southeastern Virginia summer weather. The Orioles had called him up on August 4 after he had gone on a power binge, hitting
ten home runs and driving in thirty-three runs over a thirty-six-game stretch. They had decided that adding that sort of bat to the speed and defense he brought made him a better backup outfielder than the thirty-four-year-old veteran Endy Chávez.

“I felt that if I could get hot, then I might have a shot to get called up,” McLouth said. “I wasn’t counting on anything, because if you start thinking that way, you don’t do what you have to do to get noticed. I managed to get hot at the right time, and next thing I knew, RJ [manager Ron Johnson] was calling me into the office to tell me I was going up. It was a big deal, especially after the way the spring had gone for me.”

McLouth filled in when one of the outfielders needed a night off and, frequently, late in games for defense. That changed on September 8 when Markakis—yes, again—took a C. C. Sabathia pitch on the left hand in the fifth inning of a game against the Yankees in Camden Yards. The hand was broken, and Markakis, as it turned out, was done for the season. The Orioles decided to move Chris Davis, normally a first baseman or a DH, to right field and put McLouth in left field.

Soon after McLouth was moved into the starting lineup, manager Buck Showalter put him in the leadoff spot and he flourished. By season’s end he had played in fifty-five games and hit .268 with seven home runs, eighteen RBIs, and twelve stolen bases.

He was in left field and leading off when the Orioles, after making the playoffs for the first time since 1997, met the Texas Rangers in the new one-game, win-or-go-home wild card game. McLouth walked to begin the game and scored the Orioles’ first run. In the third, he grounded a single to right to drive in the Orioles’ second run. And in the eighth he hit a sacrifice fly to right field to drive in their last run in a 5–1 win.