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

by John Feinstein

  He paused for effect, then added, “So, tomorrow, you aren’t going to be in our starting lineup.”

  The clubhouse was completely silent. The players were clearly stunned. They all knew that Marte played hard about 99.9 percent of the time. This seemed harsh.

  “I waited about thirty seconds,” Treanor said. “Looked around at all of them. Then I said, ‘Starling, the reason you aren’t going to be in the lineup is because you’re going to be in Houston. You’re going to be in the lineup there for the Pirates.’ ”

  This time the silence lasted only about a second before the news sank in with everyone. Then the clubhouse exploded. Everyone forgot how exhausted they were.

  When the hugging and celebrating was over, Marte came to find Treanor.

  “Thanks, Padre,” he said.

  “Run everything out in Pittsburgh,” Treanor said. “And don’t come back.”

  Marte led off for the Pirates the next night against Houston left-hander Dallas Keuchel. He drove the first major-league pitch he ever saw over the left-center-field fence in Minute Maid Park for a home run. He became the first Pirate to homer on the first pitch of his major-league career since Walter Mueller did it—in 1922.

  Treanor was certain that Marte would follow both his instructions: He would run every ball out. And he would not be back.

  Five days after he got to tell Marte he was going to the majors in front of all his teammates, Treanor had a very different experience. It was trade deadline day, and Treanor wasn’t at all surprised when he got to the ballpark to learn that one of his players had been traded. The Pirates were legitimately in the pennant race with a record of 59-44. They trailed the Cincinnati Reds by three games in the National League Central but were tied for the wild card lead with the Atlanta Braves. Not surprisingly, they were looking to make a deal or two to strengthen themselves for the season’s final two months.

  They had traded with the Miami Marlins to acquire the first baseman Gaby Sánchez in the hope that Sánchez might add some power to their lineup. The price had been a draft pick and, as he was described in every story about the trade, “minor-league outfielder Gorkys Hernández.”

  Hernández was twenty-four, another player who had been signed out of South America—Venezuela—as a teenager, going to the Detroit Tigers as an eighteen-year-old. He had been traded to the Atlanta Braves and then, in 2009, to Pittsburgh in the trade that had sent Nate McLouth to the Braves. He had reached Indianapolis in 2011 and had a solid year and had briefly been called up to the Pirates in May, where he was used primarily as a defensive replacement: he’d had only twenty-four at-bats in twenty-five games and had gotten two hits before being sent back to Indianapolis.

  It was a few minutes before the players were supposed to go out to stretch prior to batting practice when Treanor got the call telling him that Hernández had been traded to the Marlins. The problem was the Marlins hadn’t told the Pirates where they were sending Hernández. It could be Miami, or it could be Triple-A New Orleans, or it could even be Double-A Jacksonville. Things were so chaotic in south Florida that no one seemed certain what was going to happen to anyone next, much less the fate of a “minor-league outfielder.”

  Treanor hung up the phone and went to find Hernández, who was in uniform, ready to go out and stretch. Hernández was no longer a member of the Pittsburgh organization, so he couldn’t go out and take BP with his now-former teammates. Treanor waved him into his office. Hernández, knowing what day it was, knew something was coming—he just didn’t know what it was.

  “I figured it was a trade of some kind,” he said later. “I was nervous. I mean, they can send you anywhere.”

  Hernández’s nerves weren’t just focused on his baseball future. He and his wife had a two-year-old daughter and were expecting their second child in early to mid-September. Traveling anywhere at this point—much less trying to pack and/or find a place to live—was going to be just about impossible.

  “Gorkys, you’ve been traded to the Miami Marlins,” Treanor said, figuring there was no point beating around the bush. “Right now, I don’t know where they’re sending you. The general manager has your cell phone number, and they promised they would call as soon as they know.”

  Hernández was a little bit stunned, not so much by the trade—he’d been traded twice before—as by being told he was supposed to sit and wait to be told where he was going to go next.

  “I’m a little bit confused at that moment,” he said. “I could tell Dean was confused too.”

  Treanor was more angry than confused. Telling a player he was traded or even that he was being sent down was one thing. Telling him he’d been traded to nowhere was another. “Never happened to me before,” he said.

  Hernández walked back into the clubhouse and told his ex-teammates what had happened. When Treanor had called him in, most had figured he was being traded. When they asked where he was going, he gave them the same confusing answer Treanor had just given him.

  There was nothing anyone could do. Good-byes were said quickly. Everyone else headed out the door and up the tunnel to the field. Hernández was left in an empty clubhouse. He called home and told his wife what was going on. He was going to be getting on a plane soon; he just didn’t know where the plane would be going.

  “She was very calm,” he said. “Calmer than me.”

  He took off his uniform, showered, and was walking back to his locker when he saw his phone ringing. It was Michael Hill, the general manager of the Marlins.

  “Gorkys,” he said. “I’m sorry for the delay getting in touch with you, it’s been kind of hectic here. I want to welcome you to the Marlins.”

  Hernández told him it was no problem and waited. “The team is in Atlanta,” Hill said. “We need to get you on a flight so you can meet them there as soon as possible.”

  Hernández felt his heart rate go up. He was going to the big leagues, not to New Orleans or Jacksonville or anyplace else.

  “If I have to leave my family now, I want to do it to go back to the majors,” he said after hanging up with Hill. “An hour ago I had no idea where I was going to be. Now I know I’m in the major leagues.”

  He sent Treanor a text, and Treanor passed the good news on to the players. After batting practice, when Hernández had left for the airport, Treanor sat in his office and smiled.

  “Well, I’ve lost my two best outfielders in five days,” he said. He paused for a moment and smiled. “I couldn’t be happier.”

  14

  Schwinden and Lindsey

  HOME SWEET HOME

  While players like Marte and Hernández were making the giant leap from Triple-A to the majors, Chris Schwinden was just happy to be back in Buffalo.

  Schwinden had just endured thirty-seven days that were tumultuous even by tumultuous minor-league standards. Following his one-day sojourn in Toronto that was followed by the eighteen-hour odyssey that took him from Pittsburgh to JFK Airport … to a gas station in the Bronx … to the side of the road on the New York State Thruway … to a motel in Binghamton … and finally to the mound at Coca-Cola Field, Schwinden had spent a week back in Triple-A before getting called back to the Mets for a third time in under five weeks. Three days later he had gone from the major leagues to unemployed—when the Mets stunned him by designating him for assignment, meaning Schwinden would be on waivers for ten days, and if someone didn’t pick him up, he would be released.

  He had just cleared security at LaGuardia Airport and was going to get on a plane to go back to Buffalo, to start packing up his apartment and wait for his phone to ring. As he was standing in the airport, his phone did ring. It was his agent, Brian Charles.

  “Where are you right now?” he asked.

  “Just cleared security at LaGuardia,” Schwinden said. “Heading to Buffalo.”

  “No you’re not,” Charles said. “You need to go get yourself on a flight to Las Vegas. The Blue Jays just claimed you. They want you out there as soon as possible.”

 
; Schwinden wasn’t looking forward to another odyssey to get to a Triple-A town, but he was relieved that someone had picked him up so quickly. He found a flight to Las Vegas and, a day later, was on the mound in a Las Vegas uniform. But not for very long.

  He didn’t pitch very well that day; in fact he was awful: three innings, seven earned runs. Oh well, a bad outing after a long trip. There would be time to settle in. The team was heading for Fresno—forty-five minutes from Visalia, his hometown—and at least there he would get a chance to pitch in front of a lot of family and friends.

  “I was still in a little bit of shock going from the Mets, after being a Met my entire career, to finding myself in Las Vegas,” he said. “But I was happy at least about going home and having everyone get a chance to see me pitch. I had about 150 people coming to the game. I was fairly convinced I would pitch a lot better the second time out.”

  He never got the chance to find out if he was right. Four days after acquiring him, the Blue Jays put him on waivers. The bad news was Schwinden never got to pitch in Fresno. The good news was he was unemployed for only a few hours.

  “Congratulations,” Charles told him on the phone. “You’re now a Cleveland Indian.”

  Or, more accurately, a Columbus Clipper. Schwinden got on another airplane, flew back across the country, and presented himself to manager Mike Sarbaugh in Columbus. The Clippers, it turned out, had some guys on the roster he had played with in the past.

  “I’d pitched on the East Coast and in the International League my whole career,” he said. “It was just a more comfortable feeling to be back in the East—even if I wasn’t out west for very long.”

  His stay in Columbus lasted considerably longer than his stay in Las Vegas: twenty-three days.

  He started three times for the Clippers and wasn’t as god-awful as he had been in Las Vegas, but not nearly as good as he’d been in Buffalo, where he had been pitching to an ERA of 2.70 before the Mets let him go. On June 29, after his third start, the Clippers put him on waivers.

  By now, it had all become ritual for Schwinden. He didn’t even try to go anywhere. He just sat and waited for the phone to ring. It rang: this time he was heading for Rochester to join Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He was a Yankee—not the kind who plays in the Bronx—the kind who was wandering the International League in 2012.

  He packed again, not even certain what town he would be staying in since the Yankees didn’t have a home. Three days later he pitched for SWB and lasted four innings. In five weeks he had pitched seven times for five different teams—Buffalo, the Mets, Las Vegas, Columbus, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre—in four different baseball organizations.

  His outings had ranged from brutal to mediocre—at best. Twenty-four hours after his start for the Yankees, he was on waivers again. That made four organizations that had given up on him in thirty days.

  He was a little bit dizzy and a lot discouraged. Understandably.

  “The whole thing was draining,” he said. “To begin with, just the process each time: you find out you’ve been waived, and you sit there and wonder what you should do next. Get on a plane and go home? Sit in a hotel room and wait to hear if someone’s picked you up?

  “I did a lot of that because my agent kept saying, ‘Sit tight, someone’s going to call.’ He was right—thank goodness—each time, but when you’ve been waived, everyone else kind of moves on without you. I ate a lot of meals alone in a lot of empty food courts and restaurants. It wasn’t for that long a period of time, but it felt like a long period of time.

  “Then you get word you’ve been picked up, and you have to pack and get to an airport and figure out how to get to wherever your new team is at that moment. I’d go out to pitch, and I wanted to make a good impression on my new bosses, so I was probably trying too hard, overthrowing, getting myself into trouble right away. Then, when I did, I started to think, ‘Here we go again,’ and it would snowball. I almost found myself thinking, ‘Am I going to get waived again?’

  “Every time you get waived, it feels lousy. It’s even worse when they take one look at you and say, ‘We don’t want you.’ On the one hand, you tell yourself that it’s good that there are people out there who want you, who think you’re worth a shot. But the negatives during a time like that completely overwhelm any positives you might try to come up with. It was not any fun.”

  The day after he was waived by the Yankees, Schwinden was sitting in another hotel room contemplating yet another meal by himself when he got a text from Bobby Parnell, an old friend from his long-ago (at least it felt that way) Mets days. Sitting in the Mets’ bullpen, Parnell had heard about Schwinden’s latest release and that he might be on his way back—remarkably enough—to the Mets, which would mean a return to Buffalo.

  “Hearing you might be a Met again soon,” the text said.

  Schwinden almost held his breath hoping. It took two more days for the phone to ring again.

  This time it wasn’t Brian Charles. It was John Ricco, the Mets’ farm director. “We’d like to bring you back,” he said. “Do you think you can report to Buffalo right away?”

  By then, Schwinden was actually in Buffalo. He’d driven there from Rochester after the Yankees had released him, since he still had his apartment there and had never had a chance to get back to pick up his things. He had sublet it to Matt den Dekker, a Bisons outfielder, but there was enough room for two.

  “I was ecstatic when I got the call that I was a Bison again,” he said, smiling. “I was going back to a place that was familiar, with guys I knew. I felt like I had been on the longest, strangest road trip in history.”

  He didn’t even mind it when he walked into the Buffalo clubhouse on July 5 and his new/old teammates kept asking him how many SkyMiles he had rolled up in the previous five weeks.

  It had been thirty-seven days since he had pitched for the Mets in Philadelphia and thirty-four days since his first release. He had appeared in “transactions” fourteen times since being sent down by the Mets at the end of spring training.

  Perhaps no one in baseball history has ever been happier than Chris Schwinden to learn he was being sent back to Buffalo. He was home again.

  John Lindsey’s spring hadn’t been nearly as hectic as Schwinden’s, if only because his phone hadn’t been ringing at all since he had signed to play in Mexico.

  Although the Mexican League is generally considered to be on about the same level as Triple-A, Lindsey didn’t find the pitching to be quite as challenging. Very few of the pitchers in the league had been in the majors—unlike Triple-A, where almost every night you faced at least one pitcher with major-league experience.

  “I felt comfortable playing there,” he said. “I could tell right away that the work I had done in the off-season, losing the weight, getting into better shape, had helped me. My dad had been right—my body still had something left to give.”

  Lindsey had been a consistent Triple-A hitter for several years, and he was even better playing for Laguna. By mid-June he was hitting .341 and had hit twenty-one home runs and driven in sixty-four runs. He knew that scouts from major-league teams were in the ballpark most nights, so he remained hopeful he would get a call.

  Finally, on June 21, he did.

  The Tigers wanted to sign him and send him to Toledo. The Mud Hens were struggling and needed an extra bat with some power. In truth, the Tigers were having a tough time getting going at that stage, after being picked in the spring by many experts to reach the World Series. If he played well and Detroit continued to struggle at the plate, who knew?—maybe he would get a chance to build on that one hit he had gotten back in 2010.

  “All I knew was I would be going to a ballpark that was an hour away from the big-league team,” Lindsey said. “I didn’t see any way that could be a bad thing.”

  Within twenty-four hours of being signed by the Tigers, he was in Toledo. He wondered if he would have trouble adapting to the International League. He’d been in the Pacific Coast League in recent years
, where the pitchers tended to throw more breaking pitches than fastballs because of the altitude. It didn’t turn out to be an issue.

  “I’m a fastball hitter anyway,” Lindsey said. “I was very happy to be in a place where they were going to throw me a lot of fastballs.”

  Manager Phil Nevin put him in the lineup right away, often having him hit cleanup. Lindsey was comfortable in the Toledo clubhouse right from the start. “One of the advantages of playing in so many places is that you’re used to going to new places,” he said. “Plus, in the minors there’s so much turnover on teams all the time that there are new guys coming in every day. You learn how to get along with people pretty quickly because if you don’t, you aren’t going to have a very happy life.”

  Just as Schwinden was delighted to find himself in Buffalo, Lindsey was thrilled to be a Mud Hen. He was thirty-five years old, and he was still playing high-level professional baseball.

  “It’s funny, because if you had told me when I first signed that I would play this long, I would have told you no way,” he said. “And if you had told me I would play this long and almost all of it would be in the minor leagues, I’d have laughed at you and said you had no idea what you were talking about.

  “That’s the thing about baseball. No one knows. None of us know what it’s going to be like when we start out, and none of us know how tough it’s going to be when the day comes we have to walk away. We all know it’s coming, but we want to push it back—and push it back for as long as possible.”

  Lindsey knew his day was coming. But he wanted to keep pushing it back for as long as he could and hope he might push it back far enough to get one more shot at making the one-hour trip up I-75 to Detroit.

  15

  Slice of Life

  JAMIE FARR WOULD BE PROUD

  If the Durham Bulls are minor-league baseball’s most famous team, the Toledo Mud Hens must be second.

  Part of it is simply the team’s name. In recent years, minor-league teams have become much more creative with their names than in the past. Nowadays there are teams like the Savannah Sand Gnats, the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the Charleston RiverDogs, and the Augusta GreenJackets.