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

by John Feinstein

  “I figured I would take a year off and relax,” Johnson said. “I’ve been on the road my entire adult life. It actually sounded pretty good to me.”

  A month after he was fired in Boston, Dan Duquette, the new general manager in Baltimore, called Johnson. The two men had worked together when Duquette had been the Red Sox’ GM. He needed a manager in Norfolk. Was Johnson interested?

  Johnson thought about it briefly, discussed it with his wife, and made a quick decision. “I’ll take it,” he told Duquette. “I’m not sure why I’ll take it, but I’ll take it.”

  Actually, he knew exactly why he was taking it: it was baseball and he was a baseball guy.

  “I get paid to go to the ballpark and put on a uniform every day,” he said. “How can I possibly complain?”

  It was after midnight as he spoke, a half-eaten plate of food in front of him. He was about to go home for a few hours of sleep. There was another game the next day.

  Johnson would be there, in uniform—six hours before first pitch—to get ready for another day in baseball.

  No sport is more wedded to ritual than baseball. The day after the World Series ends each year, the question “When do pitchers and catchers report?” is asked as part of the ritual of the off-season. Of course most baseball people don’t acknowledge that there is an off-season. They refer to the winter months as “the hot stove league”—a nickname for yet another baseball ritual that dates to the days when people literally sat around their stoves to keep warm and talk about the trades their team might make while the snow was still falling outside.

  Ritual.

  For established major leaguers, the ritual of spring training is often a family affair. Cars are packed up for long drives to Florida or Arizona. Kids get their homework assignments for several weeks, or, these days, parents hire tutors to work with them while they miss school for a month to spend time in the sun as their classmates shiver in colder climates in late February and through spring break into March.

  It is different for those who have spent all or most of their careers in the minor leagues. Their February ritual almost always involves saying good-bye to their families for six weeks. Maybe they can steal a week away during spring break, but often as not the work involved—not to mention the money involved—in the travel isn’t worth it.

  For baseball teams, spring training is an all-hands-on-deck affair. Nowadays, they all have massive, modern complexes that have enough fields to accommodate everyone under contract—the fifty or sixty players who are invited to major-league camp and about two hundred more who report to the minor-league facility.

  The players invited to the major-league camp work with the major-league manager and his coaches and with a number of people who will be working in the minor leagues once the season begins: the Triple-A manager and his coaches (most teams have two, some three) and various instructors who rove the minor leagues at all levels during the season, not only working with players, but also reporting to the major-league front office on their progress.

  For those who know they will begin the season in the minor leagues, spring training is a time to savor, not just because everything is fresh and the weather is warm, but because you live the life of a big leaguer for six weeks.

  “Lots more room in the clubhouse, and the food is a lot better,” Durham manager Charlie Montoyo said on a bright February Sunday, sitting inside the Tampa Bay Rays’ clubhouse in Port Charlotte, Florida.

  Montoyo had just been through the good-bye ritual with his family, which was never easy. It was easier this time because his four-year-old son, Alexander, who had already been through three heart surgeries and was facing a fourth in the future, was healthy and doing well. It didn’t make leaving easy; it just made it a little less worrisome.

  “I miss them [his wife and two sons] a lot,” he said. “But I remind myself I’m not the only one dealing with missing my family. It’s part of the deal when you do this for a living.”

  Montoyo was about to start his sixth season as the manager of the Durham Bulls—arguably the most famous minor-league baseball team in history. The Bulls were immortalized in Ron Shelton’s 1988 movie, Bull Durham, and remain the one minor-league team even casual baseball fans can name off the tops of their heads.

  Much has changed in Durham in the quarter century since the movie was filmed there. For one thing, the Bulls no longer play in the Class A Carolina League, several long steps from the majors. (Nuke LaLoosh being called up to “The Show” direct from the Bulls was one aspect of the movie that is extremely unlikely to ever happen.) Since 1998, the Bulls have been the Rays’ No. 1 farm team, which means that most of the Rays’ current stars have passed through Durham at some point.

  The Bulls no longer play in Durham Athletic Park, although it still exists and hosts high school, college, and American Legion games. Their new park, which is a mile down the road from the old place, is called Durham Bulls Athletic Park. In Durham, most people just refer to it as the Dee-BAP. It opened in 1995 and is a modern, redbrick facility that seats ten thousand people. The famous snorting bull—“Hit Bull Win Steak”—was moved to the new ballpark, where it now sits atop and behind the left-field wall, known as the Blue Monster, because it is a blue copy of Fenway Park’s Green Monster. In tribute to twenty-first-century diets, the grass that the bull is standing on reads, “Hit Grass Win Salad.” About one or two players a year hit the bull and collect their steak. To the best of everyone’s recollection, no one has cashed in on a salad yet.

  The Bulls have retired two numbers in their history, which dates to 1902: One is the number 18 worn by the Hall of Famer Joe Morgan when he played for the team in 1963 on his way to starring first in Houston and then as a two-time MVP in Cincinnati. The other is the number 8 worn by Crash Davis.

  Davis did, in fact, play for the Bulls in the 1940s and spent three years in the major leagues prior to that, playing for the Philadelphia Athletics. That’s not why his number is retired, though; it’s retired because Shelton and Kevin Costner made it—and him—famous.

  Montoyo has seen Bull Durham and appreciates the unique history of the team he manages. Most days, though, he drives to the ballpark from his two-bedroom apartment, sits in his small office under the first-base stands, and makes out a lineup—knowing that the players available to him that day may not be available the next day.

  “I’ve loved baseball since I was a kid, and I still love it,” he said. “But at this point in my life, I’m forty-six and I have two kids to raise. Baseball’s my job. The best thing I have going for me this year is that I have a two-year contract. That’s the first time since I got drafted out of college that I’ve had that kind of security. That’s important to me.”

  Montoyo has coached and managed in the Rays’ farm system since he “got retired” as a player in 1996. He was talented enough as a kid growing up in Puerto Rico that he was offered the chance to move to California to play junior college baseball by a man named Don Odderman.

  “He was Puerto Rican and he looked for kids he thought had a chance to make it in baseball in the U.S. and he financed them,” Montoyo said. “It was kind of a scholarship program. A number of good players came to the U.S. because of him.”

  Odderman set Montoyo up to play at De Anza College in Cupertino, California. His coach picked him up at the airport and drove him to the house of a local family that hosted some of De Anza’s players. Montoyo was eighteen and spoke no English. The family he was staying with spoke no Spanish.

  After two years at De Anza, he was recruited to play at Louisiana Tech. “I felt like I had to learn a third language when I went down there,” he said. “Southern. People would say to me, ‘Well, I’m fixing to go now,’ and I’d say, ‘What is it you’re going to fix?’ ”

  He majored in business at Louisiana Tech but didn’t stick around long enough to get a degree. The Milwaukee Brewers drafted him in the sixth round in 1987, and since playing baseball was his goal, he left school to play rookie ball in Helena, Mon
tana. From there he moved up the minor-league ladder from Beloit to Stockton to El Paso to Denver. Prior to the 1993 season the Brewers traded him to the Expos, which made sense for Montoyo because the Brewers had Pat Listach, who had been the American League’s Rookie of the Year in 1992, playing second base, meaning Montoyo was more likely to get a shot in the majors with another team.

  Sure enough, his shot came late in the 1993 season. On September 7, Montoyo arrived at the ballpark in Ottawa, which was then the Expos’ Triple-A team, at about two o’clock in the afternoon and was called into manager Mike Quade’s office.

  “You want to play tonight?” Quade asked him.

  Montoyo was surprised by the question. “Of course I do,” he answered.

  “Well, then you better get going,” Quade said. “The game in Montreal starts at seven-thirty.”

  It took Montoyo a split second to understand what Quade was saying.

  “Seriously?” he asked.

  Quade just nodded.

  “Naturally, I got lost on the way,” he said. “There was no GPS or anything other than a map or asking directions. I pulled in to a gas station looking for help. I spoke Spanish and English, and they spoke French. It didn’t work so well.”

  Montoyo finally got to Olympic Stadium at about seven o’clock. He got into uniform and sat on the bench—“pretty much in awe”—as the game against the Colorado Rockies moved along. In the eighth inning, with the game tied, manager Felipe Alou turned and pointed at Montoyo.

  “Grab a bat,” he said, which is baseball for “you’re pinch-hitting.”

  Montoyo is fluent in three languages: Spanish, English, and baseball. He grabbed the first bat he could find.

  Montoyo came up against the Rockies’ reliever Gary Wayne with the go-ahead run on second base and two men out. He promptly singled up the middle, driving in what proved to be the winning run. “The best thing was Felipe sent me up there so quickly I had no chance to think about how scared I was,” Montoyo said. “If I’d thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the bat off my shoulder.”

  Montoyo spent the rest of the season with the Expos—twenty-two days in all. He had five at-bats and two hits—the second one driving in two runs, meaning he had three RBIs in five at-bats. As it turned out, that was the beginning and the end of his career as a big-league ballplayer.

  He played in the minors for three more seasons. He was a player-coach at the Double-A level in 1996 and was fairly certain he wasn’t going to be offered any kind of playing contract for the next season. “I actually thought I might get cut in spring training in ’96, but they sent me to Double-A,” he said. “I hit behind Vlad Guerrero [who would go on to hit 449 major-league home runs] for a lot of that season in Harrisburg and got back to Triple-A for a little while before the end of the season.

  “But the Expos had some young guys coming along, so I knew I was probably done,” he said. “I knew I wanted to stay in baseball. The question was, how?”

  The answer was the Rays. Tom Foley, whom Montoyo knew from his time in the Expos’ organization, had been hired as a field coordinator by the Rays and was looking for someone to manage the Rays’ Class A team in Princeton, West Virginia, during the 1997 season. The Rays would not start playing in the American League until 1998, but they had minor-league teams playing a year earlier. Montoyo had just turned thirty-one. He had played for ten years, including his stint in Montreal in 1993. As a minor leaguer, including six seasons in Triple-A, he had hit .266. Only as a major leaguer did he hit .400—leading to his oft-repeated line about being the game’s “last .400 hitter.”

  “I knew another chance might not come down the pike to make the switch,” he said. “So I told Tom I’d love to come and work for him.”

  He has been with the Rays’ organization ever since, moving steadily up the minor-league chain from Princeton to Hudson Valley (upstate New York); Charleston, South Carolina (where he met his wife, Samantha); Bakersfield, California; Orlando; Montgomery, Alabama; and finally Durham in 2007. He had just won the Double-A title in Montgomery in his third year managing the Biscuits in 2006 when he got the Triple-A job in Durham. He was an instant success there, winning the division title in 2007 while continuing to receive rave reviews from his players and those running the Rays’ organization.

  By then he was a father, his son Tyson having been born in 2003.

  Shortly after the end of his first season in Durham, Alexander was born with the heart issues that made hospitals a too-familiar place for the Montoyo family. Alexander had open-heart surgery to try to correct or at least control the symptoms of the condition when he was one month old. Although he was healthy enough to go to school during 2012, he faced at least one more heart catheterization and, depending on the results, the possibility of still more surgery.

  “Whenever I think about him going through it again, I want to cry,” Montoyo said softly. On his desk in Bulls Athletic Park are photographs of his family, including several of Alex right after his first surgery. Underneath one is a caption that says, “Prayer with faith can change things.”

  Montoyo never prays during a baseball game. He saves it for more important things.

  As 2012 began, Montoyo had never failed to reach the postseason while managing in Durham. He had reached the playoffs in each of his first five seasons, winning the Triple-A National Championship in 2009. The Rays had played their first season in 1998 and for ten years had been one of baseball’s worst teams. But in 2008 the young players they had acquired with high draft picks through the years began to pay dividends, and they won the American League East title and made it to the World Series. They made the playoffs again in 2010 and in 2011, all the while managed by Joe Maddon, who had been hired at the end of the 2005 season, when the Rays finished 67-95.

  The team had been sold by then, and new management was in place. After two more horrific seasons (61-101 and 66-96) under Maddon, the Rays took off. The young talent moving through the farm system made the managing job in Durham one of the better ones in Triple-A. Montoyo was grateful to have good players, although he was always aware of the fact that he was expected to deliver those players to the majors with good attitudes, good fundamentals, and an understanding of how Maddon wanted the game played.

  Montoyo’s success, along with the fact that players universally sing his praises after playing for him, has made his a name that has come up when teams are talking about hiring a manager. Still, he’s a realist: the guy in front of him in Tampa isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Maddon is only fifty-eight and considered one of the game’s best managers.

  That means another organization is going to have to go looking for someone and think, “Hey, that guy in Triple-A with no major-league experience might be the answer.” Montoyo knows his best shot to make it to the majors is the Ron Johnson route—as a coach. One reason that most Triple-A managers coach third base is to prepare themselves for possibly being a base coach in the major leagues. Even so, Montoyo doesn’t give “the jump,” as it is called in Triple-A, much thought—especially once spring training is over and he heads back to Durham.

  “When I was a player, there were guys who became obsessed with why they weren’t in the big leagues,” he said. “They would sit around and wonder why someone else got called up instead of them or what needed to happen to get them up to the majors.

  “The same is true when you’re managing. It doesn’t do any good to sit around and wonder, ‘When is my chance going to come? Is my chance ever going to come?’ Some guys get it when they least expect it. Some guys never get it.

  “All I know right now is I have a job and I like my job. I get paid okay, and I like going to work every day. I don’t even look at the standings during the season. Believe me, I know when we’re winning and when we’re losing, and our local media guys always let me know where we are in the standings. In the past, when we’ve been closing in on clinching the division, our radio guy always lets me know, ‘Five more games to clinch, four,
three,’ so I know what’s going on. But I never go out of my way to find out.

  “Getting a big-league job often has as much to do with being in the right place at the right time as it does with doing your job well. Just like playing. I always tell my players if they don’t get discouraged because they’re here and keep giving everything they have every day, their chance will come. I tell myself the exact same thing.

  “I have one goal in life right now: take care of my family. That hasn’t been easy since Alexander was born. As long as I can do that, I’m fine.”

  Of the fourteen men managing in the International League in 2012, two had been managers at the major-league level: Dave Miley, who was in his seventh season managing the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees, had managed the Cincinnati Reds from late in 2003 until midway through 2005 and had been fired after compiling a 125-164 record. Joel Skinner, in his first season managing the Charlotte Knights—the White Sox’ Triple-A team—had been an interim manager in Cleveland in 2002, going 35-41. That record was good enough to get him interviewed for the job at season’s end but not good enough to get him hired.

  Every manager in the league hoped his time would come—or come again—when he would be in the majors.

  Seven of the fourteen had played in the majors, ranging from Montoyo’s twenty-two days as a .400 hitter to Lehigh Valley manager Ryne Sandberg, who was in the Hall of Fame. If anyone in the group was considered a lock to manage in the majors someday, it was Sandberg.

  “First of all, the guy’s really good,” said Pawtucket’s Arnie Beyeler. “Second of all, the back of the bubble gum card matters.”

  Among the facts on the back of Sandberg’s bubble gum card were sixteen major-league seasons, almost all of them with the Chicago Cubs; ten trips to the All-Star game; nine Gold Gloves as the National League’s best defensive second baseman; seven Silver Slugger awards as the best hitter at his position; and the 1984 National League MVP. Most important of course was the last notation: inducted into the Hall of Fame, 2005.