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

by John Feinstein

  Through it all, Montoyo’s demeanor never changed.

  “That’s the great thing about Charlie,” catcher Chris Giménez said. “He’s trying to get the team to win every night, but he’s still managing us as individuals. We all know that his door is always open for us whenever we want to talk about anything. And he’s not going to bury anyone. If you’re on his team, you’re going to play. That makes life down here a lot more bearable for everyone.”

  Montoyo completely understood how tough it was for someone like Giménez to be on the Tampa-Durham shuttle. Giménez had started the season in Durham and had been called up in mid-April. In late May he was back in Durham being kidded by his teammates because when he rejoined the team in Indianapolis he didn’t have any of his Durham equipment with him. So he warmed up in Rays gear before games.

  “They started calling me ‘big-league Jimmy,’ ” he said, laughing on a hot summer night. “It’s kind of stuck. Of course that’s not the kind of big leaguer I want to be.” He shook his head. “I know how this sounds when I say it, but I swear to God when I was up there I couldn’t get anything to fall. But that’s the way it works. No one is looking at the type of outs you make up there. I get it.”

  Giménez, who was twenty-nine, and fellow catcher Stephen Vogt had both been on the shuttle all season because the Rays’ catching situation was in flux. Vogt, who was twenty-seven, had been sent to the minor-league camp midway through spring training but then had been called up to the team before opening day; the Rays had decided they needed more offense in their lineup after outfielders Sam Fuld and B. J. Upton went on the DL.

  Vogt had been drafted out of Azusa Pacific University in the twelfth round in 2007 as an outfielder but had been converted into a catcher. He’d come back from major shoulder surgery in 2009 to be the Rays’ Minor League Player of the Year in 2011. He was sitting in the training room in Durham getting ready for the Bulls’ last preseason workout when coach Dave Myers came in and told him he needed to get dressed and get to the airport because he needed to catch a plane to Tampa.

  Vogt was stunned and thrilled. It would turn out to be the first of three times he would get the call to Tampa during the season—meaning he was sent back down twice. He spent the majority of the season in Durham, getting only twenty-five at-bats in the major leagues—without a hit.

  “I honestly believe I’ll get another chance,” he said one night. “Just being in the major leagues was great. I want to go back and prove that I can stay there. I’ve come a long way in a fairly short time—especially after my surgery.” In 2013 Vogt did get another chance—in Oakland.

  There were two disappointed people on April 4, the day Vogt was called up: Jeff Salazar, who thought he had made the team but found himself on the way back to Durham; and Montoyo. Montoyo was out for his daily five-mile run when the call came from Tampa for Vogt. Normally, Myers would have waited to let Montoyo get back to give a player the news he was going to the majors for the first time, but there was no time because Vogt had to leave for the airport right away.

  “I hate missing those moments,” Montoyo said. “They’re the best part of the job. I don’t even like to tell a guy on the phone unless I have to. I like to call him in, sit him down in my office, and see the look on his face when I tell him. With Steve, I missed it completely.”

  Of course, seventeen days later, when Vogt came back, the first person to greet him was Montoyo.

  “You have to deal with each guy coming back differently,” he said. “Most of our guys handle it well. I haven’t had too many pouters on my teams through the years. A guy like Steve, he’s come so far, he’s not likely to get down. And I could say to him, ‘Look, with your ability to catch and play outfield, they’re going to be keeping a close eye on you.’ I never lie to a guy. I try to tell him what he needs to do to get back up, because if I lie, one of two things will happen and both are bad: He’ll believe it’s not his fault, and he will get bitter, and he won’t work on his weaknesses. Or he’ll know I’m lying and I’ll lose his respect.”

  Sometimes the toughest conversations were not with the guy who had gone up and come back but with the guy who didn’t get called up. On August 2, the Rays decided they needed some more punch on their bench, so they sent veteran Brooks Conrad to Durham and called up Will Rhymes—swapping backup infielders. Rhymes had been hot, hitting .368 over a ten-game stretch—so the Rays thought he might be able to help their anemic lineup.

  Montoyo had the pleasant task of telling Rhymes he was on his way to Tampa. A few minutes later he had a far less pleasant task when Reid Brignac asked if he could talk to him.

  Brignac was twenty-six and had spent a good deal of time playing shortstop for the Rays in 2010 and 2011. He was a slick fielder, and he had become quite popular in Tampa Bay. In the media room in Port Charlotte, where the Rays hold spring training, there was a photograph on the wall of a woman wearing a sash across her chest that said, “Miss North Florida.” She was throwing out the first pitch at a Rays game, having been invited because she was dating the starting shortstop at the time—Brignac.

  But Brignac couldn’t hit enough to hold on to his spot, especially in a lineup that was hurting at the start of the season because of injuries. He had a career batting average of .228, and the Rays decided to move Sean Rodriguez ahead of him in the pecking order.

  Brignac was still on the opening-day roster, but when the Rays—in their constant search for more offense off the bench—claimed Brandon Allen off waivers from Oakland two weeks later, Brignac was sent down to Durham. In early August he was hitting only .227, so when the Rays came looking for more offense, it was Rhymes who got the call.

  Discouraged, Brignac went to see his manager. The conversation lasted forty-five minutes—which is about forty minutes longer than most player-manager meetings last.

  “I told him there was no doubting the fact that he was a major-league shortstop,” Montoyo said. “He knew that. But he also knew that he needed to hit more, that he needed to work on finding a way to be an effective hitter in the major leagues. Teams can’t afford to have outs in their lineup. He knew that too. Really, he just needed to vent. I let him vent.

  “I told him to take a day off, take a deep breath, and come back ready to play. I always tell the guys it’s a lot less hot in August when you’re playing well than when you’re playing poorly. Reid knows that; he’s a pro. This is a cranky time of year for everyone—especially if you think you shouldn’t be here.”

  He shrugged. “Of course around here, that’s just about everyone.”

  “Everyone” isn’t just the players, or even the managers and coaches in Triple-A. It is everyone: umpires, broadcasters, beat writers, groundskeepers. For them, the road to the majors is even more difficult because they aren’t judged on hard numbers.

  Umpires are judged by checkers assigned by Major League Baseball who watch them work and make subjective decisions on how they handle a game. Broadcasters almost always need someone important to like them—and their work. It can be a general manager, a director of broadcasting, or someone else in the business who knows the general manager or the director of broadcasting.

  The toughest jump may be for the guys who take care of the fields at the Triple-A level. “Usually, someone has to die or get fired—or both,” Scott Strickland said as he scanned the skies one afternoon in Durham, watching to see if the predicted thunderstorm that he had just warned Montoyo about might be closing in. “Typically, one job a year at the big-league level, either as the head groundskeeper or the number-one assistant, might open up.”

  Strickland was only thirty, but he had been in charge of the grounds crew at Durham Bulls Athletic Park for nine years, having been hired while he was finishing up as a student in the turf program at North Carolina State. He had grown up in Winston-Salem, the son of two Wake Forest graduates, but had become fascinated with turf management as an American Legion baseball player in high school.

  “Our coach was in charge of the field,
and he completely killed the grass,” he said. “I was part of the group that worked trying to put it back together or at least get it up and running. I just found the whole thing cool. I enjoyed the learning process—what to do, what not to do. So I decided to try to train to do it for a living.”

  Many people who go to turf-training school aspire to run golf courses. Strickland, a former baseball player and a big baseball fan, always wanted to work in baseball. When he got the chance to start his career at the Triple-A level, he jumped at it. Nine years later he still enjoyed the job. He had a staff of six—most big-league teams have sixteen—and was in charge not only of the field but also of the weather. When the weather was hot—which it almost always was in July and August—the players blamed him. When it rained, management blamed him. Even worse, if he said it was going to rain and it didn’t, everyone blamed him.

  All of which Strickland took in good humor. Although he had applied for major-league jobs and received nothing but rave reviews (other than his weather reports) from everyone he had worked for and with, he’d had only one close call with a big-league job.

  “Actually, that one wasn’t as close as I thought it was—at least as close as I thought it was for a few minutes,” he said. “I had a few good minutes before I realized someone had made a mistake.”

  Strickland had applied for the job as superintendent of grounds for the Milwaukee Brewers. As he pointed out, it had taken the death of Gary VandenBerg, who had worked for the team for thirty years and had been in charge of the grounds crew for twenty, to create an opening. A few days before Christmas, Strickland had just gotten back from lunch when his phone rang. When he saw a 414 area code come up on the caller ID, he tried not to get excited.

  That thought didn’t last very long.

  The call was from the Brewers’ office. A very pleasant-sounding woman told Strickland that he was one of the finalists for the job and she wanted to set up the logistics for his trip to Milwaukee. Strickland would probably have walked the 938 miles if that’s what he had been told was required of him.

  Strickland isn’t exactly certain when the conversation went bad, but he knows what was said that caused his heart to sink. “I’m sure Patrick has already spoken to you,” the woman said, referencing the person Strickland would be talking to when he got to Milwaukee.

  “No,” Strickland answered. “Actually, he hasn’t spoken to me.”

  “He hasn’t?”

  “No.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. At that moment, Strickland’s gut told him something was wrong.

  “Look, maybe you want to do some checking and then call me back,” he said.

  “Um, yes. Maybe I should do that.”

  It didn’t take very long for the phone to ring again. There had been a mistake. The person whom Patrick had spoken to who was supposed to fly to Milwaukee was Justin Scott—the assistant groundskeeper for the Kansas City Royals—not Scott Strickland, the head groundskeeper for the Durham Bulls.

  “She was very embarrassed and apologetic,” Strickland said. “I sort of wish they’d faked it and let me fly out there just so I’d have the experience of doing the interview even if I wasn’t going to get the job.”

  He smiled. “I guess I can claim I was a finalist for the job—even if it was only for about five minutes.”

  There are a handful of people each year who don’t mind spending time in Triple-A. They are major leaguers on rehab assignments. The reason they don’t mind it is simple. “It means you’re headed in the right direction, that you’re on your way back to playing,” said Sam Fuld, who arrived for a rehab assignment in Durham in mid-July. He’d hurt his wrist the previous September, and it had required surgery in April after the pain had returned during spring training.

  “Of course in the back of your mind there’s always that tiny bit of fear that when your rehab time is up”—it can be up to twenty days by rule—“they might just say, ‘Well, go ahead and stay down there for a while.’ ”

  Fuld knew he wasn’t in any real danger of having that happen, although on occasion it did happen to players. He would end up spending nine days in Durham before being recalled to Tampa.

  There was irony in the fact that Fuld’s time in Durham overlapped with Evan Longoria’s rehab assignment there, and that Durham played the Charlotte Knights shortly after Fuld arrived.

  Fuld, Longoria, and the Knights’ Dan Johnson had been involved in one of the most extraordinary nights in baseball history the previous September. Longoria had hit two home runs, including the game winner, on the last night of the regular season to put the Rays into the playoffs. In between those two home runs, which came in the eighth and twelfth innings, Johnson had hit a game-tying home run with two outs in the ninth inning—pinch-hitting for Fuld.

  “I like to point out that I started the rally by walking with the bases loaded in the eighth,” Fuld said, grinning. “I was pissed when [manager] Joe [Maddon] took me out for Dan. Afterward, I told him I would have homered twenty rows deeper if he’d let me hit.”

  This from someone with four major-league home runs.

  It had taken Fuld a good long while, though, to think of himself as a full-fledged major leaguer. “Actually, there’s part of me that still thinks like a minor leaguer,” he said, relaxing after a grueling workout in late afternoon heat. “I spent so long in Triple-A, went back and forth so many times, that part of me still feels like this is a very natural place to be.”

  He smiled. “Then again, I remember when I was in Triple-A, I always looked at rehab guys and thought how lucky they were. It always seemed to me that the toughest thing that could happen to a major leaguer was having their fillet overcooked at a restaurant. To some degree, I still think there’s a lot of truth in that.”

  Fuld had more than earned his fillet—regardless of how it was cooked. He liked to joke about the fact that he was a one-of-a-kind baseball player. “To start with, I’m pretty sure I’m the only Jewish/type-one diabetic in baseball,” he said. “Throw in the fact that my dad’s a college dean [College of Liberal Arts, University of New Hampshire] and my mom is a state senator [D-N.H.] and I think I’m pretty safe in saying I’m unique.”

  Fuld was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of ten, and it has been a driving force in his life ever since.

  “I was lucky that I was diagnosed when the stigma of having it if you were an athlete was being erased,” he said. “Ron Santo [the Cubs’ Hall of Fame third baseman] hid the fact that he had it for years, because he was afraid he might not get a chance if people knew he had it.

  “It’s always been obstacles that fueled me. When I was younger, people said I was too small—that fueled me. I remember my senior year in college one scout told me the general feeling was that I was too small and I had the ‘issue’ of being a diabetic, so teams would shy away from me. That fueled me too.”

  There was never any doubt that Fuld was going to college, regardless of how good a baseball player he was in high school. He lists himself at five feet ten and 175 pounds, but no one in baseball buys those numbers. He might be five nine (at best), and his weight probably hovers around 160. “I have the right to round up,” he said, grinning.

  He went to Exeter, where he met his future wife, Sarah (who played lacrosse at Princeton), and then to Stanford, where he graduated with a major in economics. Fascinated by numbers, especially as they relate to baseball, he has worked (slowly) toward a master’s in statistics.

  “I grew up in an academic-minded home, I think it’s fair to say that,” he said. “The question was always where I’d go to college, not if. Stanford had great baseball and great academics, although I think some people questioned whether I was good enough to play there.”

  He was plenty good enough, starting for four years and graduating as Stanford’s all-time leader in runs scored. The Cubs drafted him in the twenty-fourth round after his junior year and then in the tenth round in 2004 after his senior year. The start of his pro career was de
layed when he tore the labrum in his shoulder diving for a ball late in his senior season.

  Even so, he moved quickly through the minor leagues, never hitting worse than .287 at any level, consistently stealing bases while playing an often spectacular outfield. His first call-up came in September 2007, but Cubs manager Lou Piniella used him strictly as a defensive replacement the first couple of weeks he was in the majors—so much so that his teammates hung a sign that said MOONLIGHT GRAHAM in his locker.

  The next three years were frustrating for Fuld. Everyone in baseball seemed to think he was ready to contribute in the majors—except the Cubs. They kept sending him down to Iowa—not to the “Field of Dreams,” where Moonlight Graham made his brief comeback as a player, but to Iowa City. Just when he was starting to wonder if he was ever going to get a real chance to play in the majors, he was one of five players dealt to Tampa Bay by the Cubs in a deal that sent starting pitcher Matt Garza to Chicago.

  “I had gotten frustrated,” Fuld said. “I felt stuck because the Cubs had contract obligations to guys who I thought I could play better than. One year I thought I had totally outplayed Reed Johnson, but he was making $3 million a year; I was making the minimum. If someone was going down, it was me.