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

by John Feinstein

  “I hadn’t been pitching that badly,” he said. “I mean, if I was getting killed, I would have said, ‘Yup, you’re right, I get it.’ But the fact is, I didn’t get it.”

  Bell was completely honest with Tomko. This had nothing to do with the way he was pitching. He had told the Reds that if someone was needed for an emergency start or if someone got hurt, there was no doubt in his mind Tomko could get the job done. But it was late in the season, and the Reds believed they had enough backup that they could afford to use Tomko’s roster spot on a younger player. It was baseball math: all things being equal, the old guy goes overboard.

  “He was really, really disappointed,” Bell said. “Hurt. Surprised. Pick a word. But he didn’t vent or take it out on me at all. He handled it as well as you could handle it—which didn’t surprise me at all.

  “Funny thing is we were teammates for two years, and I always felt I knew Brett well. I always liked him. But I also had the sense that he was a guy who people often didn’t understand. In baseball, if you have any outside interests, people look at you as if you’re weird. Brett was into art, and some guys just couldn’t understand that. I thought it made you better rounded and more interesting.

  “There was this notion that he wasn’t tough. Believe me, he’s tough. I felt as if I got to know him more in Louisville than I did in Seattle. His attitude was so good.

  “We talked that day for an hour. I told him that I knew this was hard to understand but this was the best thing for him—fair or unfair. He’s so competitive it’s going to be hard for him to stop playing, but at some point he’s going to stop playing.

  “The Reds weren’t going to call him up before the end of the season. They’d made that decision. This was a chance to maybe catch on with a team that would call him up. Or, if this was the end, well, it was meant to be the end. It might be time to move on.

  “Easy for me to say, no doubt. Probably hard for him to hear.”

  Ten days later, Tomko was signed by the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose farm director is Mike Bell.

  “Sheer coincidence,” David Bell said, laughing. “But I suspect he was highly recommended.”

  20

  Slice of Life

  I-75

  While Brett Tomko was trying to keep his job in Triple-A during that late July weekend in Toledo, Danny Worth was trying to figure out how he could put Toledo in his rearview mirror once and for all.

  It wasn’t that he disliked the town. He liked the people, he liked his manager, and he liked his teammates.

  He just wished he wasn’t their teammate.

  “When I got back the other day, several guys came up to me and said, ‘It’s great to see you, but it sucks to see you,’ ” he said. “I felt exactly the same way.”

  Worth had been sent back to Toledo from the Tigers on July 24—the ninth time he had been sent down since his first call-up to Detroit in May 2010. In all, including spring training, he’d gotten—as he called it—“the tap on the shoulder” to be sent down eleven times in his career.

  “Usually, there’s a routine to it,” he said. “Jeff Jones [the pitching coach] will give me the tap and tell me that [manager] Jim [Leyland] wants to talk to me. It isn’t always that way. Once [in 2011] we had flown from Anaheim to Chicago, and we got to the hotel at about four o’clock in the morning. I got off the bus, walked into the lobby, and [general manager] Dave [Dombrowski] and Jim were standing there waiting for me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t to ask me what I thought about the in-flight movie.”

  Worth’s most recent return to Toledo had not come as a shock, although he readily admitted that every time it happened it was tough to take. Shortly after getting back to town, he did a pregame TV interview. He said all the right things: he knew he just had to hang in there; this was part of the game; he had to keep his head up and play hard and hope the call to go back up would come again soon.

  “I fake it,” he said, smiling. “The fact is, every time you get sent down, it’s crushing because no matter how you rationalize it, the reason it happens is because you aren’t a good enough player to stay up. I simply haven’t been able to hit enough to stay in the majors. Every time you get sent down, they tell you, ‘Hey, you’ll be back up soon,’ and you know it’s entirely possible. But you also know it’s possible you might never get back. Maybe they make a trade at your position. Maybe you get hurt. Maybe they’ve decided you’re out of chances. That’s the fear: that maybe this time down is the last time.”

  It had been a trade that had sent Worth back to Toledo this time. The Tigers, looking to strengthen themselves for the second half of the season, had acquired pitcher Anibal Sánchez and second baseman Omar Infante from Miami. The acquisition of Infante meant a position player had to go down. There were three candidates: Worth, Don Kelly, and Ryan Raburn. As a player with five years in the majors, Raburn couldn’t be sent down unless he agreed to the demotion; the Tigers would have therefore had to release him, and they didn’t want to do that. Kelly was out of minor-league “options”—which are so complicated most players don’t understand them—and would have had to pass through waivers to get to Toledo.

  Rather than take that risk, the Tigers decided to send down Worth. They had just finished a series at home and were flying to Cleveland when Worth heard that the trade had been made. He got on the plane with the team, wondering if perhaps he might avoid the dreaded “tap.” Kelly and Raburn were on the flight too, so he knew it might still be coming.

  “We got to the hotel, and Jim grabbed me getting off the bus,” he said. “They had to wait until we got to Cleveland because the trade hadn’t been final before we left.”

  The only good news was that the Mud Hens were playing two hours away in Columbus. Worth called his wife, Bree, and told her it had happened again and that she would need to pack their things in the apartment they had been renting in Detroit for another move back to Toledo. They had both been through this before.

  “I remember the first time I got called up in ’10,” he said. “Needless to say, I wanted to call everyone I knew. We packed the car, and I told Bree to drive so I could make all the calls. The problem is she’s a terrible driver, and she was so excited I finally had to take the wheel from her about halfway to Detroit. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  So what became of all the phone calls and texts?

  “I made them anyway,” he said, grinning.

  His first major-league at-bat was against John Lackey, who had first come up to the Anaheim Angels in 2002—when Worth was in high school in Valencia, about sixty miles north of Anaheim. “I remembered watching him pitch back then,” Worth said. “Now here I am in the majors and he’s pitching to me. It was a little bit scary but also quite cool.”

  Sent up to pinch-hit with the bases loaded, Worth hit a roller down the first-base line and beat it out for a single and an RBI. A nice moment. It is one he thinks back to when he starts to feel depressed about the literal ups and downs his career has gone through since that night.

  “I try to remind myself that ten years ago, when I was a high school senior, if you had told me I would get to the majors, I’d have said, ‘I’ll sign for that right now,’ ” he said. “I played on a really good high school team. I probably wasn’t the best player—in fact, I wasn’t the best player. We had six guys who people thought had major-league potential. I’m the only one who has ever gone past A-ball, much less played in the majors.

  “When I sit back and think about things like that, it makes me feel good and it makes me feel lucky. On the other hand, when you’re a kid and you dream about being in the major leagues, you don’t dream about being a backup shortstop or second baseman. You don’t dream about being the guy who is up for a month, then down for a month. You dream about being a contributor, being a star—not the guy who gets sent down eleven times.”

  He sighed. “This is a really good place to play Triple-A ball. Really nice ballpark, good crowds, good people. But when you’ve been in the majors …” He
shook his head. “Every time I hear the crowd at Comerica [Detroit] my body goes numb. I get goose bumps on my arms. It’s so loud up there. You can’t make ten thousand people sound like forty thousand people. I guess the only good news is I can make the drive up and down I-75 blindfolded by now.

  “I still remember going to see the Dodgers play when I was thirteen. Alex Cora was the shortstop. He made a couple plays, and he made an error too. I remember thinking, ‘I can do that; I’m good enough to do that someday.’ I was right. I have been good enough to do that. I just need to be good enough to do it more consistently—with my bat.”

  As difficult as it was to be back in Triple-A, Worth was a long way from giving up. He had played for Steve Rodriguez in college at Pepperdine. Rodriguez had produced many top players, nine of whom had been drafted by major-league teams.

  “I still go back during the off-season and take BP at Pepperdine and I talk to Steve,” Worth said. “We talk about all the guys who have played for him and how tough it is sometimes to keep your head up as a baseball player. The game can be so negative. I asked him what he says to guys when they get down and talk about quitting.

  “He said, ‘I tell them, guys, the grass outside the ballpark may look greener sometimes, but believe me it’s not. It’s a lot better to be inside the park than outside the park.’ ”

  Whether the park seats ten thousand or forty thousand.

  21

  Elarton

  PIGS (NOT) IN THE BIGS … AND THE EVER-PRESENT REVOLVING DOOR

  The newest franchise in the International League is the one in Allentown—the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.

  The Pigs, as they are called throughout the valley, came into existence in 2008 when the Ottawa Lynx were moved by the Philadelphia Phillies to the brand-new ballpark that was only sixty miles from Citizens Bank Park in South Philadelphia. The Phillies had taken over the Lynx from the Baltimore Orioles in 2007 while that new ballpark—Coca-Cola Field—was being built, fully intending to move the team in a year.

  The IronPigs have been a huge success almost since day one. The team’s affiliation with the Phillies helps greatly because there are lots and lots of Phillies fans in the area. Not only do the Pigs wear Phillies colors, but one of the first things people see when they walk into the ballpark is a mural that is called “Pigs in the Bigs.” On it are the names and uniform numbers of all the Lehigh Valley players who have gone on to play in Philadelphia.

  Next to the elevator that leads to the suite level in the ballpark is an actual iron pig—complete with a definition for those who have never seen one before.

  1. Derived from Pig Iron, raw iron that is melted down, refined and then used to make steel, which is one of the strongest metal alloys known on earth … (A) The iron was called pig iron because it was melted into molds said to resemble a row of piglets.

  2. Name of AAA baseball team in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Name was derived from steel making heritage that existed in Lehigh Valley … (A) team name was chosen by a name-the-team contest. Eight finalists were: Woodchucks, Crushers, Gobblers, Phantastics, Phillies, Keystones, Vulcans and IronPigs.

  Certainly IronPigs was by far the best choice on that list.

  The ballpark is full of reminders regarding the team nickname. During 2012 if you went to look for Ryne Sandberg, you didn’t look for the manager’s office—you looked for the office marked “Head Pig.”

  The best one-liners in the ballpark, however, can be found in the men’s rooms. In a minor-league ballpark, every inch of real estate is for sale—including space in the bathrooms. The urinals in the men’s rooms are sponsored (seriously) by the Urology Specialists of the Lehigh Valley. That means when someone walks into the bathroom and steps to a urinal, he will be greeted by signs posted in the urinal.

  Among the messages are:

  “Standing here longer than the National Anthem? … Urology Specialists of the Lehigh Valley …”

  “Back again? It might not be the beer’s fault.”

  “Has your bat gone silent?”

  “Can’t reach home plate like you used to?”

  And, last but not least: “The only place for dribblers in the ballpark is down the first and third base lines.”

  You simply cannot get entertainment like that in Yankee Stadium.

  Which might explain why the IronPigs play consistently to sellouts or near sellouts. In 2012 they drew a total of 688,821 for seventy-six home dates—four more than normal because Scranton/Wilkes-Barre played four games as the home team in Allentown. For their seventy-two official home games, they averaged 9,034 fans per game—which is pretty good given that the ballpark seats 8,089. Frequently, the Pigs draw crowds of more than 10,000—many fans paying for the right to stand or sit on the grassy knolls beyond the outfield fences.

  “I honestly didn’t think you could have an atmosphere like the one we have night in and night out in a minor-league park,” said Sandberg, who managed in Lehigh Valley in 2011 and 2012. “One of the hard parts about being in Triple-A is that a lot of nights there’s no buzz in the ballpark. That’s not a problem here.”

  The IronPigs’ clubhouse is comparable to many visiting clubhouses in the major leagues and much roomier than those in older parks like Fenway and Wrigley Field. The visiting clubhouse—as in the majors—is considerably smaller than the home clubhouse.

  “If you have to be in the minor leagues, this is about as good as you can possibly hope for,” Scott Elarton said. He smiled. “Of course it’s still the minor leagues.”

  On an early summer night, Elarton was the starting pitcher for the Pigs against Pawtucket. His mound opponent was Brandon Duckworth, who also had extensive major-league experience. In fact, the two men were almost the same age: Duckworth had been born January 23, 1976, and Elarton had been born exactly a month later. The matchup could just as easily have taken place in the big leagues except that both pitchers had gone through enough ups and downs that they found themselves trying to pitch their way back to that level.

  They had been teammates briefly, in Kansas City in 2007, and had pitched against each other in 2008 after Elarton landed in Cleveland. That was the last year either had pitched in the majors. “We were joking that we’ve come a long way since we last pitched against each other,” Elarton said. “Problem is we’ve gone in the wrong direction.”

  Both men pitched reasonably well in their rematch. Duckworth came out in the fifth inning in large part because his pitch count had reached ninety. He had given up three earned runs to that point, which pushed his ERA to 4.34 for the season. Not awful, but probably not good enough to merit a serious look from the Red Sox.

  Elarton was a little better. Even though he gave up ten hits, he kept pitching out of trouble and left a tie game having given up four runs—three of them earned. His ERA crept up a little bit to 3.55—again, not bad, but not as good as he had been hoping for when he had walked out of Charlie Manuel’s office in Clearwater back in March after being sent down.

  “I was lucky,” he said afterward. “I really didn’t throw the ball very well, but I got some outs when I had to.”

  Which is what good pitchers do. Like hitters, they know they aren’t going to have their best stuff every night. How they perform on those nights when they are being knocked around the ballpark a little usually determines how their season—and ofttimes their career—will turn out. Elarton was old enough and wise enough to understand that, but it still bothered him that he wasn’t pitching better.

  “The funny thing is it’s no different now than when I was young and pitching well in the major leagues,” he said. “There are very few nights when I walk off the mound feeling good about the way I’ve pitched. Sometimes I’m being hard on myself. Other times I’m not.”

  And other times—most times—the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Elarton knew that the middle wouldn’t be good enough to get him to the major leagues. At thirty-six, he had to be better than that to get the Phillies’ attention, even with the team having i
ts worst season in years. In fact, the team’s struggles made it more likely that a young pitcher would be called up, if needed, because the focus would be more on the future than the present.

  “I don’t have a single regret about doing this,” he said the morning after getting the win against the PawSox. “Just being healthy and being able to take the ball every time it’s my turn has made it fun.”

  Elarton sighed. “But there are days and nights when it’s tough. The road trips are tough, especially those last few days when you feel like you’ve been looking at the same walls in the same hotel room for a month. I miss my family at that point. I occasionally catch myself saying, ‘Do I want to be here?’ I want to play baseball, I know that, but do I want to be back at this level?

  “I think every guy who has ever been in the majors, especially for an extended period, is going to have issues with coming back down. You do it because you believe you can get back up. But if you’re looking in the mirror at night and you know the person looking back is pretty much stuck in Triple-A if he’s being realistic … sometimes it’s tough.”

  Elarton had his hand on his forehead as he spoke, as if he were thinking the whole thing through one more time. He paused, then nodded. “The easiest thing in the world is to say, ‘I’m done, I’m going home.’ I did that once when it wasn’t time yet. I’m going to make sure I don’t do that this time around.”

  Lehigh Valley’s starting third baseman in the game Elarton had pitched on that Saturday night had been Timothy Craig Hulett Jr., known to one and all since he was little as Tug—because his mother’s second-favorite major-league baseball player was Tug McGraw, the great and colorful relief pitcher for the Mets and the Phillies.

  Her favorite major-league player was Tim Hulett, Tug’s father, who had played in the majors for twelve years with three different teams. Tim Hulett was never a great player—his career batting average was .249—but he was a solid infielder and was always considered a positive clubhouse presence wherever he played.