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

by John Feinstein

  Minor-league playoffs, especially at the Triple-A level, don’t have the urgency that major-league playoffs have, in large part because teams often strip the Triple-A club of key players before or even during the playoffs if they have a need.

  “It isn’t as if you don’t want to win,” Pawtucket manager Arnie Beyeler said. “Of course you want to win. And when you get to hold a championship trophy at any level of baseball, it’s a special feeling. But it isn’t as if this is what you’ve been building to all season. It isn’t the same kind of climax I would think they feel up in the majors.”

  The series are all best of five, with a two-three format. That means the wild card team—in this case Pawtucket—gets to play its first two games at home. Again, an advantage more at the Triple-A level than in the majors.

  “You get down 2–0 and go home knowing you have to win three, it’s going to be tough,” Charlotte manager Joel Skinner said. “You shouldn’t be feeling let down, but it’s human nature. Guys are tired; some are unhappy they aren’t in the majors. It’s just not as easy to get up one more time when you get in a hole like that.”

  Scranton/Wilkes-Barre found itself in that sort of hole after losing the opening two games in Pawtucket. Returning to their “home” in Rochester, the Yankees found themselves down 3–1 going to the bottom of the ninth inning of game three. Clearly, it was time to call it a season. Somehow, they rallied one more time. After they had scored a run off Tony Peña Jr., Pawtucket manager Beyeler called in veteran Pedro Beato to try to finish off the Yankees. Beato got the second out of the inning, but with the score 3–2, two men out, and a man on first Melky Mesa turned on a Beato fastball and hit it out of the park for a walk-off, two-run homer, keeping the Yankees’ season alive.

  That moment was cause for a celebration at home plate because it happened with such stunning swiftness. Mesa was surrounded by the time he reached the plate, and suddenly—or so it seemed—the Yankees had life.

  “It’s a team that won’t die,” manager Dave Miley said with a satisfied smile after the game.

  At least until the next night. On a cool, cloudy night, with an announced attendance of 442 fans milling around Rochester’s Frontier Field, the PawSox shelled Yankees starter Vidal Nuño for seven runs in the second inning and cruised to a 7–1 win from there—Nelson Figueroa again the winning pitcher.

  That put the PawSox into the Governors’ Cup Series against Charlotte, which had beaten Indianapolis in four games. The teams had split two games in Indy before the Knights, playing in front of crowds not much bigger than the ones in Rochester, won the last two games at home to reach the finals.

  The championship series didn’t take very long. Again, the PawSox were untouchable at home. By the time the teams got back to Charlotte, the Knights not only were down 2–0 but knew they had to face Figueroa, who had been virtually unhittable the last month of the season after being traded by the Yankees to the Red Sox, meaning he had moved from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre to Pawtucket. A crowd of 1,102 showed up for game three, and the Knights never had a lead. Figueroa was again brilliant, and the PawSox clinched their first Governors’ Cup since 1984 with a 4–1 victory.

  Figueroa had pitched in parts of nine seasons in the majors and had probably never pitched better than he did during the last six weeks of the 2012 season. But it wasn’t enough to merit another call-up.

  “It’s a nice feeling,” Beyeler said of winning the title. “I’m sure we’ll all remember that we were a part of this.”

  On the night the championship was clinched, seven of the twenty-five players in uniform had been playing in Pawtucket on opening day in April. All were excited to win and to have their picture taken with the trophy.

  And, if truth were told, they all would rather have been someplace else that night.

  They would rather have been where Scott Podsednik was: playing in Boston for the Red Sox.

  Eight days after he had been told to report to Reno by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Podsednik, having received his release, was still in Boston hoping the phone would ring with the news that someone wanted to sign him to a major-league contract.

  It hadn’t.

  “Finally, I decided it was time to pack up and go home,” he said. “We made plane reservations, packed the apartment, and put our car on a truck to be shipped back to Texas. Honestly, I thought maybe it was over.”

  On the morning the Podsedniks were scheduled to fly out of Boston (August 9), the phone finally rang. It was his agent, Ryan Gleichowski. The Red Sox had decided they wanted to re-sign him for the rest of the season. They were willing to guarantee he would stay in the majors—easier in mid-August since rosters would expand on September 1.

  The Red Sox had decided to option Ryan Kalish, who was hitting .229, back to Pawtucket. That left an opening for an outfielder, and they decided that Podsednik was the best option.

  “It was great to get the call, but it was a little bit wild,” Podsednik said, laughing. “I had to get in the car we had rented and chase down our car—because all my stuff was in it. It was a couple of hours down the road, so I called the guys driving the truck and just told them to pull over and wait until I got there. I caught up to them, got what I needed, and turned around and drove back to Boston.”

  Lisa and the boys went home as had already been planned. Podsednik got an extension on the apartment lease and headed to Cleveland to meet the team there. The Red Sox were just starting a ten-game road trip to Cleveland, Baltimore, and New York. He was back on the road again—but it was in the major leagues.

  “I just felt I had proved that I could still produce in the majors, so what was the point of going back to the minors again?” he said. “And I had decided that if I was going to spend time away from my family, even just on road trips, I was going to do it in the major leagues. I was thirty-six years old. I did my time in Triple-A. I went back there at the start of the year, even though I didn’t think I belonged there, and I proved when I got to Boston that I didn’t belong there.

  “So it was a major-league deal or go home. I was happy not to go home.”

  And the Red Sox were happy to have him back. He was in and out of the lineup the rest of the season, frequently going in as a defensive replacement on the nights he didn’t start. He ended up the season with 199 major-league at-bats, a batting average of .302, and eight steals. Solid numbers, the kind that would make most people think the Red Sox would want him back in 2013.

  But the team had been unloading big names and salaries even before the end of the season, retrenching after a 69-93 disaster. Manager Bobby Valentine was fired. The Red Sox decided to go young, not old. Podsednik became a free agent at the end of October.

  He had gotten his wish and his chance—finally—in 2012. But there were no guarantees for the future.

  37

  Lollo and Tomko

  ENDING

  SEPTEMBER 18, 2012 … DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA

  The last day of the minor-league baseball season was a perfect day to play ball—indoors. The rain started in Durham before the sun came up, and by mid-afternoon the entire town looked drowned, with the rain still coming down in sheets.

  International League president Randy Mobley forced a smile while standing in the lobby of the hotel that was the headquarters for all those who had come from around the country for the national championship game. The Pacific Coast League champions, the Reno Aces, were set to take on the International League champion, the Pawtucket Red Sox, but the weather was presenting a major challenge.

  “They’re saying that there might be a window late afternoon into the evening for a few hours,” Mobley said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. I know everyone wants to get the game in tonight.”

  Mobley is one of those people who can look at rain coming down sideways and see the rainbow coming behind it. There was no doubt he was right about one thing: everyone wanted to play that night. No one wanted another twenty-four hours of sitting-around time when the next stop on everyone’s itinerary was
home.

  Mark Lollo was also sitting in the lobby as the rain poured down. Like almost everyone else, he was happy to be someplace other than his room. He listened to Mobley’s weather report and shook his head.

  “This whole month has been bittersweet, and today sort of sums it all up,” he said. “They haven’t officially told me yet that I’m going to be released … but I feel pretty certain this is my last game. It was great to be chosen as the crew chief for both playoff series I worked, to work the plate in game one of the championship series. That’s a nice feeling, that the people you work for respect what you’re doing.”

  He smiled. “My wife’s happy. She can’t wait for me to come home and stay home and have a job where I won’t be on the road all the time. I can’t blame her. It’s tough when I’m away for a long time and she’s at home with two very young kids.”

  He took a long pause and glanced in the direction of the window, where the rain was still pelting down. “It’s just hard to think that whenever I walk off the field—tonight, tomorrow, whenever we play—that’s it. I’m not an umpire anymore. I’ve thought of myself as an umpire since I was a teenager.”

  Those who play go through what Lollo was going through, but usually not as abruptly—and rarely when they feel their career should still be on an up curve. Someone who has risen from the lowest level of the minors to spend time in the majors rarely finds himself being told he’s done at the age of thirty. Players are sent back to the minors, yes, but the option to play and move up again is still there. For an umpire, there is no option. It is up or out. Unless someone in New York decided to overrule Cris Jones’s evaluation of him, Lollo knew he was out.

  “I’m going to work this game tonight as if it’s the last one I’ll ever work in my life,” he said, forcing a laugh. “Because, in all likelihood, it is.”

  Brett Tomko was taking the same approach.

  He knew he probably wasn’t going to play in the championship game that night but comforted himself knowing that he had played a role in getting Reno to the championship game. He had pitched the deciding fifth game of Reno’s series against Sacramento in the opening round of the PCL playoffs, although he hadn’t been certain until the day of the game that he’d be able to make it to the mound.

  “I was still sore,” he said. “Getting back to 100 percent after a major injury at thirty-nine is a lot harder than when you’re twenty-nine. When I took my physical with the Diamondbacks, they found all sorts of stuff in my shoulder left over from the injury in Louisville back in May.

  “I thought I might flunk, but they said, ‘Hey, you’re thirty-nine, you’re coming back from an injury, this is normal.’ I knew I could go out and pitch, but when I did, I was sore. It was okay in the regular season and I pitched pretty well, but when you get in postseason, you are trying to win. And when you’re playing a win-or-go-home game, you don’t want to walk out there and get blown up and walk off the mound knowing you’ve cost your team a chance to win the ball game.”

  Reno manager Brett Butler had played in the majors until he was forty, so he understood the notion of pushing a creaky body to the breaking point. Before game four, with Reno up 2–1 in the series, he called Tomko in to see how he was feeling.

  “If we have to play tomorrow, you okay?” he asked.

  Tomko thought it was important to be honest with Butler, not just to play the brave soldier, because doing so and getting bombed wouldn’t help anyone.

  “Brett, I’m not 100 percent,” he said. “You know that. I think I’m 80, I really believe that. I think I can give you five or six innings, but if you’re worried about me not being totally healthy and you want to go with someone else, I understand.”

  Butler leaned forward and said softly, “Brett, I’d take you at 50 percent. I mean that. Let’s see what happens tonight. Then you tell me how you feel if we have to play.”

  They had to play. Sacramento won the fourth game 7–1, meaning the deciding fifth game would be the next night. Tomko tossed and turned trying to sleep but woke up knowing he wanted to pitch. “It was there in my gut, I knew I wanted to go out there,” he said. “I knew it might be my last time starting a professional game, and I wanted to battle and just give everything I had left. I believed it would be good enough. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have pitched.”

  He told Butler how he felt when he got to the park. Butler nodded—that was the answer he had wanted.

  Tomko got through five innings. He pitched out of a couple of jams, gave up three runs early, but kept the Aces in the game. He got everything he could out of the 80 percent he had. He left down 3–0, but the Aces rallied to win 7–4, and he knew he had helped by keeping the score close until their bats had broken loose.

  “It wasn’t as if I’d gone out and pitched a three-hit shutout,” he said. “But I knew I’d done everything I could, and my teammates knew it too. That was a great feeling.”

  Butler told him the rotation for the PCL championship series against Omaha would be the same as it had been against Sacramento: if there was a game five, Tomko would be his starter. This time, though, there was no game five; the Aces won the fourth game 8–2 to clinch the series and the Pacific Coast League title, meaning they would play Pawtucket in the national championship game in Durham. Tomko was happy to see his team win, although he wouldn’t have minded one more chance to pitch.

  Like Elarton, he had become keenly aware of the ticking clock and the fact that he might be spending his last days as a baseball player. “It crossed my mind all the time,” Tomko said. “I’d find myself thinking, ‘Is this the last time I walk into a clubhouse and put on a uniform? Is this the last time I throw a bullpen? Ride a team bus? Check into a hotel? Pack for a road trip?’

  “It was all there, very clearly in my mind. I knew I wanted to see if I could play again in ’13, but I also know there aren’t a lot of jobs for banged-up forty-year-old pitchers—and I’d be forty [April 7] right around opening day. I wanted to make sure I took everything in because it might be my last chance.”

  Tomko was thinking those thoughts as he walked through the hotel lobby on the afternoon of the championship game, wondering if the game would be played. “I was thinking it might be my last rainout,” he joked.

  The lobby was crowded because it was almost time to leave for the ballpark—but no one was sure if there was a ball game to go to. Tomko ran into Lollo, and the two men stopped to chat for a few minutes. They had developed an interesting relationship during the season—not a friendship, because players and umpires can’t be friends, but a relationship.

  “I had never had him in a game before this season,” Lollo said. “I knew who he was because he’d been around such a long time and had been in the majors for so long. Then I had the plate for a game he pitched in May—just before he got hurt.

  “I could tell right away why he’d been so successful. He knew how to pitch, how to work a batter. Early in the game, there were some pitches I could tell he wanted that I didn’t give him. I have a pretty consistent zone. Good pitchers figure that out. He never reacted like, ‘You missed it’; I could just tell when he wanted one—good pitchers push that envelope because the more zone they can get, the tougher it is for the hitter. But he adjusted and pitched a really good game.

  “I ran into him later and he said nice things about the way I worked the game and I told him the same. After that, whenever we had Louisville someplace, I’d chat with him a little. They were struggling as a team, and a lot of the other guys in the league didn’t like working their games very much. [Manager] David Bell got on people a lot, but I got along fine with him too. I liked working their games.”

  Lollo told Tomko he was glad to see he had found another place to pitch after Louisville had given him his release in early August. Tomko, who knew that Lollo had worked games in the majors, asked him how his season had gone.

  “Well, I’m here, which is good,” Lollo said. “But I’ve been told I’m probably going to be released at the end of the
season.”

  Tomko was stunned. He thought Lollo was a good umpire and a good guy. As a player, he never really thought much about umpires either moving up or being moved out.

  “It really hit me,” he said. “Here I was thinking I might be at the end, but knowing I was going to go home and look at my options. He didn’t have any options. They just said, ‘You’re gone,’ and it might be because one guy just didn’t like him for some reason. I honestly felt awful after we talked. I kept looking at him all through the game thinking about how unfair it was.”

  Lollo was working first base because he’d had the plate during the All-Star game, meaning the lead umpire for the PCL, Eric Loveless, would work the plate. Loveless had never made the call-up list, and like Lollo he had been told he wasn’t coming back for 2013.

  That meant there were three men in the game who knew this was their last night on a baseball field: Loveless, Lollo, and Aces catcher Ryan Budde, who had decided at the age of thirty-three that it was time to move on with his life. Budde had been to the majors four times between 2007 and 2010, playing in twenty-nine games during that time. He had gone 7 for 33 and hit a home run. He had decided that playing on a championship team in a championship game was a good way to go out.

  Budde had a choice. The two umpires did not.

  Steve Hyder had made his choice on opening day of the PawSox season. He had decided not to make a snap decision even after he was passed over for the job as the No. 1 radio voice for the team during the winter. He had wondered even before that happened if he wanted to come back for 2012, after he’d had a heart attack in 2011, not too long after going through a second divorce.

  He had walked onto the field before the team’s opener at McCoy Stadium on April 5 and felt no buzz. A year earlier he had thought it was his health. Now he felt fine physically but empty emotionally.