“In a way, though, it helped me when I got to Tampa. I was out of [minor-league] options, so if they sent me down, they’d probably lose me. It also probably helped me focus a little more too—especially given a new chance to play.”
Fuld not only made the Rays out of camp in 2011; he became a cult figure in Tampa within a month. His penchant for running into walls and making remarkable plays in the outfield got him on You-Tube often, and he had a game in Fenway Park—not that far from where he’d grown up—in which he had two doubles, a triple, and a homer. He blew his chance for the cycle in his last at-bat when he stretched a single into a double with his teammates screaming at him to stop at first base.
“Couldn’t do it,” he said. “It just wouldn’t be me.”
Once he became a major leaguer—someone people would listen to—Fuld saw part of his role to be a spokesman on behalf of diabetics. He talks often to other baseball players who deal with the disease, as well as to kids, largely to emphasize that while diabetes is part of one’s life, it doesn’t have to have a negative effect on one’s life.
“I point out that it gave me discipline I might not have had otherwise,” he said. “Everyone has things they have to overcome in life … this is mine. But I mean, seriously, do I have anything to complain about? I play baseball for a living; I have a wife, two beautiful kids. Are you kidding?”
That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t constantly monitor his blood sugar. “Ten minutes doesn’t go by where I don’t think about it,” he said. “I make a play in the outfield, I’m on the bases, as soon as I get in the dugout, I check. After all these years, it’s innate, part of who I am. I even tell people part of the reason I’m spacey is that I’m thinking about my levels. Sometimes that’s true; other times I’m just using it as a crutch for spacing out.”
Six times a day he uses a glucometer to prick his finger. His teammates tease him about it, which, he says, is a good thing. “In a baseball clubhouse anything that makes you different makes you a target,” he said. “It’s actually a good thing. I’m Jewish and I’m a diabetic, so that’s two things that stand out.”
He’s also smart and educated. “Yeah, that too, I guess,” he said. “Sometimes I dumb things down a little. At least that’s what I tell the guys.”
More often than not, rehab assignments cause headaches for managers and—to a lesser degree—players. Although every player in an organization is technically in the charge of the major-league team, those who are designated to a minor-league team are, for the most part, left in the hands of their manager. Pitchers being rested in case of a call-up are the one notable exception to that rule.
Montoyo had a simple approach when it came to rehab players: help only if asked; otherwise they’re in the hands of the major-league-level decision makers.
He made one exception to his don’t-mess-with-the-rehab-guys rule in 2012. Seeing Fuld working out by himself one day in searing late afternoon heat while the rest of the team was enjoying the cool of the clubhouse, he walked out to the warning track where Fuld was running.
“Sam, are you sure you aren’t overdoing it?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Fuld said. “Need the work.”
“It’s really hot,” Montoyo said.
“I know,” Fuld said. “Isn’t it great?”
Montoyo left him to his work.
Evan Longoria’s arrival in Durham a few days later was another level of the don’t-mess rule. Longoria was, by far, the biggest star in the Tampa organization. He arrived in Durham on July 25 to rehab after being out for almost three months with a partial tear in his left hamstring. Montoyo knew that all decisions on when he would play or not play would come from Tampa. Which was fine with him.
“You have to be really careful with the rehab guys,” he said. “The last thing you want to do is ask them to do something they aren’t ready to do and hurt themselves again.” He laughed. “We had Matt Joyce down here in early July on rehab, and one night he’s on first and he takes off for second on his own trying to steal the base. He’s out by a mile, and then a few innings later he has to come out of the game. I let the front office know that night that he was running on his own. I certainly didn’t send him.”
As it turned out, Joyce, who was rehabbing a strained oblique muscle, had tweaked his back. Instead of doing two days of rehab and being activated in Tampa, as was the plan, he was on the DL for another eleven days. That’s why Triple-A managers leave all rehab decisions to the guys making the big bucks.
Longoria had initially been slated to spend four or five days in Durham as a DH before returning to Tampa, where the team desperately needed his bat in the lineup. The notion that he would play third base again in 2012 had pretty much been given up on. As it turned out, he would need postseason surgery on the hamstring, surgery that would—the Rays hoped—get him to spring training completely healthy in February 2013. Fortunately, it did just that.
The Longoria who showed up in Durham could barely run at anything faster than a moderate walking pace. What the Rays wanted to see was whether he could hit—and the answer was yes. A week after he arrived, Montoyo got word that Longoria might sit out a game on a Sunday evening against Gwinnett. When Longoria arrived at the ballpark, he told Montoyo that he had consulted with Rays’ trainer Ron Porterfield in Tampa and the decision was that he would play that night.
Which he did. In the first inning, he hit a majestic fly ball that looked as if it were going to be a long home run to left field. Except that the ball hit at the very top of the Blue Monster and kicked back into play. For some reason, Longoria hobbled around first and tried for a double, even though he would have needed a limo and a police escort to have any chance to beat the throw to second. He was out by at least twenty feet.
Two innings later he again crushed the ball, this time between left and center fields. Healthy, Longoria would have no doubt turned second and thought about trying for third. This time he played it smart and pulled up at first.
“God knows I only want him going one base at a time,” Montoyo said later. “Imagine what would have happened if he’d been hurt trying to get to second in the first inning.” He rolled his eyes. “Come to think of it, I’d rather not imagine it.”
Longoria had played in Durham before—though not for long. He had been the No. 3 overall pick in the 2006 draft and had moved rapidly through the Rays’ farm system, showing up in Durham late in the 2007 season—Montoyo’s first year as manager. “As soon as I saw him, I knew he wasn’t going to be around for more than a few weeks,” he said, laughing.
Longoria actually began the 2008 season in Durham—another example of a major-league team planning on not calling up a star young player until June, thus giving the team an extra year before the player would be eligible for arbitration.
“I think they were probably thinking about not starting my arbitration clock,” Longoria said. “I honestly thought it would be June before I got called up. Then I got a text from Jason Bartlett saying that Willy Aybar was hurt, that he had pulled a hamstring, and the word was they were going to call me up.
“We [Durham] had started the season on the road and come back here for the home opener. I was in the lineup and had just finished BP when Charlie came out and waved me into his office. The thought crossed my mind, but I didn’t let myself think it. I sat down, and he just said, ‘You’re going up. Congratulations.’ ”
Longoria paused as he told the story and looked around. He was sitting in Montoyo’s office in the exact same spot—perhaps the same chair—that he had been sitting in four years and four months earlier, when he had first found out he was going to the big leagues.
“I was actually a little nervous to come back down here,” he said. “Let’s face it, I’m not making $2,400 a month the way I was when I was last here. I’m not really a member of the team, although if I can get a few hits, that’s bonus. But I’m here to get ABs and make sure the hamstring feels a little better every day.”
He was stay
ing at the upscale Washington Duke hotel, a few miles from the ballpark. The team pays per diem for a player on rehab that includes his hotel expenses. At this point in his life, Longoria had no trouble paying the difference between the per diem and the tab at the Washington Duke.
Even though ten months had passed since that remarkable September night, Longoria was still being glorified—justifiably—for his role in the Rays’ historic victory in their 2011 season finale. Going into the last night of the regular season, the Rays had—astoundingly—tied the Boston Red Sox for the wild card spot in the American League, after being eight games behind earlier in the month.
But they trailed the Yankees 7–0 in the eighth inning while, in Baltimore, the Red Sox had a 3–2 lead going into the ninth inning. It looked as if Tampa Bay’s late-season rally would fall one game short.
And then, in what felt like a blink of an eye, everything changed. The Rays scored six runs in the eighth, highlighted by a three-run Longoria home run, to close the gap to 7–6. They then tied the game with two outs in the ninth inning on a home run by little-used pinch hitter Dan Johnson, who had spent most of the season in Durham.
On the game went, into the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth innings. Because there had been a rain delay of an hour and twenty-four minutes in Baltimore, the Red Sox and Orioles were still playing. While the Yankees were batting in the twelfth inning, the Red Sox sent in their lights-out closer, Jonathan Papelbon, to finish the game in Baltimore in the ninth. Papelbon quickly got two outs. In Tampa, the Rays were scoreboard watching—staring obsessively would be more accurate—figuring they had to win to create a one-game playoff the next day.
“We had actually been thinking that all night,” Longoria said. “To us it was a must-win game to stay alive and play [the Red Sox] the next day. When we were down 7–0, it looked pretty bleak since they were winning. When we tied it, we had hope—but we were still thinking we were playing to stay tied with them. I don’t think the thought crossed anyone’s mind that we could win and advance right then and there.”
The clock struck midnight with both games still going on: the Rays were in the process of escaping a first-and-second-no-one-out jam in the top of the twelfth, and Papelbon was trying to get the final out in Baltimore.
Papelbon never succeeded. Chris Davis doubled. Seconds later Nolan Reimold also doubled, and suddenly—stunningly—the score was tied and the winning run was on second base. Less than a minute later, the winning run, in the person of Reimold, was sliding across the plate after Robert Andino hit a bloop to left field that Carl Crawford couldn’t reach before it dropped. Crawford’s weak throw home was nowhere close, and in a shocking turnaround the Orioles were celebrating as if they had won the wild card while the Red Sox trudged to their dugout knowing they now needed the Yankees to win to keep their season alive.
It was 12:02 when Reimold scored to give the Orioles the win. At 12:04 the score was posted inside Tropicana Field, and the crowd went crazy. Longoria had just stepped into the batter’s box with one out in the bottom of the twelfth.
“I had to step out for a second to gather myself because seeing that score go up was kind of a shock,” he said. “I needed a minute to take a deep breath.”
He used it well. On a 2-2 count, Yankee reliever Scott Proctor threw a fastball on the inside part of the plate, and Longoria crushed it on a rope down the line, headed toward the low barrier in left field. It looked a lot like the shot Mark McGwire had hit in 1998 for his historic and steroid-aided sixty-second home run. The ball just cleared the fence as pandemonium broke loose in Tampa.
“It was all a little surreal the way everything happened so fast in that last inning,” Longoria said ten months later. “It was one of those things that will be tough to repeat. People still stop me in the street to talk about it, and it’s still cool to me.”
On this sultry evening in Durham, Longoria was a long way from that home run, but he was even farther from where he had been in his previous lifetime in Durham at $2,400 a month.
Not long after the 2012 season ended, just a few weeks after his twenty-seventh birthday, Longoria signed a contract extension that guaranteed he would be with the Rays at least through 2022 and would be paid at least $136 million.
In short, if he ever landed back in Durham on rehab, he could rent out not just one suite of the Washington Duke—but the entire hotel.
24
Slice of Life
CHARLOTTE
Evan Longoria’s walk-off home run was one of those baseball moments that will be replayed for years to prove just how dramatic the game can be at its very best.
But it wouldn’t have happened if not for Dan Johnson. And, in truth, what Johnson did was far more stunning than what Longoria did. Longoria is a star, a multimillion-dollar player. If you were casting the hero of a baseball movie, he would have Longoria’s profile.
Not so much Dan Johnson.
While Longoria was being given the royal treatment in Durham, Johnson was playing two and a half hours down I-85 in Triple-A Charlotte. Actually, he was playing two miles into South Carolina, just off I-77 in Fort Mill, South Carolina, which was where Knights Stadium was located.
“Right now that night in Tampa feels like it was a long time ago,” Johnson said shortly after batting practice one evening. “I really believed going into this season that if I stayed healthy I’d be playing in Chicago. Well, I’ve stayed healthy …”
But staying healthy had not gotten him a roster spot with the White Sox, the team he had signed with after being released by the Rays. And so, he found himself playing every day, as he had hoped—but in Charlotte, not as he had hoped. The only games he had missed had been when manager Joel Skinner rested him, kicking and screaming because he hated missing even one day in the lineup.
“Look at that wind,” he said, sitting in the dugout in Norfolk on a warm August afternoon on one of the 7 days (of 144) that he wasn’t on Skinner’s lineup card. “Blowing straight out to right field. Perfect night for me and I’m going to be watching.”
He had spent some time in Skinner’s office earlier that afternoon pleading his case. Skinner wasn’t budging. The Knights were comfortably in first place, and he wanted to keep all his players fresh for the August stretch run and the September playoffs. That said, Skinner was hoping Johnson wouldn’t be around for the playoffs.
“He’s been good every day,” he said. “He could definitely help in Chicago in September. If nothing else, his history says he’s a guy you want around when the games get tense.”
Johnson’s history as a clutch hitter was remarkable—all the more so because he had been hounded by injuries almost from the time he first made it to the major leagues in 2005.
Until then, his career had stayed on a consistent upward curve. He had grown up in Blaine, Minnesota, a town of about twenty thousand people, where hockey was far more popular than baseball. But Johnson had always wanted to be a baseball player.
“I played hockey, liked hockey, wasn’t bad at hockey,” he said. “But I remember telling my first-grade teacher I wanted to be a baseball player. It was just what I always wanted to do.”
Even though the baseball season wasn’t very long in Blaine, Johnson was good enough to be recruited by a number of Division I schools. At one point he thought about going to Iowa State but made a last-second decision to go to Butler. He was an all-conference player as a freshman but left after one year to transfer to Iowa Western Community College.
“Too much academics at Butler,” he said, smiling. “Being honest, I knew I wanted to play baseball, and at Butler you spend a lot of time in class and studying. I wanted to focus more on baseball.”
After a year at Iowa Western, he transferred to Nebraska, where he played well enough to be drafted in the seventh round by the Oakland Athletics. In 2005, after a sizzling start at Sacramento, he got called to the majors, where he was the starting first baseman for most of the season, hitting .275 with fifteen home runs and fifty-eight RBIs. He went
into 2006 penciled in as the starting first baseman.
That was when the injury bug bit him. Or, more specifically, got in his eyes. He was cleaning out his locker at the end of spring training when he found an old tube of suntan lotion. “I was carrying a bunch of stuff into the training room to dump, and I didn’t realize it was open. Some of it got into my right eye. I didn’t know it at the time, but it chemically burned the eye. After a while I realized my tear ducts were affected—I couldn’t cry. I could still see well enough to hit an occasional fastball, but that was about it.”
He was hitting .237 when he got sent down to Sacramento, and it wasn’t until after the season that he went to the Arizona Eye Institute and got a proper diagnosis. That allowed him to report to spring training in 2007 completely healthy. It didn’t last. Late in a spring training game he got his foot stepped on at first base, and when he twisted in pain, he tore the labrum in his hip. Back to the disabled list. He came back to have a reasonably good season—eighteen home runs, sixty-two runs batted in—but a year later the A’s re-acquired Frank Thomas, who could only play first base or DH—which left Johnson as the odd man out. The A’s released him in April, and the Rays signed him and sent him to Durham, where he spent most of the season.
At the end of that year his agent came to him with an offer: a Japanese team was willing to pay him $1.2 million—which was almost four times the money he was making on a split contract with the Rays and more than double what he had made in Oakland.
“I jumped at it,” he said. “All I asked was, ‘When do I leave?’ That’s the kind of money that changes your life.”
Some American players thrive in Japan. Johnson wasn’t one of them. He thought the strike zone was too big and felt as if umpires went out of their way to make it even larger when he was at the plate. “Late in the season one of the umpires told my interpreter that I was just now at the point where I had paid my dues, so they were going to be fair to me.
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Page 24
