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

by John Feinstein

  Tug was the oldest of the four boys born to Tim and Linda Hulett. The three other boys—Joe, Sam, and Jeff—all came along within the next five years. They were a close family, although, ironically, it wasn’t Tim who taught his sons to play baseball, it was their two grandfathers.

  “Dad was on the road a lot playing,” Tug said. “He helped us whenever he could, but I can remember my dad’s dad taking me to the park all the time for batting and fielding practice. I was a field rat right from the beginning. Always loved to play, to practice, just to be around baseball.”

  When Tug was nine, his dad was playing for Baltimore, and the four brothers walked to a nearby apartment complex that had a baseball field to play one July afternoon while the Orioles were in Chicago. It was only a short walk to and from the little park, and after they had played, the boys started home. They were about a block from their house when, for some reason, Sam, who was six, darted into the street. Tug remembers yelling at him and grabbing Joe—two years older than Sam—before he could follow Sam.

  He probably saved Joe’s life by grabbing him. He couldn’t save Sam. A car coming down the street couldn’t stop in time, and Sam was hit. He died several hours later. Phil Itzoe, the Orioles’ longtime traveling secretary, got the phone call in the press box that afternoon while the Orioles were playing the White Sox. Itzoe had to go down to the clubhouse to tell manager Johnny Oates that Tim needed to come out of the game and get home as soon as possible.

  “It’s a little bit hard to focus on whether you need to make a pitching change when you’ve just heard news like that,” Oates said later. “It just doesn’t seem to matter much.”

  Needless to say, Tug Hulett was crushed by his little brother’s death. “For a long time I blamed myself,” he said. “I kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ I became very introverted. In the end, what brought me out of it was my faith.”

  The Huletts were a deeply religious family before Sam’s death, and they turned to their religion afterward. Tug finally found a passage in the Bible that resonated with him: Philippians 4:7—“Peace through understanding.” It made him realize that if he understood what had happened—and that it was not his fault, that in fact he had probably saved Joe from the same fate—he could begin to move on with his life.

  “I felt an overwhelming peace afterward,” he said. “My dad had always talked about baseball giving him a platform to talk about his faith, and I came to believe that too. I don’t think I force it on anyone, but I like people to understand what it’s meant to me.”

  Tug’s mother, Linda, was as big an influence on his athletic career as his father. It was Linda who insisted that her son learn to hit left-handed. “Every time I’d pick up a bat and try to swing righty, she’d say, ‘No, son, wrong side,’ and I switched,” he said, laughing.

  When Tim retired after the 1995 season, the family moved back to his hometown, Springfield, Illinois, where Tug started high school before finishing at Evangelical Christian High School in Shreveport Louisiana. He played all sports but loved baseball most and ended up going to Auburn on a baseball scholarship. He was drafted in the fourteenth round of the 2004 draft by the Texas Rangers (his dad had been a No. 1 pick), which was a disappointment because he had been told he would go somewhere between the third and the fifth rounds.

  “After the fifth round I stopped paying attention,” he said. “I figured someone would call when I got picked. I remember hearing guys who were taken in the second and third rounds talking about how disappointed they were not to go in the first round. I didn’t feel a lot of sympathy for them.”

  Tim Hulett wasn’t very big—six feet and 185 pounds—and Tug wasn’t quite as big: closer to five ten with a fireplug body type. He could always hit, though, and was willing to play anywhere on the field to get in the lineup. He made it to Triple-A three years later—in 2007. He was traded to Seattle during the following off-season, and was hitting .301 midway through the 2008 season in Tacoma. Then he got a post-midnight phone call one evening when he was in bed in a Salt Lake City hotel room. It was Daren Brown, the manager of the Rainiers.

  “You’re going to the majors,” he said, not wasting any time. “There’s a flight out of here at four a.m. You’re booked on it. You’re meeting the team in Oakland.”

  It was not the way Hulett had envisioned his first call to the big leagues, but he wasn’t complaining. He got to the ballpark that evening with no equipment. He had to borrow a glove, cleats, batting gloves, and a bat. Manager Jim Riggleman sent him up to pinch-hit in the eighth inning and he struck out. Two nights later, in Kansas City, he was the DH and singled off Gil Meche for his first big-league hit. A week later he was back in Tacoma. But he was called back up soon after that and spent the rest of the season in the majors.

  A year later, he got some more time in the majors in Kansas City, but the Royals released him at the end of the season. He signed with the Red Sox and then became the classic journeyman, moving from the Red Sox back to the Mariners, then to the Rockies and the Nationals—all in two years. He signed before the 2012 season with the Phillies and started the season with Double-A Reading before being called up to Lehigh Valley in May.

  “There is a lot of failure in this sport,” he said, holding a bat in his hands as he sat in the third-base dugout at Coca-Cola Field waiting to start batting practice. “I’ve played in ten different places in the last six seasons. The irony is teams sign me because they say they need guys in the system with big-league experience. Then, when I don’t get the chance to go back up, they either say it’s because I don’t have enough experience up there or they want to go with a younger guy. I’m caught in the middle: I’m twenty-nine. I have some big-league experience but not enough. I often want to say, ‘How am I supposed to have enough big-league experience for you if you won’t call me up to the big leagues?’ ”

  Hulett knew his call-up to Lehigh Valley in mid-May might be temporary. The Phillies had infield prospects they were looking to move up in the system, and Hulett understood that twenty-nine-year-olds with sixty-seven major-league at-bats (and thirteen hits) were not looked upon as prospects.

  “Ryne [Sandberg] is good about getting everyone in the lineup,” he said. “That means I’ll get chances—and as long as I have a chance, I’m not going to complain.” He smiled. “Heck, I’m not going to complain regardless.

  “I remember when I was fourteen I told my dad I really wanted to focus on baseball. School was always a big deal in my family. My mom didn’t let us play sports if we weren’t making A’s. But I told Dad I wanted to be a baseball player. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘That’s fine, Tug, now tell me how you plan to separate yourself from the twenty million other kids who want to be baseball players.’

  “Well, I think I separated myself from most of them. I made it to the big leagues, and I still believe I can make it back there again. I know I can still hit.”

  That night Hulett was 2 for 3, including an RBI double. It raised his batting average to .321 since he had escaped Reading. He started again the next day and got another hit. Six weeks later, he was in the lineup on a Saturday night in Norfolk, playing third base. By then, he was getting into the lineup sporadically. The Phillies had sent the veteran Pete Orr down in early June, and he was playing third base most nights. Kevin Frandsen, the team’s best player, was at second base, and the primary backup to the two of them was Michael Martínez, who had also seen major-league time during the season. Hulett was the odd man out.

  But he kept taking advantage of the chances he was given. On the night of July 14 he went 2 for 4 and upped his batting average to .325 in 37 games and 120 at-bats. For the next four days, Hulett didn’t see the field. Which is why he wasn’t shocked when Sandberg called him into his office with the team in Durham to tell him he was being sent to Reading. The Phillies had activated pitcher Justin De Fratus off the disabled list, and he needed innings to get his arm back into shape. Hulett was hitting well and his numbers were strong, but at this m
oment in time he was also the most expendable player on the Lehigh Valley roster.

  Hulett didn’t complain. All he could do was keep playing and, he hoped, keep hitting while waiting for another chance.

  Hulett’s demotion, brought on by De Fratus’s coming off the DL, is a microcosm of the life led by what are called organization players—guys who have reached a point in their careers where getting to the majors or returning to the majors isn’t impossible but isn’t likely. As Phil Nevin, Toledo’s manager, had pointed out, once the trade deadline passes at the end of July, a Triple-A manager is faced with a clubhouse of twenty-five guys who know that—at most—they are playing for two or three guaranteed major-league spots in the month of September. And, as any manager will tell you, almost everyone knows who those two or three guys are going to be long before the September call-ups occur.

  The harshest description of the life led by most minor leaguers might have come in 1970, when Tommy Lasorda was managing the Dodgers’ farm club in Spokane and the team had a twenty-year-old hotshot named Bobby Valentine on the roster. Valentine had been the fifth pick in the draft two years earlier and had briefly made the Dodgers in 1969 as a September call-up. He was about as cocky as any player who had ever set foot in a clubhouse, and a lot of the older players in Spokane resented him and went out of their way to make his life difficult.

  Which led to Lasorda’s calling the players together and, as legend has it, telling them what he wanted them to do before the game that night.

  “First I want you all to go and get Valentine’s autograph,” he said. “Because someday it’ll be valuable to you when he’s a star in the majors. Then I want you to thank him. You know why? Because we need the rest of you guys around here so we can field a team for him to play on. If not for him, we wouldn’t need the rest of you.”

  Hyperbolic, certainly. Also brutal. But there was a large chunk of truth in it too. That’s why minor leaguers are always aware of who the “prospects” are in an organization. That’s why being on the forty-man roster, even if it doesn’t mean you’re playing in the majors, is so important. It has financial advantages, but it also means the organization sees value in you at that moment—and believes you have a future with the major-league team.

  Players like Tug Hulett and Pete Orr were always aware of where they stood in a team’s pecking order. They were never going to be considered prospects—Hulett had been a fourteenth-round draft pick, and Orr, after choosing to go to junior college instead of signing out of high school as a thirty-ninth-round draft pick, ended up signing with the Atlanta Braves two years later as an undrafted free agent.

  “The funny thing is, when I was in high school, I never even thought about getting drafted,” he said. “In Canada [Orr grew up in Richmond Hill in Ontario] the draft wasn’t that big a deal. I was sitting in a math class, and I was told to go to the principal’s office. I figured I was in trouble for something. They said I needed to call my mom. Then I figured I was really in trouble. So I called and she said, ‘Congratulations, the Texas Rangers just called and said they drafted you in the thirty-ninth round.’ That was how I found out.”

  Orr decided not to sign because he didn’t think he was ready for the minor-league life, having not yet turned eighteen. He had split time between hockey and baseball until he was sixteen and felt that he could improve as a baseball player if he went to college before trying to turn pro. Dick Smith, the coach at Galveston College in Texas, had made a habit of recruiting in Ontario after stumbling over a couple of good players there while recruiting a player who had moved north from Puerto Rico. He offered scholarships to Orr and another local kid, Jeremy Walker. Orr decided to accept. Once he got over the culture shock, he liked the school and played well enough to be offered a scholarship to Nebraska two years later.

  “I was ready to go to Nebraska but figured I’d see what happened in the draft,” he said. “I thought with two years’ more experience I’d go higher than I had in high school. Then I didn’t get drafted at all. It was very disappointing. I found out later that the scouts who’d been watching me thought I was locked into going to Nebraska and they didn’t want to waste a pick on me.”

  Orr was playing for a semipro team back home (for no money so he could retain his college eligibility) when he got a call saying that the Braves were interested in him. They were offering $10,000 to sign. That seemed like a lot of money, so he took it.

  Moving up in the Braves’ system wasn’t easy. The Braves were in the midst of their fourteen-year run, during which they made postseason play at the major-league level every year. They had a deep, well-stocked farm system, and there wasn’t a lot of turnover in Atlanta, because the team was good. Orr chipped away, finally making it to the majors in 2005—even though Bobby Cox didn’t get around to actually telling him he had made it until their chance encounter in the hallway in Atlanta, on the eve of opening day.

  Orr stuck with the Braves for the next two years. He even hit .300 in a part-time role in 2005 and became one of the team’s most popular players because of his productivity, his versatility, and his attitude. But he was sent to Richmond, which was then the Braves’ Triple-A team, midway through the 2007 season and released that winter.

  “It’s a business,” he said with a shrug. “They had some younger players coming up through the system, and they needed a spot. You can’t take it personally, because it isn’t personal. If it had been personal, I would probably still be there because I know Bobby liked me and I think the organization did too. But that’s not the way it works.”

  He signed with the Washington Nationals and spent parts of the next two seasons in Washington—which was a shock to his system. “I went from one of the best teams in baseball to the worst,” he said. “They were building, and you could see the potential in some of their young players. But at that moment, when I was there, we were a bad team. I was spoiled. I was used to contending.”

  A job was a job, though, and he shuttled between Washington and Syracuse until the end of 2010. By then the Nationals were ready to bring up young infielders like Ian Desmond and Danny Espinosa and had signed veterans like Alex Cora and Jerry Hairston Jr. to back them up. Orr was the odd man out, and signed with the Phillies for the 2011 season. He spent that year in Lehigh Valley but came to spring training in 2012, thinking he might have a shot to make the team as a backup infielder. He had a good spring and thought he might be making the trip north, especially when second baseman Chase Utley went on the disabled list. Then, a little more than a week before the team was supposed to break camp, the Phillies signed veteran Luis Castillo, a three-time All-Star who was trying to make a comeback at the age of thirty-six.

  “That was demoralizing,” Orr said. “I thought I had outplayed the other guys who were competing for utility jobs in the infield, and then they signed Luis. There was certainly no comparison in our résumés, so I thought maybe I was going to be sent down again.”

  Nine days later, the Phillies released Castillo after realizing he wasn’t even a shadow of his former self. Orr felt better—but still not safe. “Cliff Lee kept asking me, ‘Have they told you, have they told you?’ ” he said. “The answer was no.”

  There are very few boundaries when it comes to locker-room humor, especially in baseball—where players spend far more time with one another during the course of an eight-month season than they do with their families. Orr spent most of the spring being ribbed about his uncertain status with the team. After the Castillo signing, Shane Victorino put a printout in Orr’s locker that listed potential housing opportunities in the Lehigh valley.

  “All the guys were messing with me,” he said. “But I knew they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t want to see me make the team.”

  Just as he had done in 2005 with the Braves, Orr made the trip north with the Phillies, still uncertain if he was going to be on the opening-day roster. Hector Luna, another backup infielder, also made the trip. Orr was sitting in the dugout during the Phillies’ last exhibi
tion game—played in Citizens Bank Park—when Lee asked him again if anyone had told him he was on the team. Again, Orr told him no.

  “Well, I’m going to find out,” Lee said—and stalked away.

  In the ninth inning, Lee came back and sat down next to Orr. “You’re in,” he said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yup. You’re in.”

  Sure enough, after the game Charlie Manuel called Luna into his office. Orr could tell by the look on Luna’s face when he walked out that he had been sent down. A few minutes later, it was Orr’s turn. He was on the team. Whether Lee had said something to Manuel about telling Orr the news or whether Manuel had been waiting to see if the Phillies made some kind of a deal that would have sent Orr to Lehigh Valley along with Luna, he didn’t know. Regardless, he was ecstatic. “I hadn’t been in the majors at all in 2010, and just briefly in 2011,” he said. “It meant a lot to work my way back there.”

  Orr played well when he got to play in Philadelphia. He knew his time there might be brief once again because he was the most likely guy to get sent down when Utley came off the disabled list. “I knew it was probably coming,” he said. “I just didn’t expect it to happen when it did.”

  It happened on June 7—the day before he turned thirty-three. The Phillies decided to call up Michael Martínez, who had been playing well at Lehigh Valley, and send Orr down in his place. It was one of those player swaps that go virtually unnoticed even by those who read the agate, but that profoundly affect the people involved.

  Orr was in the lineup almost every day back in Triple-A. The person most affected by his presence was Tug Hulett, who had been playing more often when Martínez was on the team. On July 22, Hulett was told he would need to pack up his locker and head back to Reading.

  The revolving door of baseball never stops.