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

by John Feinstein

  Lindsey had hit a lot of fastballs in the eighteen years he had played professional baseball. He had been drafted in the thirteenth round in 1995 and hadn’t gotten above Class A ball until 2003. In all, he had played in 1,787 minor-league games in fourteen different cities—several for more than one stint—and had 6,347 at-bats. He had hit 268 home runs and had driven in 1,195 runs. All impressive numbers—none of them in the major leagues.

  His major-league career consisted of the one month he had spent with the Dodgers in September 2010.

  Through all the stops and all the letdowns, Lindsey had managed to keep an upbeat outlook on both baseball and life, even though his father’s warning to him when he first signed (that getting to the majors would prove to be harder than it looked) had turned out to be more accurate than either man could have known at the time.

  It took Lindsey seven full seasons even to reach Double-A ball. He had issues with injuries but also struggled at times at the plate when he was healthy. After he had hit .208 in 1999 (and had been forced to have shoulder surgery after hurting himself diving back into a bag on a pickoff play), he wondered if it wasn’t time to look into going to college.

  “I was talking to my uncle about it all one day, and he said, ‘When was the last time you had your eyes checked?’ ” Lindsey said. “I’d had them checked, and I was twenty-twenty. He said it might not be that simple and sent me to a specialist he knew at Mississippi State [Lindsey is from Hattiesburg]. Sure enough, I was twenty-twenty, but I had an astigmatism that was causing me to react just a split second too slowly at the plate. He gave me some lenses to correct it, and I began to see things more quickly.”

  Even then, his progress was slow. He finally made it to Double-A in 2003 after hitting .297 with twenty-two home runs and ninety-three RBIs at high-A San Bernardino a year earlier. He had two solid years at Double-A San Antonio, a Seattle farm team, and signed a free-agent contract with the Cardinals prior to the 2005 season. But the Cardinals released him in spring training, and at the age of twenty-eight Lindsey didn’t have a job.

  By then, Lindsey was convinced his dad had been wrong when he said baseball was a big pond. “Baseball,” he said, “is an ocean.”

  He turned to independent league ball, signing with the New Jersey Jackals of the Canadian-American Association. He played well enough there to be signed by the Marlins, who returned him to high-A ball for the rest of that season. The next spring, again without a contract, he was back in New Jersey.

  His time with the Jackals extended his career and also produced a nickname that stuck with him: “the Mayor.” The Jackals’ radio play-by-play man was Joe Ameruoso, who was old enough to remember that John Lindsay had been mayor of New York City from 1966 through 1973. Lindsay had been reelected in 1969 in large part because of the good feeling in the city generated by the Mets’ miracle run to a World Series title. Lindsay had clung to the Mets for dear life after losing the Republican primary. Running on a third-party ticket, he was reelected three weeks after the Mets won their championship.

  In spite of the different spelling, Ameruoso started calling Lindsey “the Mayor.” The nickname not only stuck, but teammates—who have never heard of New York City’s John Lindsay—use it today.

  With or without holding political office, Lindsey played solidly in 2006, hitting .311, but by the end of the season he had decided to retire and go to college. Major League Baseball has a program that helps players pay for their college education after they retire, but they must be enrolled within two years of having last been on the payroll of a major-league baseball team—whether they are in the majors or the minors. But independent league ball doesn’t count, so Lindsey had until the fall of 2007—two years after he had last been under contract to the Marlins—to enroll.

  “I didn’t want to commit myself to another season of independent league ball, because it would have ended too late for me to enroll before the deadline,” he said. “I was thirty and I was playing independent league. It just seemed like time.”

  He had actually enrolled at Pearl River Community College when he got a surprise call from the Los Angeles Dodgers. Lorenzo Bundy, who had been a minor-league instructor when Lindsey was with the Rockies, and Mike Easler, one of the Dodgers’ minor-league hitting instructors, had recommended trying to sign Lindsey to a minor-league contract. Both men saw him as a solid minor-league hitter who was a good clubhouse influence on younger players.

  Lindsey still didn’t have any children at that point in his life. He decided if Bundy and Easler thought he was worthy of another chance, there must still be something in him that perhaps even he wasn’t seeing. What’s more, he knew if he was under contract to a major-league team in 2007, he could still get his education paid for at the end of the season (or begin a new two-year window of eligibility) if things didn’t pan out.

  So he accepted the invitation to Dodgers camp in the spring of 2007. He was assigned to Double-A out of camp but played well enough to quickly be called up to Las Vegas—where Bundy was managing. Twelve years after signing his first pro contract, he had finally made it to Triple-A. He was bigger by then and stronger and a smarter hitter. In a little more than half a season in Vegas, he hit .333 with nineteen home runs and eighty-eight RBIs. A year later, in a full season, he hit .316 with twenty-six home runs and a hundred RBIs—the best numbers he had ever had at any level in his career.

  He spent the next year in New Orleans, having signed with the Marlins again, but returned to the Dodgers a year later. With the Triple-A team now in Albuquerque, he had his strongest season ever: hitting .353 with twenty-five home runs and ninety-seven RBIs. Even so, there was no sign at all that he was ever going to get the call to the majors. That is, until he was summoned to Tim Wallach’s office in Round Rock, on the penultimate day of the season.

  That moment was different from J. C. Boscan’s in Gwinnett, because no one in the clubhouse had been clued in beforehand. And yet all the elements of The Rookie were there again. No one in history had spent more time in the minor leagues before getting a major-league call-up than Lindsey. The celebration was spontaneous but unrestrained.

  “If you know John Lindsey at all, you know why guys would react that way,” said Phil Nevin. “He’s one of those people who is impossible not to like.”

  Lindsey’s major-league stint was cut short soon after he got his “Carlos Lee” hit, when he was hit on the right hand by a pitch and broke it. He was back in Albuquerque the next year but found himself out of work at the end of the 2011 season. Again, retirement crossed his mind. Again, he began thinking about college. Again, he decided to heed his father’s words. He spent the off-season working out harder than he had in years. He lost thirty pounds and, after his half season in Mexico, had been signed by Toledo in June. “I’ll tell you what,” Nevin said. “The guy can still hit.”

  At thirty-five, Lindsey still didn’t believe he had used it all up. “I’m an accident away,” he said, repeating the minor-league mantra. “It happened once. I still believe it can happen again.”

  Still believing is what keeps everyone in Triple-A coming back—day after day, year after year.

  The day after Lindsey’s home run and the bullpen’s late meltdown, it was a surprisingly comfortable summer Sunday in the Midwest—largely because the humidity was low enough that being in a ballpark wasn’t at all unpleasant.

  Two hours before the Toledo Mud Hens were scheduled to host the Louisville Bats, a middle-aged man stood on top of the Mud Hens’ dugout wearing a white straw hat with a Greg Norman shark logo on it, a yellow shirt, blue shorts, and flip-flops. He was giving his testimony—at length—and about three hundred people sat in the sun and drank in every word.

  “I was born again on November 6, 1983,” Frank Tanana was saying. “That was the day I gave my life and my soul to Jesus Christ.”

  Tanana was thirty years old when he was born again both as a Christian and as a pitcher. He had made it to the major leagues as a twenty-year-old flamethrower wit
h the California Angels and had eighty-four wins by the time he was twenty-five years old. In those days there weren’t pitch counts or inning counts or young pitchers being shut down at 160 innings to protect their arms. You just went out and threw until your arm fell off—which, in many cases, it did, at least as far as throwing ninety-five-plus miles an hour was concerned.

  In his first full season in the majors, 1974, Tanana pitched more than 268 innings. He turned twenty-one in July of that year. A year later it was 257 innings, and the year after that, when he was 19-10, it was 288 innings. These days, for a young pitcher to pitch 288 innings in two seasons is considered a tad risky.

  In 1979, Tanana hurt his throwing shoulder and missed almost half the season. He never threw as hard again and had to learn how to pitch all over again. Instead of getting hitters out with power, he learned to get them out with finesse. Pitching with a fastball that rarely got into the high eighties, he had a second career in Texas and Detroit—his hometown—that kept him in baseball until 1993, when he retired with 240 career victories.

  The line used most often to describe Tanana’s career was “he threw in the nineties in the ’70s and in the seventies in the ’90s.” It was very close to being true. Because he pitched for so long, he had the unusual distinction of being one of two pitchers (Rick Reuschel was the other) to have given up home runs to both Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds.

  Now, at fifty-nine, Tanana lived back home in Michigan and was part of something called the Pro Athletes Outreach group. That meant he spent quite a few Sundays in ballparks like Fifth Third giving his testimony. Sitting among the fans as Tanana talked were a handful of the Mud Hens, in uniform. They all knew who Tanana was, even if he hardly looked like someone who had once overpowered major-league hitters.

  As Tanana spoke, the dichotomies of minor-league baseball were evident all around him. Down the left-field line, the Bats players stretched, going through their Sunday pregame routine. Sunday is never a day of rest in baseball, but it is often a day with no batting practice, which means players can report to the ballpark later than normal. On the scoreboard behind Tanana, various future promotions were repeatedly flashed, including—most notably—Jamie Farr bobblehead night, which was twelve days away.

  All in a day’s work in the minor leagues.

  As Tanana was winding up his forty-five-minute talk, another ex-pitcher was drawing a small crowd himself: out on the concourse, Denny McLain was signing copies of his autobiography, I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect.

  That might have been one of the most understated book titles in history. McLain was baseball’s last thirty-game winner, having gone 31-6 for the Detroit Tigers in 1968 with an ERA of 1.96. A year later he won twenty-four games. After that, his life pretty much crashed.

  In 1970, he was suspended twice by baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn—the first time after revelations that he had been involved in a bookmaking operation, the second time for carrying a gun onto a Tigers team plane. Later that year, he filed for bankruptcy, apparently having lost most of his money gambling. He was traded to the Washington Senators—a deal that, for all intents and purposes, destroyed baseball in Washington. He spent the entire season fighting with Washington manager Ted Williams while going 10-22. He also hurt his arm during the season, which ended with the Senators leaving Washington to become the Texas Rangers.

  He bounced from Washington to Oakland to Atlanta and last pitched in the majors in September 1972 at the age of twenty-eight. He had been so good at a young age that he had 131 career victories—114 of them by the age of twenty-five. His post-baseball life had been filled with arrests, drug issues, and several stints in jail, most notably when he spent six years there after being convicted on charges of embezzlement, mail fraud, and conspiracy. His weight had ballooned to a reported 330 pounds, and while he didn’t look quite that heavy anymore, he still had to weigh close to 300. His 1968 baseball card listed him as six feet one and 185 pounds.

  Now he was sixty-eight and still able to make some money through various media outlets in Detroit and by trying to sell his book. Fifth Third Field was a fairly typical McLain stop. He signed books for a while and then appeared on the Mud Hens’ TV pregame show, which was on local cable television.

  While Tanana was testifying and McLain was signing and fans were making plans for Farr bobblehead night, the team was currently preparing for Toledo Fire Department Night. All in a day’s work in the minor leagues.

  This was a fairly complicated operation since it involved fire trucks and firefighters; one firefighter rappelling down a rope behind the right-field fence and then jogging the game ball into the pitcher’s mound; several mascots and the two teams—who were expected to be on the field when the festivities climaxed with the singing of the national anthem.

  Shortly before six o’clock, the fire trucks came rolling down the third-base line. One carried the mascot for the Toledo Fire Department. Another carried Muddy and Muddonna. Trailing them was yet another mascot called BirdZerk!, who appeared at various minor-league parks as part of the entertainment. Firefighters were everywhere. The players appeared, poking their heads gingerly from the dugouts. The firefighter rappelled; the ball was delivered to starting pitcher Casey Crosby; and, with just about every inch of the field covered by people and trucks and mascots, the anthem was played.

  Finally, it was time to play baseball.

  As the Mud Hens’ PR staff settled back to announce the game-time temperature and slip into the routine of a baseball game, their walkie-talkies crackled. It was the marketing assistant who had been in charge of the on-field activities.

  “What in the world,” she asked, “am I supposed to do with all these fire trucks and mascots?”

  17

  Brett Tomko

  MORE THAN NINE LIVES

  Brett Tomko was on the field with the rest of the Bats during the pregame tribute to firefighters, mascots, and rappellers. To him, this was just another day at the ballpark. At thirty-nine, he had pretty much seen it all.

  He was in his eighteenth season as a professional baseball player and had pitched in twenty-five different cities—ten in the major leagues; fifteen in the minors. That didn’t count two stints in the Arizona Fall League. He was scheduled to pitch the following day for Louisville, and he knew there was a possibility it could be his last start. Even though he had a respectable ERA of 3.43, his record was 0-6, and he knew that the Cincinnati Reds, the Bats’ parent club, might be thinking about giving him his release. He didn’t believe the way he had pitched merited that kind of treatment, but he also knew that stranger things had happened in baseball.

  “I’ve been done [finished] in this game so many times I don’t worry about it anymore,” he said, sitting in the dugout, wearing the kind of bright smile that isn’t seen that often in Triple-A—especially from someone who has won a hundred games in the major leagues. “I’m way past sitting around being bitter—maybe because I’ve been able to play for a lot longer than I ever thought I would play.”

  He smiled. “Last year, when I was pitching in Round Rock, we went to Omaha on a road trip. I was scheduled to pitch against Jeff Suppan. Now, think about it, we’ve both been around forever and had a lot of time in the major leagues. But here we are in Omaha getting ready to pitch against each other. The night before we pitched, we were talking and he said to me, ‘BT, I may never get back up and you may never get back up. For now, right here in Omaha tomorrow, we’re pitching the seventh game of the World Series. That’s the only way to look at it. Otherwise, why be here?’

  “That was a good punch in the gut for me. He was right. We were both in Omaha because we wanted to be.”

  Suppan has won 140 major-league games and in 2006 was voted the MVP of the National League Championship Series while pitching for the Cardinals—who went on to win the World Series. And both men did make it back to the majors after their talk in Omaha—Tomko later in the 2011 season, Suppan in 2012.

  As much as he loves baseball, Tomko didn’t
set out necessarily to become a baseball player. Growing up in Euclid, Ohio, he actually thought his best sport in high school might be basketball … until he encountered someone named Tess Whitlock one night. “I had scored fifty-five the game before,” Tomko said. “They put him on me and said, ‘Stop him.’ He did—completely. Late in the game he had the ball on the break, and I got back to try to stop him. He just jumped right over me and dunked. At that moment I thought, ‘Maybe I should start taking baseball more seriously.’ ”

  His dad, Jerry, was the sports fan in the family. In fact, Jerry Tomko was responsible for naming Cleveland’s NBA team, the Cavaliers. In 1970, when Cleveland was granted an expansion team, the Cleveland Plain Dealer staged a contest to name the team. There were eleven thousand entries, and readers voted to select one of the five finalists. Cavaliers won.

  “My dad got an autographed basketball and a one-year season ticket,” Tomko said. “That was it. And that season they won fifteen games and lost sixty-seven.”

  His mom was more artistic. In fact, she insisted that Brett take an art class as a teenager, and he got hooked. To this day, he brings drawing materials with him on the road and almost always spends some time working in his hotel room before bed. “Great stress reliever,” he said.

  He also has talent and has sold a couple dozen pieces through the years. It’s something he wants to spend more time on when he’s at home more often—after baseball is over.

  “If you’ve spent any time in the majors, there’s no point lying to yourself about where you are,” he said. “The postgame spread in a Triple-A clubhouse might be the same food as in a major-league clubhouse, but it doesn’t taste the same. In the majors you stay at the Ritz or the Four Seasons. Here …” He paused and pointed at the Park Inn, looming over the left-field wall at Fifth Third Field. “You stay at the Park Inn, and it’s just fine. You have a roommate, and that’s just fine too.