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

by John Feinstein

  The Rockies released him midway through 2004 after his ERA had ballooned to 9.80. The Indians picked him up, and he pitched better, most notably in 2005, when he had his best season since 2000—and his healthiest—going 11-9 with a 4.61 ERA. But the shoulder began acting up again after he signed with the Royals in 2006, and he was released again, midway through 2007. The Indians gave him another shot briefly in 2008. It was after his release there in July that he decided it was time to go home.

  “I had two young kids,” he said. “Everything hurt. I was pitching badly, and I didn’t want to go back to the minor leagues again. I had money [his solid 2005 with the Indians had gotten him a two-year $8 million deal from the Royals]. The White Sox tempted me back briefly in 2010, but I was awful, so I decided that was it.”

  Even before he walked away from Cleveland in 2008, he knew he needed to stop drinking. As his injuries and frustrations had mounted, he had started to drink more.

  “At some point in my life I had probably dabbled in a little bit of everything,” he said. “You name it, I tried it. But mostly I drank. It wasn’t as if I was drinking every single night or drinking all day long; it was never like that. But when I did drink, I drank too much. It could get ugly in a hurry.

  “When I came up, a lot of guys were living the hard and fast life. I fell right into it. It got to a point where I knew I had to do something about it before it killed me. I don’t think I was ever a bad husband or a bad dad, but I knew it wasn’t going to end well if I didn’t do something. I didn’t feel good physically, and I didn’t feel very good about myself either. I just decided it was time to get some help. So I did.”

  He went away to a thirty-day program but knew he still had work to do when he got back. He didn’t think he could handle sobriety and baseball and the frustrations baseball had been bringing to his life all at once. He was sober when the White Sox talked him into his brief comeback. “By then, drinking wasn’t the issue,” he said, smiling. “My pitching was the issue.”

  He had pitched in Charlotte for eight weeks in 2010 to an ERA of 8.24. His shoulder hurt even more than it had before he left the Indians two years earlier, and he knew he would need to have surgery again. He was happy to be back in Lamar, until that day in August when he had driven over to Denver with Jake to see his old buddies who were with the Phillies.

  Elarton had now rented an apartment in Allentown that was big enough that Laurie and the two children could spend the summer with him. Even with them in Lehigh Valley, the long road trips were tough on him.

  “I’m usually okay for about the first six days,” he said. “By the seventh day I start to get very cranky. I’m just at a point in my life where I don’t like being away from my family at all.”

  Jake, who was now eight, had vaguely known that his dad was a baseball player and that he knew baseball players. But he had been four the last time Elarton had been a full-time player, and his more vivid memories of his father on a baseball field dated to the August afternoon in Denver when they had stood behind the barrier and watched the “real” players take batting practice.

  “For Jake to see me in uniform, and actually pitching and occasionally getting people out, makes this whole thing worth it,” Elarton said. “At the very least I know now that he’ll remember me as a baseball player. It won’t just be some vague, shadowy memory of me playing baseball from when he was very little. He understands the game now; he’s really a fan. He thinks being able to come down on the field to be with me is cool.

  “I’d love for him to see me in a major-league uniform in a major-league park, but, to be honest, this has been great because down here things are less formal and he gets to be a lot closer to it than in the majors.”

  He smiled. “Of course I wouldn’t mind having to deal with the access issue in the majors if the time came for that.”

  As May turned to June, Elarton began to lose some of the magic touch he’d seemed to have in Florida and early in the season. A couple of bad outings ballooned his ERA a bit—it was still under 4.00 going into July, which is generally considered good in Triple-A—but he knew he wasn’t pitching nearly as well as he had been.

  “I’m making mental mistakes out there,” he said one night. “I’m not making good pitches when I most need to, and I’m not getting out of innings the way I was early in the season. It’s frustrating. I think I’ll come out of it, but I hope it’s soon.

  “Last I checked, I’m not getting any younger.”

  12

  Slice of Life

  ON THE ROAD IN PINSTRIPES

  When the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees gathered just prior to their season opener on April 5, their manager, Dave Miley, had spoken to them about the year that was to come, pointing out that they could use the 144-game road trip as an excuse if they wanted to—but not with him.

  “None of us signed up for this,” he told the team. “But we’re here. We can lie down or we can show people that we’re competitors and turn some heads that way. It’s up to you.”

  Whether those words got everyone’s attention or not, the team played solid baseball right from the start.

  “In a funny way I think it’s helped bring us together,” Miley said after the team had settled into a pennant race with Lehigh Valley and Pawtucket in the North Division. “Adversity can do that. I mean we all have two choices: accept it for what it is and try to succeed or whine about it and not succeed. I don’t think anyone in New York is going to say, ‘Oh, these guys have it too tough, we’ll bring them up even if they’re not playing well.’ The guys understand that.

  “Every spring, before we go north, I always get the players together and say, ‘Look, I know there isn’t anyone in this room who doesn’t want to be up in the big leagues, but we’re all here—at least for the moment.’ This spring I changed my speech a little, to let them know that I thought the less we talked about it, or thought about it, the better off we’d all be. I brought it up the one time. I haven’t brought it up since. Fortunately, I haven’t had to.”

  He smiled. “Of course it isn’t exactly one of those things you can prepare for. You just have to take it as it comes.”

  Two days before opening day Miley had turned fifty and, perhaps more than any other manager in the International League, had learned to take life as it came—the good, the bad, and the tragic.

  He had been a hot prospect when he graduated from high school after growing up in Tampa and had been the Reds’ No. 2 pick in 1980. He had opted to sign with the Reds—who trained in Tampa when he was a kid and were his favorite team—rather than accept a scholarship to the University of Miami.

  Two years out of high school, he blew out his knee and was never really the same player. He bounced around the minors for seven years but never made it to the majors. When the Reds offered him the chance to manage the Greensboro Hornets in 1988, he took the job, figuring he had a better chance to make it to the majors as a manager or a coach than as a player.

  He was right. By 1993, he was the Reds’ bench coach, before returning to the minors, seemingly to be groomed as a future major-league manager. He managed in Louisville for four years, winning the Governors’ Cup in 2001. Two years later, he was the Reds’ manager, moved up from Louisville late in the season when the Reds decided to fire both their general manager, Jim Bowden, and their manager, Bob Boone.

  Miley was only forty-one when he became the Reds’ manager and he was handed a young team that had traded most of its best players away for prospects. The problem with being part of a rebuilding process when you are a manager is that people still judge you on your record. Midway through 2005, having gone 125-164 with a tiny payroll and almost no veterans, Miley was fired.

  “It’s baseball,” he said one afternoon, shrugging as he sat in the small visiting manager’s office in Allentown. He had a bat in one hand, and he sat on the one chair in the room. His visitor sat on the floor. Miley is always friendly with the media and never unwilling to talk, but it is clearly not his favorite
thing.

  One reason for that is that getting fired by the Reds, after twenty-five years with the organization, isn’t even close to the worst thing that’s happened in his life. He was hired by the Yankees to manage their Triple-A team in Columbus in 2006 and moved with the team to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre a year later.

  In May 2008, the Yankees were playing at home when Miley got a call: his seventeen-year-old son, Cody, who had just graduated from the same high school in Tampa that Miley had graduated from twenty-eight years earlier, had been killed in a car crash. To this day, it is difficult for Miley to talk about Cody, to the point where he says he honestly has trouble remembering details.

  “It’s all a little bit of a blur,” he said quietly.

  He has a daughter, Courtney, and Miley has been happily remarried for twelve years now. Baseball remains his escape.

  “I get asked all the time if I’d like another shot at managing in the majors,” he said. “Of course I would. But I like what I’m doing right now. I get paid to put on a uniform every day, and that makes me happy. I like working with young players and trying to help them take that next step. Nothing makes me happier than calling a guy in and telling him he’s going up. That’s the joy in this job—those moments.

  “Especially this year. Because there’s no doubt anyone who goes up right now has more than earned it.”

  As much as Doug Bernier enjoyed playing for Dave Miley, he knew it was unlikely he was going to get that call into his office during the 2012 season. Bernier was thirty-one when he reported to spring training in Tampa for his tenth full season as a professional baseball player. He had graduated from Oral Roberts in 2002, thinking he would be taken at some point during the fifty-round amateur draft.

  “The decisions I had made up until that point in my life had all been about baseball,” he said. “When I was younger, I realized I was probably too small [five feet ten inches] to go very far in football or basketball, but I could play baseball. I was a good pitcher, but when I went to an All-Star camp in high school, I looked around and realized I was the shortest pitcher there. It isn’t as if you can’t be short and right-handed and succeed [Tim Lincecum comes to mind] but not when you throw it up there at eighty-eight—which is what I was doing. So I focused on playing the infield.”

  He went to junior college in San Luis Obispo, near where he had grown up (his dad was an aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin), for two years before deciding to go to Oral Roberts—an interesting choice of college for a California kid who wasn’t terribly religious.

  “I’d actually never heard of the place,” he said. “I got some interest from powerhouse places like Texas and Miami and thought, ‘Wow, this is cool.’ But realistically, I wasn’t going to play at places like that. ORU had really nice facilities, and I liked the idea at that point in my life of getting out of California.

  “I’m not sure I realized how different a place it was before I enrolled,” he said, laughing. “The first time I went there and saw those giant golden hands [which dominate the central part of the campus], it freaked me out a little. But I liked the baseball aspect of the school, liked the coach and the players. Plus, they were offering a scholarship.”

  When he first showed up for classes, he realized he hadn’t completely understood what the school was about. For one thing, when he walked into his first class dressed casually in the college student’s uniform of shorts and a T-shirt, he was quickly informed that no one at Oral Roberts went to class without wearing a tie.

  “I went to a Walmart and found a clip-on tie,” he said. “I wore it every day for the next two years.”

  He played well enough, especially in the NCAA regionals his senior year, to think he was going to get drafted. “It wasn’t as if I had scouts telling me their team was going to draft me—I didn’t,” he said. “But a bunch of scouts had seen me when I played well, even though I knew they were there to watch other guys. I just thought I’d get a shot.”

  He was wrong. He spent two days trolling the Internet, watching name after name go up on the draft board, none of them his. When the draft was over and no one had taken him, he sat back in his chair and thought, “What do I do now?”

  First he flew home. Then he began to consider his options. “I really didn’t have any, to be honest,” he said, laughing. “I had put all my eggs in the baseball basket. I had my degree [in physical education] but had no idea what I might do with it.

  “It really hit me hard. I had played baseball since I was five. It was what I did. And then, very abruptly, it looked like it might be over. Deep down, though, I didn’t think it was over. Sometimes when I get discouraged about still being in the minor leagues after all these years, I think about that time I spent at home and realize that I’m fortunate to still be in the game, to still be getting paid to play.”

  He had been home for three days after college when the phone rang. “It felt more like three months,” he said. The Colorado Rockies were interested in signing him as an undrafted free agent. There was no bonus, and the pay was $850 a month. “Where do I sign?” Bernier asked.

  The life of an undrafted free agent, especially at the lower levels of the minor leagues, is not an easy one. Players who have been drafted, particularly in the early rounds, are labeled “prospects” by their teams. It is almost as if they walk around wearing a sign that says PROSPECT, because they are placed on a pedestal from the second they report to a team.

  “Two things have to happen for someone like me to get a chance to play,” Bernier said. “One is to play so much better than a prospect that they have to play you. That one’s not easy, because even if a guy is playing poorly, they’ve got money invested in him, and they’re going to want to try to get him to play his way out of it.

  “More likely is an injury. Someone gets hurt, you get to play. Or, possibly, someone gets called up, and they give you a shot to play in his place.”

  Bernier often had to wait his turn throughout his early days in the minor leagues. “I got lucky with my rookie-league team [Pasco, Washington] because they had drafted a guy named Jeff Baker and he didn’t sign. That meant they had prospects at three infield spots but an opening at third base. So I got to play some of the time, and I did pretty well.

  “You’re constantly aware that every baseball organization is a totem pole and you’re at the bottom. You can be the first guy to go at any time, and you are almost never going to get the first opportunity.”

  In fact, during his first nine years, regardless of what level he was playing, Bernier was never an opening-day starter. He was always the guy waiting in the wings. And yet he never let the hard facts of who he was within the baseball pantheon bother him. He kept grinding and slowly made his way up the totem pole. It wasn’t until he got to Triple-A in Colorado Springs in 2007 that he even thought about hiring an agent.

  “I guess I had a college or high school approach to it all,” he said with a smile. “When I first got signed, there wasn’t any negotiating to do. What was I going to do, demand $900 a month instead of $850? When I got to Colorado Springs, a couple of guys on the team who had been in the majors—Clint Barmes and Frank Menechino—asked me who my agent was. I said I didn’t have one. They said, ‘Doug, you aren’t in college anymore, you need an agent.’ So I ended up hiring Clint’s guy.”

  He was thrilled to make the team in Colorado Springs in 2007. When Tom Runnells, who was the manager, asked if he could fill in at first base if need be, he said, “Of course,” even though he had never played first base in his life. Runnells had also managed Bernier at Double-A, and he had become one of the manager’s favorites because of his willingness to do anything to help the ball club.

  “He kept telling me, ‘I have no idea what they see in you, but you’re here, so go out and do the best you can.’ The first time he put me in the lineup in ’05, I got four hits. I think he remembered that.”

  Bernier was in his second season in Colorado Springs, and his salary had soared to $2,100 a month, the m
aximum a player not on the forty-man major-league roster could make back then. “Hey, I had almost tripled my salary,” he said, laughing. “I thought that was pretty good.”

  One morning when the team was in Tucson, Runnells came into the clubhouse and asked Bernier to come into his office.

  Bernier had been playing well, but given his history and the fact that he was twenty-seven and still expendable, his stomach twisted just a bit. Reading his mind, Runnells said, “No big deal, I just want to talk about some defensive adjustments.”

  Bernier followed Runnells into his office and was surprised to see the team’s coaches in the office too. If they were going to talk about defense, shouldn’t the other infielders be in the meeting?

  Bernier sat down, and as he did, Runnells’s face suddenly broke into a huge smile. Then he said the three magic words: “You’re going up.”

  Bernier was stunned. He knew that Troy Tulowitzki, the Rockies’ starting shortstop, was on the disabled list and still a few days from coming back. What he didn’t know was that catcher Yorvit Torrealba had just been suspended for getting into a fight with Matt Kemp of the Dodgers. The team needed an extra bat for a few days, and the choice was Bernier.

  “I honestly didn’t know what to do when Tom told me,” Bernier said. “I think I just sat there not really believing him for a minute until he said, ‘You better get going.’ I remember the guys in the clubhouse all congratulating me. I knew it was probably going to be only a few days, but it didn’t matter.

  “When I got to Denver, I walked in the clubhouse, and the first person I saw was [likely Hall of Famer] Todd Helton. He ran over, threw his arms around me, and said, ‘Dougie, great to see you!’ It was really cool that he understood how much it meant to me.”

  So did (then) manager Clint Hurdle, who put him in as a defensive replacement that first night and then, two days later, knowing that Tulowitzki was about to come off the DL, gave Bernier a start.