Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball

by John Feinstein

  Because of the way the calendar fell, the Red Sox didn’t have to release Ohlendorf until Monday the fourth, meaning he could pitch on Saturday night in Allentown if they so desired. But Ben Crockett, the Red Sox’ farm director, had called Beyeler that morning to tell him the team was going to release Ohlendorf right away. The thinking was twofold: why pitch someone who isn’t part of our future, and, as a courtesy, let him go to his new team fresh and ready to pitch.

  Beyeler hung up the phone with Crockett and walked into the cramped clubhouse to find Ohlendorf and give him the news. He stopped at Tony Peña Jr.’s locker to let him know he would be pressed into duty that night as an emergency starter. Peña, who had played in the major leagues as a starting shortstop for the Kansas City Royals before becoming a pitcher, wasn’t shocked by the news.

  “He’s been my most versatile pitcher for two years,” Beyeler said. “Anything I ask him to do, he does it. Down here, guys know things change every day—sometimes every hour. Nothing surprises him.”

  As Beyeler talked to Peña, he glanced up at one of the clubhouse TV sets. Every Triple-A clubhouse has at least one TV set in it, and most—if not all—are wired for the Major League Baseball package. That means when a Triple-A team’s big-league squad is playing, that game is on the clubhouse TV.

  At that moment, down the hall in the home clubhouse, the Phillies game was on in the IronPigs’ clubhouse. In Beyeler’s visiting Pawtucket clubhouse, the Red Sox game was on all the screens.

  Most of the time, players just glance at the televised game or pay no attention to it at all as they get ready to play. Beyeler kept an eye on the Red Sox games because—as always—he knew that if one of the Red Sox got hurt or if a pitcher had a bad day, his phone might ring and Crockett would be on the other end asking him who would be the best fit for whatever hole he needed to fill in Boston.

  As Beyeler was finishing his talk with Peña and was about to go and find Ohlendorf, he noticed a commotion. “About ten guys had jumped up and were crowding around the set,” he said later, smiling. “It usually doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that happens.”

  This time, it didn’t take Beyeler long to confirm that his instinct was right. Red Sox shortstop Mike Avilés had closed on a ground ball just before it took a wicked hop and ricocheted off his wrist. He had come up in pain, grabbing the wrist right away, and trainer Rick Jameyson and manager Bobby Valentine had come out of the dugout to see how badly Avilés was hurt.

  “If he’s down, someone’s going up,” Beyeler said. “If someone goes up, other guys’ playing time and their place in the lineup is affected. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It isn’t as if any of those guys are sitting there waiting for someone to get hurt, but the minute they see Avilés come up holding the wrist, their first thought is, ‘Could I get the call?’ ”

  As it turned out, Avilés hadn’t broken any bones and was able to shake off the injury. Everyone returned to what they were doing.

  “You never know, though,” Beyeler said. “It could swell, or they could find something wrong with it after the game. They’re all thinking the same thing.

  “The good news in a situation like that is you get to call someone in and say, ‘Pack your bags, you’re going to the major leagues.’ Those moments are the best part of this job—by far.” He smiled. “Of course, once that guy leaves with a big grin on his face, you have to deal with the five who didn’t get called up. That’s the hardest part of the job.”

  Or, as Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter, who spent his playing career waiting for the call-up that never came and then managed in Triple-A for four years, puts it: “Managing at that level is the worst job there is in baseball. Why? Because no one wants to be there.”

  Baseball’s minor leagues have a long and storied history, at least in part because almost every great player in the game has played in them at some point in time.

  Years ago, baseball had so many minor leagues and minor-league teams it was almost impossible to track them all. Leagues were classified from Triple-A down through Class D. More often than not, the minor-league teams were completely independent from the major-league teams they did business with, their affiliations being informal as often as they were formal.

  Minor-league teams are still owned independently nowadays, but with the exception of a handful of teams that play in what are called—cleverly enough—independent leagues, they all have formal ties to major-league teams.

  The major-league teams control the baseball operations: they assign the manager and the coaches and provide the players to each team. The owners take care of everything non-baseball, from owning (or leasing) their stadium, to tickets sales and marketing, concessions, licensing, and parking.

  There are now six levels of minor-league baseball: rookie-league; short-season A (the teams begin play in June since most of the players are high school and college draftees); low-A; high-A; Double-A; and Triple-A.

  Players in Triple-A like to say that they are “one accident away” from the big leagues—an approach that might sound a bit ghoulish but is quite real.

  Echoing the words of Arnie Beyeler, John Lindsey put it bluntly one night: “It isn’t as if you sit around hoping for someone to get hurt, but you know that it’s a fact of life that people do get hurt. The phone is going to ring. The manager is going to call someone in to his office. You just hope when that happens it will be you. When you’re in Triple-A, you’re ‘this close,’ but you can also be a million miles away.”

  There are two leagues at the Triple-A level: the Pacific Coast League, which has sixteen teams, and the International League, which has fourteen teams. Although the tie-ins change frequently, each team has a working agreement with one of the thirty major-league teams. The minor-league ownership stays the same; those on the field switch uniforms.

  The oldest of the minor leagues is the International League, which has existed in one form or another since 1884. Once, the league truly was international: there were teams from Canada, Puerto Rico, and, for six years in the 1950s, Cuba. The Cuban team had to move in 1960, two years after the noted baseball fan Fidel Castro took over the country. The team ended up in that most international of cities, Jersey City, New Jersey.

  There are no longer any international teams in the International League. The last one disappeared in 2008, when the Ottawa Lynx, who were an affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies, moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania—which is a lot closer to Philadelphia than Ottawa—and became the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.

  The I-League, as it is commonly called, has three divisions: North, South, and West. The North Division has six teams: Pawtucket, Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, Lehigh Valley, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. The South and West have four teams each: Norfolk, Durham, Charlotte, and Gwinnett play in the South; and Columbus, Toledo, Indianapolis, and Louisville play in the West.

  The playoff system is a simple one: The three division winners qualify, and there is one wild card team. The four teams play best-of-five semifinals and then a best-of-five championship series. In 2012, Pawtucket, the wild card team, won the Governors’ Cup that is given to the league champion. The Governors’ Cup was first presented in 1933 when the I-League became the first league at any level of baseball to expand its playoffs to include four teams. Major League Baseball didn’t follow suit until 1969.

  The original Governors’ Cup, which was worth $3,000 and was sponsored by the governors of New York, New Jersey, and Maryland and the lieutenant governors of Quebec and Ontario, was donated to the Hall of Fame in 1988. The new cup, which is a replica, was actually smashed by a drunken fan at a Scranton/Wilkes-Barre game in 2009 and had to be extensively repaired. The Pacific Coast League uses an identical playoff system.

  Among the managers who have hoisted the Governors’ Cup in the past are men like Walter Alston, Dick Williams, Bobby Cox, Davey Johnson, Hank Bauer, Joe Altobelli, and Charlie Manuel—all of whom went on to manage World Series winners. And yet every manager in the I-League says th
e same thing about winning the championship: it’s nice, but it isn’t what you are paid to do.

  “You try to win every night, but you know you aren’t ultimately judged on wins and losses,” said Durham manager Charlie Montoyo, whose team made the playoffs five straight seasons prior to 2012 and won the Governors’ Cup in 2009. “My job is to develop players, help them be ready for the big leagues, keep their attitudes in the right place, and be ready to do whatever the big club needs at a moment’s notice—no matter what it does to my team. Some nights, all I’m looking for is a way to have enough pitchers to get through nine innings. If I do that, then I’ve probably done my job.”

  On a July night in 2012, Montoyo’s phone rang shortly after midnight. The Bulls had managed to pull out a 7–4 victory earlier that evening against Rochester, but Montoyo had noticed after arriving home that the Tampa Bay Rays game against the Seattle Mariners had gone fourteen innings. When he heard farm director Chaim Bloom’s voice on the other end of the line, he laughed.

  “What took you so long to call?” he asked.

  Bloom laughed too. The two men had done this drill before. The fourteen-inning game meant that the Rays had gone deep into their bullpen. They would need to have another pitcher available the next night. César Ramos was the choice. He would be on a plane to Tampa the next morning. How long he would stay in Tampa was hard to say, but for the moment, since it might be only a few days, the Rays were not going to send anyone up to Durham from their Double-A team in Montgomery, Alabama.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Bloom added. “Don’t use [Brandon] Gomes tomorrow. We may need him Sunday if we have to use Ramos right away.”

  Montoyo sighed. That meant he would be two pitchers down for the rest of the weekend. It also meant the first person he would need to talk to when he got to the ballpark the next day would be backup catcher Craig Albernaz—who was also his emergency pitcher.

  “We’ve already had to use him a couple of times to finish games this year,” Montoyo said. “You don’t like to put a position player in to pitch, but sometimes you have no choice.” He smiled. “Actually the first couple of times he came in he did pretty well. Then I let [pitching coach] Neil Allen work with him in the bullpen a little bit, and the next time out he got lit up.

  “Fortunately, he has a great attitude about it. That makes it a little easier for me.”

  In a small twist of irony, Albernaz and Gomes had grown up in the same town—Fall River, Massachusetts. Albernaz has such a thick New England accent it almost sounds as if he’s exaggerating for effect. He has the classic catcher’s body—five feet eight and 195 pounds—and, at the age of twenty-nine, was happy to do whatever his manager wanted him to do.

  “Anything to get between the white lines,” he said that afternoon after Montoyo had put him on pitching standby. “The only reason I’d prefer not to get in to pitch is it probably means we’re in bad shape in the game. But I’m ready if he needs me.”

  Baseball people talk often about how bitter a Triple-A clubhouse can feel. Many of those playing in Triple-A have played in the major leagues, and most of them believe they should still be there. Some are back because they’ve gotten hurt. Others have had short stints and are convinced they should be back—and will be back—in the near future. Others have had lengthy major-league careers and believe that their presence in Triple-A at that moment is an anomaly, that they will be back where they really belong very soon.

  “What’s amazing is how quickly guys develop a major-league attitude,” said Tony La Russa, who managed in the major leagues in Chicago, Oakland, and St. Louis for thirty-three years but spent most of his playing career in the minors. “What I mean by that is a guy can spend ten years in the minors carrying his own bags, staying in roadside motels, and riding buses and then goes up to the majors for two weeks and comes back thinking he should never carry his own bag again.”

  He smiled. “Usually those are the guys who don’t go back. The guys who understand that they’re back in the minors because they need to play better are the ones who end up being major leaguers again.”

  Albernaz had never been to the big leagues. He had spent more time in Double-A than in Triple-A but had seen enough teammates get the call through the years, even for short stints, that he hadn’t ruled out the possibility.

  “If it never happens, well, I’ve come pretty close by getting this far,” he said. “I’m one of those guys who has to do the little things to succeed. I understand that. If Charlie tells me he needs me to pitch, I’m happy to pitch.”

  So, as it turns out, Buck Showalter was wrong: there are guys who are happy to be in Triple-A.

  But they are few and far between.

  Chris Dickerson is far more typical of those playing in Triple-A than Albernaz. He had played in the major leagues for parts of four seasons when he arrived in Tampa for training camp in February 2012. He was six weeks shy of thirty, and as loaded as the Yankees usually are, he knew they liked experienced players on the bench. That was why he thought he had a chance to make the team. He had played in sixty games for the Yankees in 2011, most as a defensive replacement. That was fine with him—the majors were the majors.

  Dickerson was a classic example of what scouts call a 4-A player. He was probably a little too good to be playing Triple-A but not quite good enough to play regularly in the major leagues. In 2008, the last season in which he had spent most of his time in Triple-A, he had hit .287 with eleven homers, fifty-three RBIs, and twenty-six steals in ninety-seven games. He had speed, he could play defense, and he could hit the occasional home run. He just couldn’t hit quite well enough at the major-league level.

  Still, Dickerson wasn’t prepared when the Yankees told him early in training camp that he was being outrighted to Triple-A. There are several ways to be sent to the minors. The best way is to be optioned. That means you are still on a team’s forty-man roster, which makes it easy to be brought back to the majors. If you are outrighted, you are off the forty-man roster, and if you are called back up before September 1, you have to go through waivers—meaning another team can grab you.

  “I was stunned,” Dickerson said. “It wasn’t as if I thought I was a lock to make the team, but I thought I’d get a chance. I was hurt and I was angry. I just think I’m a better player than that.”

  He shook his head at the thought of spending an entire season in the minor leagues. “When you go home for the winter after being on the big-league ball club, it means something,” he said. “People look at you a certain way. You go home after being in the minors, and people say to you, ‘So, do you think you’ll make it back to the pros?’

  “That is the most annoying thing anyone can say. What do people think I’ve been doing since college, playing for fun? People don’t understand—Triple-A baseball is very real and very good. The guys playing Triple-A are really, really good baseball players.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Of course no one wants to be one of them,” he said. “Including me.”

  5

  Johnson and Montoyo

  MANAGING EXPECTATIONS

  If there was anyone working in the International League in 2012 who had a right to feel he deserved better, it was Ron Johnson.

  The thought never crossed his mind.

  Johnson, known to one and all in the Norfolk Tides’ clubhouse as RJ (pronounced as a name—Arejay—not as two letters), was an old-time baseball guy who believed in old-time baseball rules—written and, mostly, unwritten. He had worked in the minor leagues for most of his adult life, signing with the Kansas City Royals in 1978 as a twenty-fourth-round draft pick after graduating from Fresno State.

  He had played for eight full seasons and had three brief stints in the majors with the Royals and the Montreal Expos, playing in a total of twenty-two games. He’d been to bat forty-six times in the majors and had hit .261 without a homer and with two RBIs.

  “To be honest, I’m pretty proud of the fact that I got there at all,” he said, smiling. “I was
a long shot when I signed, a long shot when I was playing, and a long shot after I stopped playing. I guess I’ve always been a long shot. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t bother me to be back in the minors. It’s the life I’ve known for thirty-five years.

  “Of course anyone who tells you they don’t want to be in the majors is either lying or crazy. Especially once you’ve been there.”

  He looked around his small office for a moment. “This is real life. There’s nothing real about that life.”

  Johnson had coached and managed in the minors for twenty-four years after retiring as a player. Then, in the fall of 2009, the call had finally come: the Red Sox were promoting him from the managing job he had held for five years in Pawtucket to be Terry Francona’s first-base coach.

  “Dream come true,” Johnson said. “It took me a while, but I was finally there. And, I wasn’t going to be sent down after a week or a month. I was in the major leagues.”

  If there was any manager in baseball whose job appeared to be secure at that moment in time, it was Francona. At the age of fifty-four, Johnson was in the majors, and he hoped it was for a long ride.

  Little did he know that the ride would be the bumpiest of his life, filled with a personal tragedy when one of his daughters was in a catastrophic accident and a stunning ending when the Red Sox collapsed in the final month of the 2011 season, costing Francona his job.

  “You have an eight-game lead with a month to go and you don’t make the playoffs, people are going to lose their jobs—especially in Boston,” Johnson said. “As soon as Tito [Francona] was gone, I knew I wouldn’t be far behind.”

  The Red Sox had been good to Johnson, especially following his daughter’s accident. They had given him all the time he needed away from the team and helped with the family’s expenses. Everyone in baseball had come to the family’s aid during that time.

  But wins and losses on the field have very little to do with family issues off the field—at least in the minds of those in charge. You win, you get a raise. You lose, sooner or later, you get fired.