Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (7 page)

“Not a record I was trying to set,” he said with a laugh. “By the time it happened, I had pretty much given up. It was the second-to-last day of the season and I was packing up so I’d be ready to go home right after we played the next day, when I got called into the manager’s office.”

The Albuquerque Isotopes were in Round Rock, Texas, finishing their season when manager Tim Wallach called Lindsey in to tell him he was going to the Dodgers. Lindsey still remembers Wallach’s
words. “He said, ‘John, I’m honored to be the one to tell you that you’re going to the major leagues. I know you’ve waited a long time.’ ”

Lindsey was so stunned by Wallach’s words that his first thought wasn’t,
“Oh my God!”
but rather, “I have to call my wife.”

Christa Lindsey was making the six-hundred-mile drive from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Round Rock to pick her husband up the next day. She was already en route. “I had to get her turned around,” he said. “At first she didn’t answer. Finally, I got her. It was one of those funny phone calls. ‘Honey, I’m sorry you’ve driven three hundred miles for nothing, but here’s why …’ ”

Lindsey is a quiet and thoughtful man, very religious and extremely considerate of others’ feelings. Which may explain why he didn’t tell any of his teammates what had happened when he walked out of Wallach’s office that day. “I just thought it wouldn’t look very good if I was jumping up and down and screaming, ‘I’m going to the majors,’ when the rest of them were all going home the next day,” he said. “I guess I must have had some kind of smile on my face, though, because Iván DeJesús, who lockered right next to me, noticed.

“He said to me, ‘What’s going on, why’d Skip call you in?’ I said, ‘Nothing, man, no big deal.’

“And then he started screaming, ‘You’re going up! You’re going up! I know it, I can tell by the look on your face!’ ”

When Lindsey confessed, a clubhouse celebration in the J. C. Boscan mode ensued. When a player has been around baseball for as many years as Boscan or Lindsey without making the majors, it is, at least in part, because he is looked to by younger teammates as a mentor. If not, teams wouldn’t keep him around. That’s why the joy is so genuine when one of them makes it.

Lindsey managed to get to bat twelve times in Los Angeles before he broke a hand when he was hit by a pitch, ending his season. His first time up, he was almost shaking when he stepped into the batter’s box. Then he looked out to the mound and saw Wandy Rodríguez pitching for the Houston Astros.

“I just told myself that I’d faced Wandy lots of times before in the minors—which I had—and this was no different,” he said. “I tried to
make myself think it was just another at-bat, no different than all the at-bats in the minors. Of course it wasn’t.”

Lindsey got one hit—in his tenth at-bat—a sinking line drive to left field that fell just in front of the Astros’ Carlos Lee. The pitcher was Nelson Figueroa, whom he had also faced often in the minors. He is grateful to this day that the less-than-graceful Lee was the left fielder that night. “Someone with a little more speed gets to the ball,” he said. “Not Carlos. That was the hit I waited to get all my life.”

When Lee tossed the ball back to the infield and play was stopped, the Astros’ Reed Johnson picked it up, looked at Lindsey, and made a motion as if he were going to throw it to a fan in the stands.

“I panicked for a second,” Lindsey said. “He just smiled at me and rolled it into our dugout. He knew.”

Players always know. The ball sits today in the room of John Lindsey III—Lindsey’s son, who was born a year before his dad reached the majors.

In the spring of 2011, Lindsey was back in the minor leagues. Dodger injuries had gotten him to the majors in September. Good healing in the L.A. outfield sent him back to Triple-A in Albuquerque. At the end of that season no one offered him a contract—even a minor-league contract. He was about to turn thirty-four, and he wondered if it wasn’t time for him to finish college and move on with his life. He had been taking online classes at the University of Phoenix. It was his father, who had told him as a teenager that life in baseball might not be quite as easy as it looked, who told him he might not want to walk away just yet.

“You don’t quit until there’s nothing left,” John Lindsey Sr. told his son. “I have a feeling you still have something left. Once you stop, it’s over; you aren’t starting again. Don’t stop until you have to stop.”

Lindsey decided his father was right. He went on an intense diet, thinking he had gotten a step slow with the passing years. He ate only healthy foods, mostly vegetables and chicken, and at times fasted for several days. He lost thirty-five pounds, dropping from a slightly fleshy 260 to a rock-hard 225. Still, there was no major-league team
willing to even bring him to spring training on a minor-league deal. It seemed as if his time had passed.

But then his agent came to him with an offer to play in Laguna, Mexico. The Mexican League is roughly the equivalent of Triple-A baseball, although the pay isn’t as good. Lindsey decided to take a chance. Off he went to Laguna, where he was fortunate to share an apartment with a teammate who was bilingual.

It wasn’t exactly Dodger Stadium. It wasn’t even Albuquerque. But it was baseball.

Chris Schwinden was very happy to be where he was in the spring of 2012. Sort of. A year earlier, he had been facing a return to Double-A ball as a relief pitcher. He was twenty-five, and four years removed from being drafted in the twenty-second round by the New York Mets out of Fresno Pacific University.

As soon as he signed, the Mets sent him to play for their short-season A-league team in Brooklyn—which was usually a sign that they considered a player a prospect. The Mets’ majority owner, Fred Wilpon, had grown up in Brooklyn worshipping the Brooklyn Dodgers, and he had built a ballpark for the minor-league team in order to bring baseball back to Brooklyn in some form.

“Pitching there wasn’t the typical rookie-ball experience,” Schwinden said. “You were playing in front of eight thousand or nine thousand people every night. You knew everyone in the organization paid attention to how the team was doing and to the players on that team. It was fun for me. I liked the crowds and the buzz and the attention.”

He pitched well in the summer of 2008—his ERA was 2.01—and began a steady climb up the Mets ladder. He had made it to Double-A Binghamton two years later and had been used primarily as a starter the second half of the season. But he hadn’t pitched especially well in that role, and the following season began with him headed back to Binghamton—as a reliever.

“It was discouraging,” he said. “My entire baseball career had
always been about moving forward. This didn’t even feel like a lateral move. It felt like a demotion.”

Baseball luck—bad for Boof Bonser, who was in Triple-A Buffalo’s starting rotation, good for Schwinden—intervened. Bonser hurt his elbow in his first start of the season, and because he had starting experience, Schwinden was called up from Double-A Binghamton to Triple-A Buffalo on April 17 for a spot start. He pitched well enough to earn a second start. He pitched well again. That earned him a spot in Buffalo in a starting role after Bonser had to undergo Tommy John surgery. Schwinden’s second go-round as a minor-league starter went much better than the first one had. In 2010, as a starter in Binghamton, his ERA had been 5.56. This time, in a league where any ERA under 4.00 was considered good (small ballparks, wide strike zones, generally speaking), his ERA was 3.87.

He knew his pitching had been solid throughout the 2011 season and was thinking he might have earned himself an invitation to the Mets’ major-league camp in the spring of 2012. On the final weekend of the season, soon after he had made his last start of the year, he was getting dressed when Ricky Bones, the pitching coach, walked over to his locker and said, “Skip needs to see you for a minute.”

Schwinden was baffled for a moment, wondering if perhaps Tim Teufel wanted to see if he might be able to come in out of the bullpen on the last day of the season.

“I really was clueless,” he said. “But then, as we were walking into Tim’s office, Ricky said to me, ‘You’re going to need some better clothes.’ I sat down and Tim said to me, ‘Well, Chris, you’ve had quite a year. You started it pitching relief in Double-A. You’re going to finish it starting in the majors.’

“It’s one of those things where at first you think you misheard or something. But you know your manager would never kid you about something like that. I think I just stared at him for a second. Finally, he said, ‘You better get going, you’re starting in New York tomorrow.’ ”

And so it was, twenty-four hours later on a chilly September evening, he found himself on the mound at Citi Field pitching the
first game of a twi-night doubleheader against the Atlanta Braves, who were fighting for a playoff spot. “The whole thing was surreal,” Schwinden said. “One minute I’m wrapping up the season in Buffalo; the next I’m on the mound in New York pitching to Chipper Jones. It was pretty amazing.”

As Teufel had predicted, he finished the season as a starter in the majors. He started four games and didn’t pitch horribly or wonderfully—his ERA was 4.71—and went 0-2. That was good enough to put him in contention for a spot on the team in the spring of 2012.

By then, the Mets’ rotation was healthy again. Johan Santana and Mike Pelfrey were both back from injuries, and Schwinden’s best chance to make the team was going to be coming out of the bullpen. Even that was a long shot, because the Mets had several veteran relievers in camp. Schwinden thought he had pitched well enough to make the team, but the Mets decided to go with more experience (and then some) in forty-one-year-old Miguel Batista. Three days before the regular season was scheduled to start, Schwinden was sent back to Triple-A Buffalo.

“It was disappointing but not that surprising,” he said. “Terry [Collins] gave me the usual talk—stay ready, keep working. I felt good that at least I’d come close. And I knew it was a long season.”

He couldn’t possibly imagine just how long it was going to be.

Who enjoys spring training the most? It might be the media, which has access to players and managers both before and after morning workouts and before and after—occasionally during—exhibition games, very few of which are played at night.

Or it might be the umpires—especially those who are accustomed to the minor leagues but find themselves living the big-league life for the month of March.

Mark Lollo was starting his eleventh season as an umpire—his fourth in the International League. The previous season, he had made
the call-up list of Triple-A umpires and had worked six games in the major leagues.

The call-up list consisted of eighteen Triple-A umpires who, like Lollo, had worked their way from the low minor leagues to one step from the majors—taking much the same route most players took. The call-ups were the guys who were brought to the majors periodically during the season to fill in for umpires who were on vacation or injured or sick. They were divided, informally at least, into four different categories: the top five on the list were likely to spend as much as a month in the majors during a season. They were umpires who major-league baseball had pretty much decided were ready for the majors and were just waiting for openings to occur—which they did every year as older umpires retired—so they could make the move to the majors.

The next five were a step behind, umps who had proven themselves to the point where they were likely to find themselves in the majors at some point in the near future unless something went wrong: they got injured, got out of shape, or for some reason, in the eyes of their evaluators, failed to progress the way they had on their way up the ladder.

The last eight were the ones who were still question marks. They were being tested. Five of them were guaranteed some major-league work during the season, and the last three knew their work would almost certainly be dependent on the unexpected happening: injury, illness, the birth of a child, or, on a very rare occasion, an umpire being suspended.

Most of the time the last eight were where they were because they weren’t as experienced as the top ten. Lollo knew, based on the fact that he’d gotten only six games in 2011, that he had been in that group, but that didn’t bother him. “First year on the list that’s what you expect,” he said. “It really isn’t until the third year in most cases that you start to be concerned.”