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

by John Feinstein

  Gleichowski asked Podsednik what he wanted him to do. “Call around, see what’s out there,” Podsednik told him. “I’ll wait here.”

  He still had the apartment he had rented in Boston. Lisa and the kids had been with him in June and July. On August 2, at Podsednik’s request, the Diamondbacks released him.

  The family headed back to Boston and waited to see if the phone would ring.

  26

  Ron Johnson

  REAL LIFE GETS SERIOUS

  Dan Johnson did get back into the lineup in Norfolk, the day after Charlotte manager Joel Skinner insisted that he sit out. As he sat and watched from the dugout that evening, his team cruised to a 12–3 win that was often cringe-worthy for the home team.

  The Tides were brutal. They gave up one run when catcher Luis Exposito could not successfully throw the ball back to his pitcher. The throw ticked off the glove of Pedro Viola while Charlotte runners on second and third each moved up a base.

  “That’s it,” the Tides’ Dave Rosenfield said as he watched his team fail to execute a catcher-to-pitcher toss. “It’s time to go home.”

  Sadly for Rosenfield and the Tides, it was only the fifth inning.

  The next day, it rained most of the morning and afternoon in Norfolk. It was a get-away day, both teams needing to travel as soon as the five o’clock game was over. The Knights had a relatively easy three-hour trip to Durham. The Tides had to travel 543 miles to get to Gwinnett—which would take almost nine hours.

  “Everything goes well, we get in about six in the morning,” Tides manager Ron Johnson said. He shrugged and repeated his Triple-A mantra: “If you don’t like it, play better and get out of the minor leagues.”

  Johnson was an expert on life in the minor leagues. He had left Fresno State in 1978 to sign with the Kansas City Royals after being drafted in the twenty-fourth round and had spent most of the past thirty-four years in the minors. Three times during his playing career he’d made it to the majors. In 1982 he was in Kansas City for eight games. A year later, he was back for nine more games. The following year, after being traded to Montreal, he made it to the Expos for five games. In all, he played in twenty-two games and had twelve hits in forty-six at-bats for a .261 career average. He also drove in two runs.

  “I guess you could say I’m in the twilight of a mediocre career,” he said, laughing—something he does often. “Honestly, I’m quite proud of the fact that I made it to the majors even if it wasn’t for very long.”

  Johnson had been a football star in high school and could have played Division I college football but chose baseball instead. At fifty-six, he still has the look of an old football player. He was six feet three, 215 pounds during his playing days but is probably closer to 240 now. A large tattoo juts out from under his uniform jersey, and he’s the kind of person who comes straight at you—which makes him the perfect manager to work for Rosenfield, who is exactly the same way.

  “There’s no BS at all in RJ,” said Rosenfield. “It makes life a lot simpler for everyone when someone is like that—especially down here.”

  Johnson made the transition from player to minor-league manager bumpily after he quit playing prior to the 1986 season. He was living in Florida, working for his then wife’s father in his carpet store, and hating every minute of it. “Fish out of water,” he said. “Absolutely wasn’t for me.”

  Since he was living not far from where the Royals trained, Johnson showed up one day at training camp to see some old friends from his playing days. He ran into John Schuerholz, then the Royals’ general manager, and, on a whim, asked him if there might be a job for him in the Royals’ front office.

  Schuerholz told him no, there wasn’t anything open and that he saw him more as a coach than as a front-office person. He recommended he call John Boles, who was then the Royals’ farm director, and let him know he might be interested in a job. Boles didn’t have anything open but told Johnson he’d keep him in mind. Thinking he had struck out, Johnson went back to work for his father-in-law. A couple of months later, Boles called. He was coming to town to see the Royals’ Class A team play. Maybe they could get together.

  “They’d lost their hitting coach,” Johnson said. “John offered it to me. The next day I was in uniform.”

  He’s been in uniform ever since. He coached for six years before getting his first managing job, with the same Class A Royals team where he had been first hired to coach. The team was based in what was then known as Baseball City, Florida—just outside Orlando. He had moved up to the Triple-A job in Omaha before Allard Baird, who had become the Royals’ assistant general manager, cleaned house prior to the 2000 season. After eight years managing Royals minor leaguers, the last two in Omaha, Johnson was among those cleaned out.

  He hooked on with the Red Sox as the manager at Class A Sarasota.

  “I felt like I was back to square one,” Johnson said. “I thought the whole thing was unfair. There I was a step away from the majors, and all of a sudden I’m back in the Florida State League, where they play every afternoon in hundred-degree heat in front of five fans.

  “I’d always had good teams managing for the Royals. They had a lot of young talent in the organization. I’d managed [Carlos] Beltrán and [Johnny] Damon and [Kevin] Appier and a bunch of other good players. So I won a lot. I wasn’t doing very much to make them better players, but I was winning—so I thought I was doing a good job.

  “About halfway through my first season [working for the Red Sox] in Sarasota, Dave Jauss [who was then the Red Sox’ minor-league field coordinator] called to say he was in town and let’s go out to eat. I remember we went out and ate wings and he totally blew me up. I was expecting to get a woe-is-you talk, and he basically looked me in the eye and said, ‘You’ve been terrible.’ ”

  Johnson laughed. “We all think we’re unique in baseball—like no one else has ever been fired. Hey, we all get fired. That’s the norm. I wasn’t doing the things I needed to do as a minor-league manager, especially at that level, where teaching and developing is so important. I can honestly say it wasn’t until then that I felt like I had any idea what it takes to be a good minor-league manager.”

  Lesson learned—without getting fired—Johnson began climbing the ladder again, this time with a different approach to the job. By 2005 he was in Pawtucket, and after five solid seasons there he got the call he had often thought would never come: The Red Sox had an opening on their staff because Brad Mills had been hired to manage in Houston. Terry Francona offered him the job as first-base coach in 2010.

  “Dream come true,” Johnson said. “Let’s face it, there’s no comparison between life in the minors and life in the big leagues.”

  And then the dream became a nightmare.

  Most baseball fans now know the basics of the story: On August 1, 2010, the Red Sox were hosting the Detroit Tigers on a Sunday afternoon in Fenway Park. The Red Sox won a tight 4–3 game, and as they came up the runway, traveling secretary Jack McCormick was in his usual spot, just outside the clubhouse, waiting for Terry Francona and the coaches.

  Baseball is so much about ritual. McCormick’s postgame ritual after a win was to stand by the door and give the manager and his coaches a high five as they walked past him. Francona was the first person to realize something was wrong when he put up his hand for his high five and McCormick looked right through him. A moment later, Johnson arrived and saw that McCormick was holding a phone in his hand. He could tell by the expression on his face that something was terribly wrong.

  “I remember thinking, ‘I hope that phone isn’t for me,’ ” Johnson said two years later, the memory still clearly vivid. “Before I could even say, ‘John, what’s wrong?’ he handed the phone to me and said, ‘Call Daphane. Right now.’ ”

  Ron and Daphane Johnson have now been together for twenty-five years. They met when Johnson, a country music buff, was giving dancing lessons in a country music bar near where he lived in Tennessee. Daphane came in one night, and, as Johnson
puts it, “We got to two-stepping and the rest is history.”

  They have a total of five children, two from Daphane’s first marriage and three of their own. That afternoon, the two youngest children, Cheyanne, who was fourteen, and Bridget, who was eleven days away from turning eleven, were riding their horses from their farm to a neighbor’s house to go swimming. Both girls were outstanding riders—all the Johnsons are expert riders. They were rounding a curve on Cooper Road, right near a sign put there by those who live in the area that says, PLEASE DRIVE SLOW, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN, when they had to cross the road.

  Cheyanne made it across safely. Bridget did not. A car came around the curve traveling, according to the police report, at forty-two miles per hour—the speed limit was thirty-five. According to what the driver told police, he didn’t see Bridget because he was distracted by Cheyanne. He hit Bridget head-on, sending her and the horse flying.

  What happened in the next few minutes is difficult for Johnson to describe even now. Bridget’s left leg was severed. As she lay on the road in a pool of blood, another neighbor, who was not that far behind the driver who hit Bridget, jumped from his car and worked to stanch the bleeding while Cheyanne called her mother. Paramedics were called in, and seventeen minutes later Bridget was in a helicopter en route to Vanderbilt University Children’s Hospital.

  Ron Johnson knew none of this because he was on the field in Boston and his cell phone was in his locker. Unable to reach anyone with the game going on, Daphane finally called the Red Sox’ switchboard, explained who she was, and was put through to McCormick.

  When his wife told him what had happened, Johnson asked her one question: “Is she going to live?”

  “I don’t know” was the honest answer.

  He told Francona and general manager Theo Epstein what had happened, and they had McCormick arrange to get him to the airport and on a plane as soon as possible. Francona later said that when Johnson told him what had occurred, he almost became physically ill.

  McCormick had Johnson on a flight out of Logan Airport within an hour. The problem was he had to go through Detroit to get to Nashville. There was no other way. Naturally, Johnson got stuck in Detroit. “They had the plane there but no pilots,” he said. “I was, to put it mildly, a complete wreck.”

  The airport was virtually empty on a Sunday night, and he sat in a small coffee shop waiting for the flight. There was no news from Nashville except that Bridget was in surgery. While he sipped on some coffee, a man came up to him looking, Johnson said, “as if he was straight out of the ’70s.”

  “Are you okay?” the man asked. “You look terrible.”

  Johnson told him briefly what was going on.

  “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Your daughter’s going to be okay.’ Then he asked for my cell number because he said Rick Allen was a good friend of his and he wanted to put him in touch with me. I had no idea who Rick Allen was, but the guy seemed like a good guy, so I gave him the number.”

  The guy in the coffee shop turned out to be Donny Clark, a close friend of Allen—the Def Leppard drummer who had lost an arm in a car accident in 1984 and had continued his career playing with one arm. Once he got to Nashville, Johnson forgot about the encounter and was baffled by the texts he kept receiving from someone named Rick. When he finally remembered the guy in the airport, he asked his teenage son Christian if he had any idea who Rick Allen was.

  “Of course he was amazed that I had no idea who he was,” Johnson said. “What do you think the chances are of my running into Donny Clark that way at that moment?”

  It was two in the morning before Johnson made it to the hospital. Bridget was out of surgery but was asleep. “We went in and Daphane said, ‘Bridget, Daddy’s here,’ and her eyes flickered open,” Johnson said softly.

  His daughter’s first words that night stayed with him: “Daddy, don’t go.”

  “Honey, I’m not leaving, I’m not walking out of this hospital until you do” was his answer.

  He didn’t leave the hospital for the next thirty-four days. Every night Daphane would go to get some sleep in a hotel across the street (that the Red Sox paid for), and Johnson slept in a chair next to his daughter’s bed. “I didn’t ever want her to wake up alone,” he said.

  The most difficult moment of Bridget’s hospital stay might have come when Ron and Daphane had to tell her that her horse had died in the aftermath of the accident. “She dealt with so much physical pain,” Johnson said, eyes welling again. “The emotional pain of losing the horse was, without doubt, the toughest thing she dealt with.”

  The Red Sox, led by Kevin Youkilis, who had played for Johnson at Pawtucket and still credits him with helping make him a major leaguer, raised money to help Johnson deal with all the expenses that were still to come. Other baseball teams—including the Yankees—literally passed the hat in their clubhouses to raise money. Cards, texts, letters, poured in from all over.

  The doctors couldn’t save Bridget’s leg below the knee but told her she would ride horses again and could be fitted for a prosthetic in a few months. To this day, Johnson chokes up when he talks about the outpouring that came from the Red Sox and all of baseball.

  The only time his voice hardens is when he talks about the man whose car hit his daughter.

  “It was an accident, I understand that,” he said, the words coming more slowly as he spoke. “The police never explained to me why there was no sobriety test at the scene. I thought that was standard in that kind of situation. I have no idea if he was drinking or not.

  “What I do know is that he never called, he never asked to come and see Bridget. One card—he sent one card—and that was it. After she came home, still nothing. He lives so close I can see his house from my barn. For a long time I had trouble letting go of that. It took a lot of talk and a lot of counseling to get to the point where I could just say to myself, ‘Let him live in his own personal hell, we’ve moved on.’

  “I’ve done that now. Bridget is doing great. Her prosthetic has been great, she’s back riding horses regularly, she’s just a terrific and happy kid. It was a horrible, awful thing we lived through, but we lived through it. Most important, she lived through it.”

  Johnson can’t talk enough about the way the Red Sox treated him in the aftermath of the accident—not only financially, but with constant moral and emotional support. He didn’t return to the team for the rest of the 2010 season, and Theo Epstein told him if he wanted to take 2011 off with full pay, that was fine with him and with the club.

  Johnson chose to go back to work in 2011. Bridget was back in school and doing fine, and he was a baseball guy. For most of the season, the Red Sox appeared to be a lock for the playoffs. Then came the collapse that set up the home runs by Dan Johnson and Evan Longoria that sealed Boston’s fate on the last night of the season.

  Two days later, Terry Francona—who had managed the Red Sox to two World Series titles in eight seasons and had helped break the Red Sox’ dreaded “Curse of the Bambino” in 2004—“resigned.” He and the team had agreed that the option on his contract for 2012 would not be picked up.

  Johnson knew his days in Boston were numbered even before Francona was let go. “You go into the last month of the season with an eight-game lead and don’t make the playoffs, heads are going to roll, especially in a market like Boston,” he said. “Once Tito [Francona] left, I was pretty certain it was just a matter of time for me.”

  The time was six days. After what he had been through the year before, getting fired hardly seemed catastrophic to Johnson. Disappointing certainly—he’d been in the Red Sox organization for twelve years—but hardly something he couldn’t handle. He went home and thought about taking a season off from the game to spend more time with his family.

  That notion lasted about six weeks. In early November, soon after Dan Duquette had been named as the new general manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Johnson’s phone rang. It was Duquette, who had hired Johnson to manage in the Red Sox’ syst
em when he had been the general manager there in 2000. Now he wanted to know if Johnson would like to manage in Norfolk.

  It meant going back to the minor leagues—to the long bus trips, the roadside motels, and the 4:00 a.m. wake-ups to deal with airport security for a commercial flight. But Johnson didn’t have to think about it twice. “I’m in,” he said.

  The 2012 season had been hectic, especially since four of the five pitchers who had been in the Orioles’ rotation at the start of the season had been sent to Norfolk during the season—not because of rehab assignments, but because they hadn’t pitched well enough.

  “Buck and I have a routine,” Johnson said, talking about Orioles manager Buck Showalter, who almost always called him directly when he was thinking about a call-up or sending someone down. “He calls and says, ‘RJ, you got a minute?’ I just say, ‘What do you need?’ and then he asks me what I think. We’re usually on the same page, but every once in a while he wants to try something different. I don’t argue. He’s the boss.”

  In the background, as Johnson talked about Showalter, his office television was tuned to the game between the Orioles and the Tigers that was going on in Detroit. Johnson was watching with more than passing interest at that moment. Wei-Yin Chen, the Orioles’ starter that afternoon, had been jumped on for five runs in the first inning.

  “He comes out early, and Buck has to stretch the bullpen out; he’s going to be on the phone in a couple of hours looking for a pitcher,” Johnson said. “The good news is whoever it is will get out of the bus trip to Gwinnett.”

  He looked away from the game for a moment and saw Joel Skinner, the Charlotte manager, poking his head inside the door.

  “What do you think, they gonna bang it?” Skinner asked.

  “Bang it” is baseball slang for calling a game off. It had been raining steadily all day with no apparent end in sight three hours before game time.