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

by John Feinstein

  “But there are moments when it hits you. Earlier this season we were up against some pitcher I’d never heard of, and we couldn’t touch him. Willie Harris [another veteran major leaguer] says to me in the dugout, ‘That dude is nasty, really nasty.’ I said, ‘Dude, he’s pitching in Triple-A. If he was that nasty, he wouldn’t be here.’ ”

  For most of his career, Tomko was one of those pitchers described as an “innings eater.” He rarely dominated or overpowered anyone. In 266 major-league starts he had thirteen complete games and two shutouts, the second one coming in the game in which he badly hurt his shoulder in 2009. But he consistently got his team into the sixth or seventh inning with a chance to win, which kept him around for a long time with a lot of different teams.

  “The not-so-funny thing, looking back, is I was pitching about as well as I’ve ever pitched when I got hurt,” he said. “Not just that day, but the whole time I was in Oakland that summer—which was only six starts. It was such a strange feeling that day. There I was throwing as well as I ever had, and I threw a 3-2 fastball to Chris Davis and felt something pop near my shoulder bicep. I remember thinking, ‘Please don’t be something serious.’

  “I tried to throw another fastball, and I think it got halfway to the plate. I called Kurt Suzuki, who was catching, out and said, ‘Just call curveballs.’ Somehow, I got three outs. I think I threw ten straight curveballs. When everyone came out to the mound to celebrate, all I could think was, ‘Is this it? Am I done?’ ”

  The A’s were celebrating the hundredth win of Tomko’s career. A major milestone. But Tomko was in no mood to sit back and enjoy what he had accomplished.

  He went back to the hotel and had a drink with Nomar Garciaparra, who was in town broadcasting the game for ESPN. “I was holding the drink in my hand, and suddenly it felt very heavy,” he said. “I had to put it down.

  “I went to bed hoping it would feel better after ice and with some rest. I woke up about five in the morning screaming in pain. I sat up in bed with my arm up against my chest and waited as long as I could before I called the trainer. I was crying by then I was in so much pain.”

  He had fractured the biceps muscle in his shoulder. The doctor in Texas gave him painkillers so he could fly home to witness the birth of his twin sons, who were due to be born on September 18—four days after he was injured. “By the time they were born, I couldn’t move my arm,” he said.

  He had surgery soon after that and then had to decide if he wanted to put himself through the rehab process to try to pitch again. “Part of me was thinking this was the time to stop,” he said. “I’d just become a father. I had made pretty good money. But every time I was ready to make up my mind and retire, I’d think about that day in Texas and the memory wasn’t happy, it was bleak. There was this black cloud because of the injury and the pain.

  “My wife and I talked about it, and she said, ‘You have to see this through until you know it’s time to stop.’ ”

  He had not yet reached that moment. Every time he thought it might be time to go home, he thought about something he had read years earlier. “You’re an ex-ballplayer for a lot more years than you’re a ballplayer,” he said, smiling. “So I stuck with it and here I am.”

  In spite of his god-awful (7.52) ERA during his stint the following year at Stockton, early in 2010, the A’s moved him up to Triple-A Sacramento, where he pitched marginally better, but not well enough to merit a new contract at the end of the 2010 season. “My ERA in Sacramento wasn’t a lot better than in Stockton, but I can honestly say it was deceiving,” he said. “The first time I pitched there I didn’t get anybody out. I got blasted. But after that I actually did get a little better.”

  But not well enough to get another contract in Oakland. The Rangers were willing to give him a chance, though, and he decided to take one last shot—hoping that some rest and a little more arm strength might make a difference.

  He pitched better at Round Rock at the start of 2011 and was called to the majors as a relief pitcher—something he hadn’t done much in his career. He wasn’t complaining.

  “Just to get back to the majors after all that had gone on was thrilling,” he said. “That’s why I lost it that first game back when I got through that inning. I remember thinking, ‘At least now I can tell the boys they saw me pitch in the majors.’ We took pictures that day of them on the field with me before the game. I’m not sure I ever enjoyed a day in my baseball career more.”

  He lasted forty-three days in Texas, a number he remembers because his contract said if he was in the majors for forty-five days, he was guaranteed major-league pay regardless of where he was pitching for the rest of the season. He went back to Round Rock, finished the season, and then signed one more contract, this one with the Reds—the team he had started with eighteen years earlier—for 2012. Which was what landed him in Toledo in a Bats uniform in late July.

  Being in uniform—ready to make a start—was no small thing at that point in the season. Tomko had pitched well for the Bats for two months. His ERA on May 30 was 3.15 when he went out to pitch against Syracuse—even though he hadn’t yet won a game. Early in the game his spikes caught on the rubber just a tad, and he felt a tug inside his shoulder.

  “It wasn’t anything like that day in Texas when I knew I’d done something serious,” he said. “But I knew it wasn’t good. At thirty-nine, no pain is a good idea. Anything else is trouble.”

  It turned out Tomko had strained his shoulder and the biceps muscle. He ended up missing almost two months before coming back to pitch again for the Bats on July 25. The shoulder, he insisted, felt fine. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “It feels good enough. That’s all I can ask for at this point.”

  Every time he took the ball to start, Tomko felt as if he had beaten the odds—for at least one more day.

  “To say I don’t think about the end at this point would be lying,” he said. “I’ve probably thought about it almost every day since I hurt my shoulder back in ’09 because it was staring me right in the face. I’ll be forty in April. Knowing I’m going to stop playing baseball soon and that I’m going to be forty does make you think about things like your mortality. You can’t help it. I mean, my manager [David Bell] and I were teammates once upon a time [in Seattle] and he’s six months older than I am.”

  He sat back and folded his arms. “When I was in rehab, there was a sixteen-year-old kid from the Dominican who had just signed, I can’t remember his name, but he was rehabbing too. I looked at him and thought, ‘Oh my God, this kid wasn’t born when I signed my first contract.’ That was a dose of reality.”

  Tomko was quiet for a moment, staring at several teammates playing catch in front of the dugout. “As difficult as the shoulder injury was, I think it did make me appreciate how lucky I’ve been to do this for so long. When I was rehabbing, if I was riding a bike or something and a baseball game came on, I couldn’t watch, I’d go turn it off. It occurred to me in very real terms that the game goes on just fine without all of us. Not just guys like me, everyone who has ever played—Ruth, Cobb, Mays, Aaron—the game went on.

  “We all get a little window to play and be part of it. Not many people get that chance. I’m almost forty, and I still get paid to play the game I loved to play as a kid. Whenever I walk away now, I’ll have no regrets.”

  He stood up to go back to the clubhouse to get ready for the game. There were perhaps half a dozen fans standing at the corner of the dugout looking for autographs. Tomko stopped and signed. When one of them asked if he could get a picture taken with him, Tomko said absolutely.

  He walked out of the dugout and leaned into the seats so he could get close to the fan. The smile on his face as the photograph was snapped was completely genuine.

  18

  Mark Lollo

  TRAVELING THE UMPIRING ROAD

  Brett Tomko wasn’t the only one feeling a bit insecure about his future in July. Mark Lollo was also wondering about his future. And he was starting t
o get nervous.

  He had worked two major-league games in June but hadn’t gotten a call since then. As one of eighteen Triple-A umpires on the major-league call-up list, he was keenly aware of which guys were getting major-league games and which ones were not.

  Lollo was one of the “were-nots.” Which he knew wasn’t a good sign.

  “One thing that was making me nervous was that I was working with a third different supervisor in four years,” he said. “You never know how you’re going to get along with a new boss. More important, you don’t have a feel for how they feel about your work.”

  The new boss was Cris Jones, a longtime Triple-A umpire who was thought of as a hard-ass by the umpires working for him. “I’d say no-nonsense,” Lollo said. “Which I didn’t really mind.”

  Umpires are like players in that they travel a long way to get to the cusp of the big-league life. Lollo had been a football player and a baseball player as a kid growing up in Coshocton, a small town in east-central Ohio. He was better at football than baseball, but he loved baseball.

  “Problem was I couldn’t hit,” he said. “Most games I spent a lot of time hitting ground balls. One day I changed my stance and got three hits, but that was the highlight.”

  He was recruited by his dad’s alma mater, Otterbein, to play quarterback and linebacker. By then, he was also working as an umpire, working three or four Little League or youth-league games a day and making $70 to $80 a day at it. He enjoyed it and took it seriously. “I even went out and bought my own equipment,” he said. “I wanted to be good.”

  There was an umpire working in Triple-A at the time named Scott Nelson, who was from Coshocton. Knowing of Lollo’s interest in umpiring, he invited him to drive with him to a game in Columbus one night. Lollo liked the whole atmosphere surrounding the umpires, from the room where they got ready to the game itself to their little postgame meal.

  By the time he was ready to graduate from high school, he had three choices on what to do next: go to Otterbein; go to umpiring school; or join the marines. The marines were eliminated because he didn’t especially like the recruiter. He decided to give umpiring a shot and signed up for the umpiring school in Florida run by the former major-league umpire Jim Evans.

  At the end of the school, 25 umpires out of about 150 students were selected for membership in the Professional Baseball Umpire Corporation. The other major umpiring school, run by another former major leaguer, Harry Wendelstedt, also had 25 umpires selected. That meant 50 new umpires who started to receive minor-league assignments. Lollo didn’t make the cut.

  “They told me I was on the reserve list,” he said. “They encouraged me to get some more experience and come back in a year. It was hard. I’d never failed at anything before.” He smiled. “Except hitting a baseball. I went home to decide what to do.”

  He was working a local college game when his mother showed up one afternoon with a letter inviting him to umpire in the Northwoods League, a high-level collegiate summer league which had a total of eight teams that were located in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Apparently, the Evans people had recommended him to Dick Radatz Jr., the league president.

  Lollo took the job and spent the first few weeks of the season being miserable. “To begin with, I wasn’t very good,” he said. “I can remember calling breaking pitches a strike just before they bounced on home plate. Plus, I didn’t like my partner very much and we were traveling together. I was so discouraged I was ready to quit and go home. Dick Radatz asked me to hang on until the All-Star break, and I said okay.

  “I called my parents to tell them what I was doing, and my dad said, ‘I’ll get you a car to drive the rest of the season so you don’t have to travel with the other ump. But you don’t quit.’ He didn’t believe in quitting.”

  Thanks to the car and his father, Lollo stuck with it. By the end of the season he had come a long way. “No more breaking pitches called strikes that hit the plate,” he said, smiling. “Dick Radatz told me at the end of the year that one of the reasons the league existed was to train guys like me.”

  He smiled. “The only problem was my diet. We had meal cards [from the league] for KFC and Country Kitchen. It was a lot of that and a lot of ballpark food all year. That wasn’t especially good for my weight, although the price was right.”

  A year later, Lollo went back to umpiring school. This time he made the cut. He was assigned in June 2002 to the Gulf Coast League.

  From there, just like a player, he began working his way through the minors. Of course, in umpiring, there are no phenoms. You move up one step at a time, and sometimes you take baby steps. In 2006, while he was working in the Carolina League, the minor-league umpires went on strike for more money. Some of the umpires were willing to cross the picket line to work. Lollo wasn’t one of them.

  “My grandfather was a plant manager at General Motors,” he said. “I remember when I was a kid he told me to never cross a picket line.”

  The strike ended in June, and Lollo’s pay increased by $100 a month and $1 a day in per diem.

  Soon after that he was promoted to the Texas League (Double-A), and after filling in on Pacific Coast League games in 2008, he made the jump full-time to Triple-A when he was assigned to the International League in 2009. At that point his chances of working in the major leagues had gone from 1 percent (when he graduated from the Evans school) to 33 percent. It had taken him seven years to get that far.

  Two years later, in 2011, he was assigned to work major-league spring training—a very encouraging sign and a financial boon. Triple-A umpires make $3,200 a month and are guaranteed five months of work. If they make the playoffs, they make extra, but typically they are paid between $16,000 and $18,000 a year.

  Working spring training basically doubles a Triple-A umpire’s pay because umpires are paid $420 a day in per diem (the major-league rate) for thirty days plus $175 for every game they work. Most work between twenty-two and twenty-eight games. “I made almost as much in March the last two years as I made during the season,” Lollo said. “That was a big help in justifying what I was doing to my wife. With two young kids [three years old and less than one during 2012] the travel is very tough on her.”

  The minimum pay for a big-league umpire is $90,000 per year. Like the players, umpires are paid on a prorated daily basis when they sub in the majors. They also fly first-class between cities. Lollo, like most minor-league umpires, was used to driving first-class between cities.

  Lollo got his first call-up to the majors in 2011, working six games, including a game behind home plate. All the feedback was encouraging, and he was asked again to work both the Arizona Fall League and major-league spring training.

  “Which is why, I guess, I thought I’d get more games in 2012, not less,” he said. “No one ever indicated to me, based on my work in the majors in ’11 or on anything else, that I wasn’t still on the fast track—or at least a good track. Then again, maybe it was just opportunity. I knew I wasn’t in the top five [on the call-up list], but I figured I was doing okay. I tried to tell myself that I was jumping at shadows.”

  Eleven years after his summer of KFC and Country Kitchen, weight—and avoiding fast food on the road—were still issues for him.

  “It’s a very competitive situation, especially when you get that close to the majors,” he said. “I’ve always been a big guy.” He smiled. “When you’re my size, you can either be big boned or fat. I needed to make sure I wasn’t seen as the latter. When they look at a guy’s potential as a major leaguer, they aren’t just looking at how you call balls and strikes. They look at your demeanor, how you handle tough situations, or how you handle missing a call—because we all miss them. They also project out and say, ‘What is this guy going to look like ten years from now? Fifteen?’ I knew that was a potential issue.”

  Lollo was a stocky five feet ten inches and had weighed as much as 250 pounds. After he first made the call-up list in 2011, he had worked very hard and gotten his weight down to 2
15. During most of 2012, he weighed about 230. “I still think I move well and get to where I need to get,” he said. “But I know I always have to be aware of it.”

  During his six-game major-league stint in 2011, Lollo made $3,000 plus the major-league per diem. He even got a plane flight out of it. But then it was back to his car and to the back roads, hoping his phone would ring. Major-league umpires get four weeks off for vacation during the season. Minor-league umpires get zero weeks during the season for vacation. An umpire in Lollo’s position, on the call-up list, waits for the phone to ring to be told he’s going to the majors to replace someone for a few days or, he hopes, perhaps a week or so.

  A year later, by late June 2012, Lollo hadn’t gotten a call. He was getting antsy. Finally, on June 23, while he was in Indianapolis preparing for game two of a series between the Indians and the Rochester Red Wings, Lollo got the call: the Reds were hosting the Minnesota Twins, and veteran umpire Jerry Layne had gotten hit in the nose by a broken bat and had a broken nose. Lollo was only 112 miles away—could he get to the ballpark for the game that night?

  “If they needed me to walk to get there, I’d have been there,” Lollo said, grinning.

  Walking into a major-league ballpark to work again was a thrill for Lollo, just as it had been a year earlier, when he had made his major-league debut in Washington. Beyond that, it was a relief. Lollo was keenly aware of which umpires also on the call-up list were actually getting called up, and he was beginning to wonder when his turn would come. Once it came, he relaxed a little bit.

  “It’s my second year on the list, and generally speaking, it isn’t until the third year that you begin to wonder if you aren’t moving forward enough,” he said. “None of us actually knows where we are on the list, but we can make some kind of educated guess based on how often we’re going up. I knew I wasn’t at the top of the list, but at least when the call came to go to Cincinnati, I figured I was still in the mix and, I hoped, moving up based on my work.”