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

by John Feinstein

  “Two days,” Lollo said. “That’s it.”

  “Maybe we got bad information on that.”

  Lollo asked Jones if his rating was based strictly on Jones’s opinions or if there was a consensus.

  “Mark, one opinion isn’t going to keep you out or get you in,” Jones said. “That’s not the way it works.”

  Lollo almost didn’t want to ask the next question.

  “Am I going to be released?” he finally asked.

  There was a long pause. “It’s a possibility,” Jones answered.

  Lollo felt the air go out of him. He had been concerned about not being called up more often, but he hadn’t really thought there was a possibility he was going to be out of a job.

  When Lollo said nothing, Jones went into what Lollo later called “the farewell spiel.”

  “He talked about how this was the toughest part of the job and how far I had come to be where I was. Everything you would expect. It was the old ‘really love you, you’re fired’ speech.

  “I was stunned. All of a sudden it hit me that I was going to be looking for a job, a full-time job, very soon. I wasn’t going to be an umpire anymore. I wasn’t going to the big leagues. He’d just told me my dream was dead.

  “It hurt. It was sad, very sad. But there was some sense of relief. At least I knew. I had to start making plans, had to figure out where and how to start my life over at the age of thirty.”

  He smiled. “The only good thing was I knew my wife was going to be thrilled. I would be home, a full-time husband and father. I tried to picture her doing cartwheels when I told her so I could cheer myself up.

  “Umpiring is never an easy life. If you make it to the big leagues, you can make very good money and live very well. I know I beat the odds: I went from a one-in-a-hundred chance to make the majors full-time to a one-in-three chance. I feel good about the work I did and the people I met.

  “I made myself think all those things when I hung up the phone that day. I believe all those things—because they’re true.”

  He paused. “But I’d be lying if I told you it didn’t hurt.”

  36

  March to September

  The end of the Triple-A season comes quickly. Once August begins, everyone has one eye on the door—knowing it is either going to lead to a September call-up (chances being about one in six on most teams) or home. Making the playoffs is a mixed blessing: It means extra pay, and it means you’ve won more often than you’ve lost. But it also means extra travel when you’re tired and playing games that ultimately aren’t going to get you closer to the big leagues.

  “I hope they call every one of my guys up before the playoffs start,” said Dave Miley, the manager at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. “I’ll play with whoever they leave me. I know they’d all rather be on a major-league bench someplace than down here playing postseason.”

  Miley’s wish was almost granted. On the night of August 31, after his team had played a “home” game in Pawtucket, came word that six of Miley’s players were September call-ups. They were all out of Pawtucket headed for Yankee Stadium within a couple of hours of getting word. Miley, who was going to be the runaway choice for IL Manager of the Year (after his team won the North Division by five games over the PawSox), was left to re-create his roster in four days before the playoffs began.

  “Couldn’t be happier for all of them,” he said.

  The happiest among the six players called up had to be Chris Dickerson, who had started the season very angry—not just because he hadn’t made the team, but because he had been taken off the forty-man roster when he was sent down early in spring training. He had spent most of the season quietly seething about his fate but had played good enough baseball to force the Yankees to put him back on the forty-man so they could call him up. Teams don’t like moving players onto their forty-man roster before September unless they have to, because the player who is removed has to go through waivers, meaning any other team can claim him. The Yankees decided he could help in September when rosters expanded, so he was moved to the forty-man so he could be called up.

  “The only answer to what they did,” he said one night in July, “is to hit .316.”

  Which is what he was hitting for Scranton/Wilkes-Barre at that moment.

  The Scranton six all made it to Yankee Stadium in time for a Saturday afternoon game against the Baltimore Orioles, who were making life miserable for the Yankees by hanging right with them in the race for the AL Eastern Division lead. For once, the Yankees didn’t have to worry about the Red Sox, who were on their way to a horrific 69-93 season, but the pesky Orioles were right on their heels.

  On Sunday morning, Dickerson walked into the clubhouse, checked the lineup, and saw that he was playing center field and batting eighth. Curtis Granderson had tweaked a hamstring the day before, and manager Joe Girardi had told Dickerson before he left the clubhouse there was a possibility he might be in the lineup on Sunday.

  “Joe has always done that, given me a heads-up if he thinks he’s going to start me,” Dickerson said. “He just said to me, ‘Be ready,’ as I was leaving on Saturday. I was definitely ready.”

  Dickerson’s first major-league at-bat of the 2012 season came in the bottom of the second inning against Orioles right-hander Chris Tillman. Catcher Russell Martin was on first base. The count went to 2-1, and Tillman tried to get a cutter inside on Dickerson’s hands.

  He failed.

  Dickerson, expecting the pitch, got his hands into the hitting zone before the ball could cut all the way through it. “I knew it was gone pretty much as soon as it came off the bat,” he said. “I turned on it and got all of it. I would have been surprised if it hadn’t gone out.”

  It did, into the right-center-field bleachers, giving the Yankees a 2–0 lead. Dickerson’s feet barely touched the ground as he rounded the bases.

  “All the home runs I’ve hit in my life I’ve never felt like that,” he said. “Not as a kid, not the first one I hit in the majors [in 2008]. There was a rush of adrenaline through my body that was unreal. To come back to that stadium after the year I’d had and the way I’d been treated and hit one out my first time up …”

  He stopped. “Some things are beyond description. You feel it inside you in a way you can’t put into words.”

  As he rounded the bases on that bright Sunday afternoon, Dickerson was a long way from the lonely nights he had spent in hotel rooms throughout the 2012 season. He was back where he believed he belonged.

  Scott Elarton was pleased with the fact that he had been able to come back from his hamstring injury (after missing only one start) to get back on the mound and—finally—win his sixth game of 2012. But as he watched the final few days of the season wind down in Lehigh Valley, he felt an almost inescapable sense of melancholy.

  “Once we knew we weren’t making the playoffs [which happened with two games left in the season], I began thinking that Monday [the last game of the season] might be the last time I ever pitched in a real game,” he said. “I mean, I had no idea what 2013 was going to hold for me.

  “The fact is, after my good start, I fell off a cliff. You can put it any way you want to, but that’s what happened. I’ve thought about it a lot. I know in mid-May, after I’d pitched so well to start the season, I thought there was a real chance I’d get called up. The opportunity was there because the Phillies had guys hurt. In the end, I guess they decided it wasn’t worth taking someone off the forty-man [roster] to put me on it for what might only be a couple of starts.

  “I get that, but it was definitely a disappointment. Whether that affected me emotionally, I just don’t know. But I wasn’t the same pitcher the next couple months. So now I’m looking at turning thirty-seven and knowing teams are going to look at my numbers from this season and aren’t going to be bowled over. I know I pitched well a lot of the time, and I believe I can still pitch.”

  He smiled. “But I may be a little bit biased.”

  During those final days, El
arton made a point of seeking out some of his teammates, especially the older ones, to spend some time talking about life in baseball, about their experiences and their feelings as they knew their careers were winding down.

  “It wasn’t one of those ‘meaning of life’ sort of things, nothing like that,” he said. “It was just sitting around with guys like Michael Spidale and Pete Orr, who aren’t as old as I am [Spidale was thirty, Orr, thirty-three] but who had been around awhile and knew that there probably weren’t that many years left—if any, in my case. It was good for me because it made me realize that in spite of all my ups and downs I’d been very lucky. But it also made me think again about the fact that there comes a time when you are no longer a baseball player, and that’s tough to handle for all of us. That’s why most of us hang on to it for as long as we possibly can.”

  The last day of the season dawned rainy and bleak. The game was scheduled for one o’clock, and Elarton was in the clubhouse early. His car was packed so he could start driving west as soon as the game was over once he had showered and said his good-byes.

  The weather report wasn’t good—all-day rain was the forecast. But the IronPigs didn’t want to send a sellout crowd home—or whatever portion of that crowd showed up—without doing everything possible to play one more baseball game before closing up shop for the winter.

  As he was sitting in the clubhouse, it occurred to Elarton that he really wanted the chance to pitch one more game. He wanted to end the season on a high note—two straight good outings—and show people that he had found whatever it was that had been missing when he had gone over the cliff.

  But it was more than that. As the rain continued to come down, it occurred to Elarton once more that this might be his last day in a baseball uniform. He walked out to the dugout and sat alone for a while watching it rain, knowing that the chances of playing weren’t good at all.

  “They were going to wait as long as they could,” he said. “But there was going to come a point where playing was dangerous. It wouldn’t make sense to risk someone getting hurt in order to play a meaningless game.”

  Not meaningless to Elarton, but, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless. He was pondering all that when John Suomi joined him in the dugout. Suomi was a month shy of thirty-two and had been playing in the minor leagues for eleven years. This was his fourth stint with Lehigh Valley and the longest he had ever stuck in Triple-A. He had no idea what his future held beyond that afternoon.

  Elarton had already seen what life was like without baseball once, and he had struggled with it—in part because he had felt as if he had walked away in mid-sentence: that his struggles with alcohol and his health had forced him to leave before he was ready. Now, four years older, at the end of a season in which he had been healthy both emotionally and physically, he still wasn’t sure if he was ready to face the end.

  “John and I had a long talk about what your last day in baseball might feel like,” Elarton said. “We agreed we didn’t want it to feel like this, but maybe this was just reality.”

  Or, in this case, instead of a career ending with a ground ball to shortstop, it might end with a rainout.

  The end came officially just before four o’clock when manager Ryne Sandberg told the players the game had been called off. A man of few words to the end, Sandberg thanked everyone for their hard work during the season and wished them all luck.

  “I sat there for about two minutes thinking how disappointed I was that I didn’t get to pitch one more time,” Elarton said. “And then it was over. I got dressed, said some quick good-byes, and I was probably in the car within fifteen minutes of Ryno finishing up. I had a long way to drive.”

  He had 1,606 miles to drive to get to Lamar. His goal was to be there in time to pick the kids up from school on Wednesday, as they had requested/ordered him to do. “I stopped in a motel and slept for four hours,” he said. “Other than that I just kept on going.”

  And so, when Kenan and Chloe Elarton walked out of school on Wednesday afternoon, their dad was waiting for them—just as he had promised.

  It wasn’t a perfect ending to the season, but it was a perfect start to the off-season. Or whatever came next.

  Chris Schwinden was in Allentown that same final day, sitting in the cramped visitors’ clubhouse across the hall from the IronPigs’ clubhouse. He felt none of the swirling emotions Elarton did as he waited out the last rain delay of the season.

  There were reasons for this: For one thing, he would turn twenty-six on his next birthday, not thirty-seven. For another, he wasn’t scheduled to pitch. He had ended his season four days earlier on a satisfying note in Rochester, pitching six strong innings (three earned runs, four hits, and five strikeouts) to get the win.

  The victory meant he finished the Buffalo portion of his season with an 8-6 record and an ERA of 2.70. During the thirty-five days he had wandered in the Triple-A desert, he had pitched 22.1 innings and given up twenty earned runs. In 106.1 innings in Buffalo he had given up thirty-two earned runs.

  Buffalo, as it turned out, was the promised land.

  “Some of it was comfort, some of it was getting my confidence back, some of it was being able to develop my changeup as a strikeout pitch,” he said, sitting in the first-base dugout on the other side of the infield from where Elarton would soon come out to ponder the rain and his future. “In the end, though, all it means is I’ve got something to take with me to spring training next year. I still know I’m not the pitcher I need to be to have success in the majors. Triple-A, yes; the majors, so far, no. I haven’t won a game there, and I haven’t pitched very well there.

  “I need to show them that they can give me the ball every fifth day and expect a quality start out of me. Of course, after this year, I’m going to have to earn my way back up there. I know I’ve fallen back in the pecking order some, but I think I showed them I still have the potential to be a good pitcher.

  “I just need another chance.”

  He smiled. “I guess that’s what everyone says, isn’t it? ‘Give me one more chance.’ Well, I can say it too. I hope I get it.”

  John Lindsey’s season ended on an uptick. He had finished 2011 wondering if it might be time to retire. He finished 2012 convinced he still had a chance to get back to the major leagues one more time.

  On the penultimate day of the season, a cool, overcast day in Toledo, he hit a three-run fifth-inning home run off Columbus’s Eric Berger with a sellout crowd of 9,831 in the ballpark. Even during a 60-84 season, the people of Toledo flocked to Fifth Third Field right until the end.

  The home run led the Mud Hens to what would be their last win of the season, an 8–5 decision over the Clippers. The home run was the fifteenth Lindsey had hit since he had arrived in Toledo in June and Phil Nevin had slotted him into the cleanup spot in the lineup. “The guy can flat out hit,” Nevin said. “It would help him if he had a natural position defensively, but at this point in his career he really doesn’t. But if you need a bat, he’s going to give you one.”

  The Tigers were healthy for their September stretch run, and Lindsey didn’t harbor any fantasies about a late call-up. But he did believe he had revived his career with the season he’d had—starting out in Mexico and ending with success in Triple-A.

  “I had to work my way back into a major-league organization,” he said. “No one wanted to sign me in the spring. Now I feel like someone is going to give me a chance in spring training next season. I’d like to get into some exhibition games, show people I can hit major-league pitching, at least put that in their minds even if I don’t make a team out of camp.

  “A year ago I was close to retiring. Now I feel like I’m not that far from the majors. I honestly believe it can happen again. I’m just going to go back and do what I did last off-season, because I think the weight I took off made my bat quicker and kept me fresher during the season.

  “Funny thing is, if they looked at the numbers I had this year and I was going to be twenty-six instead of
thirty-six, I’d probably be thought of as a pretty hot prospect. I understand how it works. I have to make sure not to think about things like that. They just get in the way. I’ll just go someplace and try to keep putting up numbers—wherever I might be.

  “At least now I feel confident that I’ll get a chance. That’s all I’ve ever asked for in the game—a chance.”

  Lindsey had earned that—for at least one more year.

  While Elarton, Lindsey, and Schwinden were nearing the ends of their seasons, there wasn’t a lot of suspense to the Triple-A pennant races as the season wound down around the league.

  The International League division races were all decided before the final weekend—well before it in both the South and the West. Indianapolis won the West by a whopping fourteen-game margin over Columbus, finishing at 89-55, the league’s best record. Charlotte won almost as easily in the South, finishing nine games ahead of Norfolk with an 83-61 mark. In the North, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre stumbled a little down the stretch—the long season of travel perhaps catching up—but still finished a comfortable five games ahead of Pawtucket with a final record of 84-60.

  The only real suspense was for the wild card spot, with Pawtucket, Lehigh Valley, and Norfolk still having a shot going into the final week of the season. But the PawSox went on a six-game winning streak during the final week, making it impossible for either Lehigh Valley or Norfolk to close ground. They clinched the last playoff spot with two days left in the season, when thirty-eight-year-old Nelson Figueroa pitched eight shutout innings in a 2–0 win over Scranton/Wilkes-Barre (which was playing its first game without the six September call-ups) to raise his record for the season to 12-5.

  That meant the playoffs were set: Charlotte would play Indianapolis, and Pawtucket would play Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Unlike in the majors, where wild card teams don’t play a team from their own division in the first round, the playoff matchups are locked in before the season begins. The North champion was scheduled to play the wild card team regardless of what division that team came from.