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

by John Feinstein

  Boscan called Phil Regan, the former relief pitcher and major-league pitching coach who had been managing in Venezuela for years. He had played for Regan in the past, and Regan was now managing the team in Margarita. Boscan was blunt when he called. “I need a job,” he said. Regan told him he had one for him.

  He had playing time for him too, and Boscan, who had almost always hit well in winter ball, did so again. Midway through the winter season he got a call from Rolando Petit, the scout who had signed him to his first contract as a sixteen-year-old.

  “I’ve got a [minor-league] Braves contract for you to sign,” he said. “Do you want it?”

  “I think I said yes before he finished the sentence,” Boscan said.

  Just as they had done for Buddy Carlyle, the Braves gave Boscan a second life.

  He spent most of 2008 in Double-A but was more laid-back than he had been in the past.

  “I had a different attitude,” he said. “I stopped being frustrated that I wasn’t in the major leagues.” He shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong, I still prayed I would get the chance, but I stopped thinking of myself as a failure because I hadn’t gotten there.”

  Coincidence or not, he began to hit better—perhaps because he was more relaxed at the plate and not squeezing the sawdust out of the bat the way he had in previous years. By 2009 he was back in Triple-A and made the All-Star team. Which led to the scene in the Gwinnett clubhouse in 2010 when the call to the majors finally came.

  “Brundy [Brundage] tells people he didn’t mess with me at all because he saw the look on my face when I went in,” he said, a smile creasing his face as he sat in the almost-empty clubhouse where his best baseball moment had taken place. “Actually, for a minute he did. The first thing he said when I sat down was, ‘JC, you’ve been playing a long time, haven’t you?’ For a split second I panicked because I thought he was going to tell me I should feel good about my career but this was the end.

  “Then he said, ‘Have you ever been to the big leagues?’

  “That’s when I thought maybe this was it because he knew I’d never been. Everyone knew I’d never been. That was when he said, ‘I was going to mess with you, but I can’t,’ and he told me I was going up. I’ll never forget the words: ‘This is your day.’ I’m sure I was crying by the time he finished the sentence.”

  When Boscan got to Atlanta the next day, the first thing he did was take a picture of his uniform hanging in his locker.

  “I’d had a major-league uniform in the big-league locker room in spring training,” he said. “But that was different. In spring training, you’re a visitor. This time I felt like I really belonged.”

  He was along for the ride as the Braves tried to get Cox to the playoffs one final time that September. He got to bat only once—and walked. That meant he had an on-base percentage in the majors of 1.000, but technically he did not have an at-bat, just a plate appearance.

  A year later the Braves brought him back for another September cameo, and in the heat of another pennant race he got to the plate nine times and got his first three major-league hits.

  “Because I’m a catcher, I feel like I’ll get chances longer than most guys,” he said. “But regardless of what happens the rest of my career, I will never—never—forget the day I got called up.

  “I remember it minute to minute. If I played down here for another ten years, that memory will never change.”

  It wasn’t just Boscan’s best moment. “Because I’ve done this awhile, I’ve had the chance to send quite a few guys up, many for the first time,” Brundage said. “But that moment with JC, the look on his face when he realized what I was telling him, and, to be honest, the way his teammates looked when we went out into the clubhouse …” He paused. “Never seen anything quite like it. Doubt I ever will again.

  “Hot nights in August during a long season like this one, you think back to that moment and you smile. And you remember why you have a great job.”

  32

  Slice of Life

  SYRACUSE … WASHINGTON … COLUMBUS …

  On July 21, 2012, John Lannan made it back to the big leagues. It had been three and a half months since Davey Johnson had found Lannan in the tunnel during the Washington Nationals exhibition game with the Red Sox and had to tell him he was being exiled to Syracuse.

  Now Lannan was back. His chance came because a rainout earlier in the season had forced the Nationals and the Atlanta Braves to play a day-night doubleheader in Washington, as part of what had become a crucial four-game series.

  His start that night became even more crucial after the way the series began. On Friday night, the Nationals had a 9–0 lead after five innings (with ace Stephen Strasburg on the mound) and somehow found a way to lose 10–9 in eleven innings. The next afternoon, they were shut out 4–0, shut down for six innings by Ben Sheets—another pitcher trying to restart his major-league career. Suddenly what had once been a comfortable lead in the National League East was down to one and a half games with Lannan, a Triple-A pitcher all season, scheduled to pitch in the night game.

  “I loved getting the ball in that situation,” Lannan said later. “If you don’t love it, then you need to find another job.”

  Easy to say, not so easy to get that job done. But Lannan did just that. He gave up two runs in the first inning and nothing afterward, leaving the game after seven innings with a 3–2 lead that became a 5–2 Nationals victory. After the game his teammates gave him a Gatorade shower as he did a postgame TV interview.

  Then Johnson called him into the same office where he had given him the news that he was being sent down in April and told him he’d done a great job and that the team would call him when he was needed again. He was on a plane back to Syracuse the next morning and had dinner by himself that night sitting at the bar of a Pizzeria Uno.

  Welcome back to Triple-A.

  Thirteen days after his win over Atlanta, Lannan got the same call from Washington. This time the day-night doubleheader was against the Miami Marlins due to another early season rainout. Lannan pitched in the afternoon game. He gave up three runs in six innings and got another win, this time 8–3, and another plane ticket back to Syracuse.

  “By then, I had stopped second-guessing or even first-guessing what they were going to do,” he said. “I knew as long as all five starters were healthy up there, I was going to be in Syracuse. They had made their decision in April, and all of them had pitched well.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. Ross Detwiler, who had beaten Lannan out for the fifth starting spot, had pitched well. But Edwin Jackson, whom the Nationals had thrown $11 million at during the winter in large part because they were conned by his agent, Scott Boras, had been decidedly mediocre. Boras had persuaded team owner Ted Lerner to sign Jackson as backup for Stephen Strasburg—another Boras client.

  Boras had already convinced Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo that he should shut Strasburg down after he had pitched 160 innings in 2012, even if he was healthy, to make sure he had no recurrence of the elbow problems that had led to Tommy John surgery in 2010. Then he talked the owner into spending $11 million on Jackson to fill a role that Lannan could have filled as well or better.

  As upset as he had been in April when he’d been demoted, Lannan was resigned to his fate by August. He went back to Syracuse and continued to work with pitching coach Greg Booker on his delivery. In his last two Triple-A starts of the season he pitched shutouts. Then, with the Nationals getting ready to shut Strasburg down in early September, he was finally called back to the big leagues for good at the end of August.

  He was very happy to be back in the major leagues for a stint that lasted more than twenty-four hours. It had been a long summer in Syracuse.

  If there is one person in the International League who does not crave a call from the major leagues, it is Randy Mobley.

  Mobley has spent his entire life in the state of Ohio and his entire adult life working in the minor leagues. He grew up in Hamilton—ab
out thirty miles north of Cincinnati; got his academic degrees at Otterbein College (sixteen miles northeast of Columbus) and at Ohio State (an MBA). While there, he worked as an intern for the Columbus Clippers and then was hired for a job in the International League office, which was then in Grove City (ten miles southwest of Columbus). After he became the league president in 1990, he moved the office back to Columbus.

  There is no truth to the rumor that he has never been outside the state of Ohio.

  “If you describe me as a midwestern kid, though,” he said, “that would certainly be accurate.”

  Mobley is fifty-four and looks younger than that, perhaps because he’s completely satisfied with his life. He and his deputy, Chris Sprague, run a two-man league office, and there are very few people in the league who have any complaints with the way the two of them keep the league’s engine running.

  “I’ve been very lucky,” he said on a comfortable summer night in Columbus (where else?) as he looked around an almost-full Huntington Park. “I grew up in this league, got to run this league when I was very young [thirty-two], and I still love what I’m doing because the job changes so much from year to year. It’s never boring.”

  Mobley has certainly seen change since he first worked for the Clippers more than thirty years ago. Back then, they played in Cooper Stadium, on the outskirts of town, right off I-70. The ballpark had been around forever, as the home first of the old Columbus Red Birds and then of the Columbus Senators before the Clippers came to town in 1977 (after the city had gone six years without a Triple-A team).

  “This ballpark, all the parks that have been built in the last few years, is symbolic of how far we’ve come in the minor leagues,” Mobley said. “What you saw in Bull Durham really doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, I don’t think you can refer to us as ‘the bush leagues’ anymore either. This isn’t the major leagues, but it’s a long way from being the bush leagues.”

  Huntington is the prototype of the modern minor-league park. It is in downtown Columbus, with parts of the city skyline serving as a backdrop. It is named for a bank, which paid $23 million for twelve years for the naming rights when the stadium opened in 2009. Its capacity is 10,100, but because of the grassy areas beyond the outfield fences the one-game attendance record is 12,517. It has all the modern amenities, corporate boxes, and corporate-named “porches” beyond the outfield fences. Franklin County built the ballpark for $70 million and maintains it. The clubhouses, especially the home clubhouse, would be considered quite acceptable as visiting clubhouses in most major-league parks.

  The fact that the Clippers’ clubhouse comfortably fits a Ping-Pong table is a perfect example of how far minor-league life has come in terms of comfort level.

  “It’s still a place where no one wants to stay very long, for obvious reasons,” Mobley said. “The financial differences for ballplayers, for umpires, for broadcasters, are still huge. But getting sent back down isn’t quite the culture shock it used to be in the old days.”

  Mobley played a major role in the realignment of the minor leagues that occurred in 1998, leading to what exists now. Where there had once been three leagues in Triple-A—the International League, the American Association, and the Pacific Coast League—there are now two: the IL and the PCL, which combined, for all intents and purposes, to swallow the AA in that 1998 shake-up.

  Since 2006 the two leagues have staged a one-game “National Championship” between their respective champions. The game is basically meant to be a showcase for Triple-A players who have had good seasons, although, as Mobley points out, it is also worth some extra money for the players: $2,000 per player to the winning team and $1,000 per player to the losing team. For men making somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 a month on a six-month-a-year job, that isn’t a bad one-game bonus.

  “I’m one of those lucky people who found a niche early that I’m completely comfortable with,” Mobley said. “My family [he has two grown children] grew up here, and I enjoy the people I work with. I guess I’m the one minor leaguer who has no aspirations of ever becoming a big leaguer.”

  Just don’t call him a bush leaguer.

  33

  Tomko and Lindsey

  IT’S NEVER OVER TILL …

  Brett Tomko was back in uniform … again.

  He had gone home after David Bell had given him the news that the Reds were releasing him from Louisville and wondered if he had finally reached the end of the line as a baseball player. Louisville had been his twenty-fifth stop in his eighteen years as a professional pitcher—ten in the majors; fifteen in the minors. Maybe that was the final number. Maybe it was time to jump off the carousel.

  Or maybe not.

  He had been home in Phoenix for a week with Julia and the twins, who were now a month shy of turning three, when the phone rang. It was Joe Longo, his agent. The Arizona Diamondbacks were interested in signing him for the rest of the season. Tomko wasn’t too surprised to hear that the call had come from the Diamondbacks: he knew that David Bell would put in a good word for him with his brother Mike, who was their farm director.

  Even so, when Longo said “Arizona,” for a split second Tomko thought the perfect storm had landed in his backyard: not only was he being offered a job, but the Diamondbacks were right there in Phoenix. He could live in his own home and pitch again.

  Then he came back to reality. The Diamondbacks’ offer was to go to Mobile, Alabama—which was 1,640 miles from his backyard—and, beyond that, in the Double-A Southern League. That was the offer: BayBears or bust. Tomko sighed, packed again, and got on a plane to fly to Alabama.

  He still believed he could pitch—as he had told Bell before leaving Louisville—and, sure enough, given the ball in Mobile, he had two good outings in a row. He even got a couple of wins, something that hadn’t happened in Louisville even on those nights when he had pitched well. The Diamondbacks noticed, and on August 24 they moved him up to Reno—which was in contention for the PCL playoffs.

  “It all happened very quickly,” Tomko said. “On August 1, I was in Louisville pitching for a last-place team. The next day I’m released. Three weeks later I’ve been to Mobile and I’m in Reno pitching for a team where the games actually kind of matter. The stadium was full, which was nice too. The important thing was I was still playing baseball.”

  He was playing in the twenty-seventh city of his career.

  Tomko wasn’t expecting the Diamondbacks to call him up in September. He still believed he could help, just as he believed he could have helped the Reds. But he was thirty-nine, and he had been released less than a month earlier. He knew his chances for a call-up were somewhere between slim and none, and slim rarely shows up in Triple-A in late August.

  So he put his head down and kept grinding. He got two starts in Reno before the playoffs began. They were a lot like his starts in Louisville: reasonably good, but not as good as Tomko would have liked. Still, he was on the playoff roster when the Aces began the postseason against Sacramento—a team that Tomko, not surprisingly, had pitched for in the past.

  “Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of places where I haven’t pitched,” he joked.

  The first-round playoff series was a best of five with no off days, meaning each team would need five starting pitchers unless one of the managers decided to start someone on three days’ rest. That was, generally speaking, frowned upon in the minors, even in postseason. Aces manager Brett Butler let Tomko know that if there was a fifth and deciding game, he would go with his No. 5 starter and not bring back game-one starter Charles Brewer on short rest.

  Which meant, if the series came down to a fifth game, Tomko would have the ball.

  He was still in the game.

  There are two kinds of Augusts in major-league baseball. There are the Augusts when a team is in contention and the ballpark is full or close to full every day. It may be hot, but you almost don’t notice, because the games are important and the electricity in the building fills you with adrenaline.

>   “When you take the field at home and you hear the crowd, the only thing you feel at that moment is the rush,” said Nate McLouth, who had gone from unemployed in early June to starting in left field in Baltimore in early August. The Orioles were contending for the first time in fifteen years, and even though the fans were only just beginning to notice, the feeling in Camden Yards each night was different than it had been the previous fourteen Augusts.

  Then, the Orioles had been going through the other kind of August. The kind where you drag into the ballpark in the middle of the afternoon—or, worse, the middle of the morning for day games—and stay in the air-conditioned clubhouse until the last possible moment. During Augusts like that, you tell yourself there’s still a lot to play for: your future, your pride, and those who loyally show up night after night even when the team is going nowhere.

  Still, it is tough to take the field to the sounds of silence. It isn’t fun, for example, to be a New York Met and play in a ballpark technically called “Citi Field” but dubbed by New York radio talk show host Steve Somers “Citi Morgue.”

  “The only good thing about a season like that is you find out a lot about guys,” said Tony La Russa, who had managed through very few of those seasons during thirty-three years as a major-league manager. “The guy who still comes to play, even when it doesn’t matter, is the guy you want to keep around. The guy who has already mentally packed it in, you probably don’t want.”

  He smiled. “Of course they’re all in the big leagues, making big-league money, living the big-league life. It isn’t exactly all bad.”

  It is a lot better than August in Triple-A, regardless of a team’s record. Charlie Montoyo’s mantra that he kept repeating to his players: “It’s a lot less hot in August when you’re winning than when you’re losing,” was true—up to a certain point.

  Montoyo had been through five Triple-A Augusts as the manager of a contending team. He preferred that to the August he was living through in 2012, with a team that was under .500 and would be packing its bags to go home as soon as the season ended on September 3.