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

by John Feinstein

  Lollo worked two games in Cincinnati. He was at third base the first night and second base the next afternoon. He actually flew to Minnesota to begin a series there the next night but got a call saying he wasn’t needed and should head back to Triple-A.

  “You know that call is coming sooner or later,” he said. “You just hope it will be later. It felt good, though, to be back in the majors. I didn’t have a lot of calls, but felt like I handled the ones I had well.” Lollo had a lot of confidence in his work behind the plate and in his demeanor. “I feel like I handle myself pretty well now when a manager gets hot,” he said. “I get along well with most of the guys in the league, and I feel as if they respect me. Occasionally, you know someone is coming out to make some kind of point—to you or to his players. You can tell that they want to get run. When I sense that, I just say, ‘Do you want to go? Because if you do, just tell me and we’ll get it over with.’

  “But if someone just thinks I missed one or he’s trying to let his players know he’s got their back, I’m not going to let that get to me. With the players, I try to give them some space too. They’re trying just as hard to get to the big leagues as I am. Most of them are good guys. They know we’re all trying really hard and not getting paid a lot of money to work in a place we would love to be leaving soon.

  “Every once in a while you see a guy who is completely bitter about being in the minors. Usually, it’s a guy who has been in the majors—and thinks he has a right to be there.”

  He smiled. “Last season [2011] I had Brendan Harris in a game when he was in Norfolk. He was being paid $1.7 million for the year and was back in Triple-A. I called him out looking, and he got back to the dugout and was screaming at everyone in sight. He went through about twelve batting helmets while I was standing there, just flinging them everywhere.

  “Finally, I just looked at him and said, ‘Hey, Brendan, why don’t you just keep your head up.’ What I wanted to say is, ‘You’re making $1.7 million and I’m working for about 100 bucks a day—grow up.’ ”

  He paused.

  “There are two ways to look at where I am in my career,” he said. “One way is to say that I’m not where I want to be. I want to walk into those major-league parks every day. It isn’t so much the money or the lifestyle—although both would be very nice—but the feeling that you’ve beaten the odds and become one of the best at what you do.

  “This has been my life’s work. It’s all I’ve ever done since I got out of high school, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to. My goal has always been to be a big-league umpire, and although I’ve tasted it, I haven’t achieved that. On the other hand, when I started out eleven years ago, there were a lot of guys who had the same dream who haven’t come nearly as far as I have.

  “Late at night, when I’m in the car, that’s what keeps me going. As long as I’m still moving forward, I still have a chance. That puts me in a lot better place than most guys I started out with.

  “There’s one last hurdle. It’s right there in front of me. All I need is the chance to jump over it.”

  Clearly, Randy Mobley, the president of the International League, was in his corner. Lollo was selected to work the plate for the Triple-A All-Star game between the International League All-Stars and the Pacific Coast League All-Stars. He was pretty certain he would be a crew chief once the playoffs began. Mobley had even made a point of telling his father one night at a game, “Mark is exactly the kind of person and umpire we like to see succeed.”

  All well and good. But even though the major-league supervisors might accept input from Mobley, they would be the ones who would ultimately decide Lollo’s professional fate.

  He knew that. Which was why as the days in the season dwindled and he continued to work in Triple-A one night after another without another major-league call-up, he wondered exactly where he stood.

  Finally, while he was talking to Mobley on the phone one afternoon late in August about how to deal with potential hurricane conditions in Gwinnett that evening, Mobley asked him straight out, “Do you want me to see what I can find out?”

  Lollo wasn’t sure if he did. Then again, he needed to know. “Why don’t you,” he said.

  “I’ll get back to you,” Mobley said.

  It wasn’t Mobley who called back. It was Lollo’s supervisor, Cris Jones.

  Mobley steeled himself when he heard Jones on the phone. He had wanted to know where he stood. He suspected he was about to find out.

  19

  Slice of Life

  MANAGING THE HIGHS AND LOWS

  Almost without fail, the first person in any clubhouse on a given day—other than trainers and equipment people—is the manager. Occasionally, a coach might arrive first, but 90 percent of the time it is the manager.

  “I like the quiet,” David Bell was saying on a Sunday morning about six hours before game time. “I like to kind of review what happened the day before, see what’s going on with the major-league club, work on a lineup, and decide if there’s anyone specific I want to talk to when the players get to the ballpark.”

  If there is anyone in the world who should be comfortable inside a baseball clubhouse, it is Bell. In a very real sense he was born to the game. His grandfather Gus played in the major leagues for fifteen years and was a four-time All-Star. His dad, Buddy, played eighteen seasons in the majors, and his career numbers merit at least some Hall of Fame consideration: 2,514 hits; six Gold Gloves as a third baseman; one Silver Slugger as best hitter at his position; five All-Star game appearances. If his batting average—.279—had been a little bit higher, he would have received serious consideration.

  David and his brother Mike both played in the majors too—making the Bells the fifth family to have three generations reach the majors. Mike’s major-league career was brief—half a season in Cincinnati. David’s didn’t quite measure up to his father’s or grandfather’s but was very solid: twelve years with six teams, a .257 career average with 123 home runs and 589 RBIs.

  “My grandfather was a very good player, and my dad was a great player,” he said. “I just wasn’t in their class.”

  At five feet ten inches and 170 pounds, he was never blessed with his father’s (six one, 180) or his brother’s (six two, 195) size, but he was one of those players who kept making themselves better.

  After graduating from Moeller High School in Cincinnati (a school much better known for football than for baseball), he was drafted in the seventh round by the Cleveland Indians. His first instinct was to follow through on his plan to attend the University of Kentucky, but when the Indians offered a $50,000 signing bonus, he decided to make the leap.

  “The funny thing is a lot of kids who make that decision because they think it’s a quicker route to the big leagues regret it, because they find life in the minors to be so tough,” he said. “Because I’d been around baseball clubhouses my whole life, including the smaller ones in spring training, it never bothered me at all. I got sent to the Gulf Coast League and felt right at home from day one.

  “Of course my problem was simple: I didn’t have great talent or size.”

  Perhaps not, but a twelve-year big-league career is nothing to thumb one’s nose at by any means. Most of Bell’s players in Louisville would have killed to have their manager’s career. What’s more, he had scored the winning run in the deciding game of the 2002 National League Championship Series for the San Francisco Giants and was also involved the following week in one of the more bizarre plays in World Series history.

  The Giants were playing the Anaheim Angels, and Bell was on first base, J. T. Snow on second base, in the sixth inning of game five. Kenny Lofton tripled in the gap. As Snow and Bell flew around the bases, Dusty Baker’s three-year-old son, Darren, who was in uniform and serving as a batboy/mascot for the Giants, wandered out toward home plate to pick up Lofton’s bat.

  At the last possible second, Snow saw the little boy and, as he crossed home plate, scooped him up in his arms to avoid running into him.
Bell, not far behind Snow, was more than relieved when he saw that Snow had gotten Darren out of the way because he was concerned there might be a play on him at the plate with Darren somehow in the middle of it.

  “All was well that ended well,” Bell said, years later. “But it was a good idea for baseball to pass the rule that you had to be fourteen to be in uniform after that happened. I’m not so sure I would have been as quick thinking as JT was in that situation. Plus, I tended to run with my head down, so I shudder when I think about what could have happened if JT hadn’t gotten him out of there.”

  Bell played until 2006. The desire to play was still there, but his body wouldn’t let him. He’d had back problems and had surgery on one knee and one hip. “Mentally I wasn’t burned out, but physically I was,” he said. “Some guys can lose a step, and because they’re so talented, they can still play effectively. I didn’t have that margin for error. When my body started breaking down, it became harder and harder for me to compete.”

  Bell had just turned thirty-four when he retired. He didn’t want to try to hang on, perhaps find himself back in Triple-A because he wasn’t quite the player he had been. He had become a father for the first time earlier that year. Being home felt like a good idea. After two years, not surprisingly, he decided to get back into baseball.

  “I’m an expert at one thing,” he said. “Baseball. I honestly believed I had something to contribute, that I could help players get better. I knew a lot of people in the game—obviously including my dad [who was managing in Kansas City at the time and is now a Chicago White Sox vice president]—but I didn’t want to do it that way. I made six phone calls—the sixth one was to Billy Doran, who I’d known for years. He was working for the Reds, and he said they had a job open managing at Double-A in Carolina. That was the good news. The bad news was I had to make a decision by the next day because they were about to start interviewing guys.”

  Because of his father, Bell grew up around ballparks. He can remember sitting in the dugout (à la Darren Baker) when he was a kid and how much he and Mike looked forward to going to games with their dad.

  “The best thing my dad did for us was to never make us feel any pressure to succeed in baseball,” he said. “That’s a tough thing when your dad has been playing in the majors your whole life. He got to the majors the year I was born. He retired one year before I was drafted. So when I say he was in the majors my entire childhood, I’m not exaggerating.

  “But he never coached us in baseball. He coached us in basketball and we loved it. He didn’t want us to feel like he was looking over our shoulder when we played baseball. I think that’s why Mike and I both grew up loving the game.”

  And wanting to stay in it. Today, Mike is the Arizona Diamondbacks’ farm director. It made sense for David to return to the one thing in which he was, in fact, an expert. He spent three years in Carolina before being promoted to Louisville prior to the 2012 season. Even though the team’s record was awful, Bell was enjoying most of what he was doing.

  Like most minor-league managers, the thing he enjoyed most was telling players they’d been promoted to the majors. The first time he’d had a chance to do that had been in his second season at Carolina when his closer, Jordan Smith, was jumped straight from Double-A to the majors because he had been performing so well and the Reds needed relief help.

  “I got the call in the morning, and they wanted him to get on a plane and get to Cincy right away,” Bell said. “They wanted him available that night. The thing to do, of course, was to pick up the phone and call him so he could pack and get going. But I knew he had a little time to make his plane, so I called him and asked him to meet me in a shopping center near where he lived. I told him I was going to buy him lunch—or something like that. I just wanted to see his face when I told him.

  “He got out of his car and I said, ‘Jordan, I have to tell you something.’ For a split second I think he was nervous, but he was pitching too well for that. I’m sure he thought I was going to tell him he was going [up] to Louisville. When I told him he was going to Cincinnati and he had a plane to catch, I could see him processing it in his mind for a minute and then he broke into this huge smile. The first thing he said was, ‘I gotta go call my dad.’

  “It’s funny, because the first time I got called up [in 1995] I think those were my exact words.” He smiled. “It’s interesting to me, being the son of a player who was also the son of a player, the number of guys whose relationships with their father were about baseball in a lot of ways. I guess it’s the oldest cliché in the book, but there is something to the idea of fathers and sons playing catch in the backyard. I know I remember the first time I did it with my dad. Obviously, I’m not alone in that.”

  On Bell’s list of things to do on this particular Sunday morning was to talk to Denis Phipps. It had been Phipps who had started the five-run ninth-inning rally the night before by lining a single to center field with the Bats trailing Toledo 4–3 and two outs from another loss. When he stepped to the plate in that ninth inning, Phipps was hitting .200 and was already 0 for 4 on the night.

  “What I want to do is remind him that winning players find a way to make something good happen, even when they’re struggling,” Bell said. “He’s had a tough year and I know there have been moments when he’s been discouraged, but he’s never hung his head. Last night, he came up to the plate in the ninth not thinking about being 0-fer, but about finding a way to get something started for his team. And that’s what he did.”

  Phipps was twenty-seven and had grown up, like so many good players, in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. The town of just under 200,000 people had produced more than seventy major leaguers—among them Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, and Robinson Cano—and so many shortstops had come from there that it had been dubbed “the cradle of shortstops.”

  Phipps was an outfielder in his seventh minor-league season and had never spent a moment in the major leagues. Bell believed he had the talent to play in the majors.

  “One thing I know, because I never had overwhelming skills, is that the difference between most major leaguers and guys at this level isn’t physical; it’s mental or emotional. Every guy in our clubhouse has the physical ability to play at the major-league level.

  “But some don’t have the confidence; some don’t have the attitude or the work ethic. I tell the guys all the time that most major leaguers have two hot streaks a year at the plate, maybe three in a good year. That’s the time when they feel like they’re going to get a hit every time they come up.

  “Most of the year isn’t like that. Most of the year is about grinding. It’s about being 0 for 4 and finding a way to get a hit in that fifth at-bat. It’s about taking an extra base when you can to help the team or moving a runner or making a play on defense. The guys who make it are the guys who do that, because managers notice that, coaches notice that, personnel guys notice that. You can be in the worst slump of your life, and there’s still a way to help the team. The guys who grind through those periods and find a way to contribute are the guys who ultimately make it. If you compete when it’s hard to compete, when lying down would be easy, that’s when you become a real baseball player.

  “Denis could have lain down last night. We did nothing for seven innings, and we’re two outs from losing. But he had a good at-bat against a good pitcher [Chris Bootcheck] and started what turned out to be the game-winning rally. That’s what a winning player does.”

  Bell spent some time that day with Phipps reminding him of all those things. Coincidence or not, Phipps raised his batting average by 20 points starting with that ninth-inning single in Toledo in late July and, on September 3, when Louisville’s season ended, got his first call-up to the majors.

  “That’s the kind of thing that makes managing at this level worth it,” Bell said. “It makes up for those moments when you have to send a guy down or, worse, release a guy. Those are the moments you dread.”

  Four days after his encourag
ing talk with Denis Phipps, Bell had one of those dreaded moments. Brett Tomko had pitched the third game of the series in Toledo and had been neither awful nor good—somewhere squarely in between. He had pitched six innings and given up five earned runs. The Bats had actually broken a 5–5 tie in the top of the seventh to take a 6–5 lead, putting Tomko in position to win his first game of the season. But, as had been the case all summer whenever Tomko left a game with a chance to win, the bullpen couldn’t hold a lead. The Mud Hens rallied to win 10–9 in eleven innings.

  Three days later, after the team had gotten back to Louisville, Bell got one of those phone calls a Triple-A manager doesn’t want to take. The Reds had decided to release Tomko. The major-league team was flush with pitching, and with several prospects at both Double-A and Triple-A who needed innings, there was no reason to keep a thirty-nine-year-old pitcher around who was muddling through with a respectable ERA of 3.78. Plus, Pedro Villarreal, a twenty-four-year-old right-handed starter who was considered a prospect by the Reds, was coming off the DL. A roster spot was needed.

  When Tomko reported for work that afternoon, Bell was waiting for him.

  “Hey, you got a minute?” he said as Tomko walked in the direction of his locker.

  At first, Tomko didn’t think anything of it. He and Bell often talked baseball early in the day when the clubhouse was quiet. They went into the manager’s office, and Bell shut the door.

  “That was my first clue,” Tomko said later. “David was an open-door manager. He wouldn’t close the door to talk about what a nice day it was outside.”

  Even so, Tomko was stunned when Bell told him what was happening.