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

by John Feinstein

  “I waited to make a decision because I wanted to see if being healthy would make a difference,” he said. “Maybe if I’d gotten the No. 1 job, it would have been different, but I didn’t. That hurt. I thought I had earned it. They disagreed. I just decided on opening day this was going to be it. I’m fifty-one. There has to be something else out there for me.”

  Hyder worked hard throughout the season on his personal journal, hoping he would be able to make a book out of it after his last game. He already had a title: “The Real McCoy.”

  Now, with the last game of his career looming, Hyder had no intention of turning back, even though he had a good deal of trepidation about starting over.

  “I love baseball, and I’ve loved the job and the relationships I’ve had,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I don’t think anyone can stay in the minor leagues full-time in any job for very long. It’s too draining and, if you want to move up the way most of us do, too frustrating.

  “I’m glad I’m going out as part of a winner. It was fun to see the team win the championship. It’s amazing to think sixty-nine different guys wore the uniform during the season and only seven were still left the night they won. I’m happy my last game is going to be the last game of the season for everyone. Makes it a little bit easier to take.

  “Even so, when I walk out of the ballpark tonight, I know I’m going to have a melancholy feeling. It would be impossible not to feel that way.”

  As it turned out, Randy Mobley’s hopeful weather report was accurate. The rain began to clear at about six o’clock, and the game actually started on time. In spite of the weather, 8,606 fans showed up.

  As part of the pregame ceremony, Scotty McCreery, the American Idol winner for 2011, who had grown up thirty-one miles from Durham in Garner, North Carolina, was scheduled to throw out the first pitch. Since the Aces were the home team, Brett Butler needed a volunteer to catch for McCreery.

  Brett Tomko put his hand up right away.

  “I remember I had caught a first pitch a few years earlier when I was in Kansas City from David Cook, the year he won American Idol,” Tomko said. “I figured, ‘What the heck,’ it might be the only way I get to see the field. So I told Brett I’d do it.”

  He caught McCreery’s pitch, and soon after, the Aces began teeing off on Nelson Figueroa’s pitches. Figueroa had been the PawSox’ ace down the stretch and throughout the International League playoffs, but this simply wasn’t his night. He was gone after two innings with his team trailing 6–0. The irony was that Pawtucket had a better record (38-26) playing in Bulls Athletic Park than any other visiting team in the International League.

  Not on this night. The lead grew to 8–0, and the game crawled along. By now, with the outcome not in any serious doubt, everyone pretty much wanted to go home. The evening had turned out quite pleasant—a cool sixty-nine degrees at game time with almost no wind—but as the sky darkened, clouds could be seen on the horizon, and it was apparent the window for playing baseball wasn’t going to be open too much longer.

  The rain was starting to come down by the time the PawSox came up in the ninth, trailing 10–3. Even with a seven-run lead, Butler sent Jonathan Albaladejo to pitch the ninth, in part because he thought he deserved to be on the mound for the last out—he had done so forty-two times during the season, twenty-five times in save situations—and in part because there was certainly no reason to rest him. His next outing wouldn’t be until March.

  Andy LaRoche led off the inning with an infield single. Bryce Brentz struck out. The rain came down harder. No one wanted the season to end in a rain delay. Dan Butler lined a double into the right-center-field gap, and LaRoche was running all the way—perhaps not the best idea with his team down seven. Center fielder A. J. Pollock ran the ball down in the wet outfield and hit shortstop Taylor Harbin with a perfect relay throw. Harbin turned and saw LaRoche rounding third. He fired the ball to Ryan Budde as LaRoche pounded toward the plate.

  Because the ball had been hit in the gap, the umpires had rotated positions, with Loveless covering third in case Butler tried to go to third and there was a play there. Lollo came sprinting down from first to cover for Loveless at the plate. As a result it was his call as the ball and LaRoche arrived at almost the same time.

  Lollo thought he saw Budde get the tag on LaRoche a split second before LaRoche hit the plate. Except his angle wasn’t as good as it might have been if he hadn’t had to come down from first base to cover the plate.

  “I missed it,” he said. “LaRoche said to me, ‘He never tagged me,’ and I realized too late he was right. If I’d been in a slightly different position, I think I would have seen it, but because I was coming from first, I didn’t get the best possible angle. I felt sick about it when I realized too late that I’d missed the call.

  “My last call ever—and I missed it.”

  Everyone agreed it was a tough call to make, especially coming from first, and that the play was hardly a game decider. Two batters later, Che-Hsuan Lin hit a line drive almost directly at left fielder Keon Broxton for the final out, and everyone sprinted for the clubhouses as the sky started to explode with rain. The game had taken three hours and twenty-nine minutes. The Triple-A baseball season ended at 10:37 p.m. as the rain swept through the ballpark.

  An hour later, at an after-party thrown by the two leagues, Lollo encountered LaRoche and apologized to him.

  LaRoche grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “If you’d called me safe, we’d probably be back at the ballpark right now in a rain delay,” he said. “It’s not as if we were going to score seven and tie the game. Don’t give it another thought.”

  But Lollo did, even though others echoed LaRoche’s sentiment.

  “It’s hard to get out of my mind,” he said. “That was my last call as a professional umpire. It wasn’t the way I wanted to go out.”

  He went out hustling to make a tough call. There’s no shame in that. Whether it is your first call or your last call.

  Epilogue

  MCLOUTH

  On the night of October 7, almost three weeks after the minor-league season had ended, Nate McLouth jogged from the first-base dugout inside Oriole Park at Camden Yards in the direction of left field, hearing a loud roar as he and his teammates took the field for game one of the American League Division Series against the New York Yankees.

  Oriole Park, which had been a mausoleum on many game nights during the previous five seasons, was packed with 47,841 fans, and almost all were on their feet as the Orioles took up their defensive positions.

  It occurred to McLouth that he had come a long way from the afternoon in late May when he had sat in Pirates manager Clint Hurdle’s office and had been offered a choice: go to the minors or be released.

  He had chosen to be released. After a nervous week of waiting, he had gotten the call from the Orioles—who wanted to sign him and send him to Norfolk as potential outfield insurance after Nick Markakis, their starting right fielder, had broken his wrist the same day that the Pirates formally released McLouth.

  McLouth had struggled early in Norfolk, but beginning with Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Night in late June, he had gotten hot in the sizzling southeastern Virginia summer weather. The Orioles had called him up on August 4 after he had gone on a power binge, hitting ten home runs and driving in thirty-three runs over a thirty-six-game stretch. They had decided that adding that sort of bat to the speed and defense he brought made him a better backup outfielder than the thirty-four-year-old veteran Endy Chávez.

  “I felt that if I could get hot, then I might have a shot to get called up,” McLouth said. “I wasn’t counting on anything, because if you start thinking that way, you don’t do what you have to do to get noticed. I managed to get hot at the right time, and next thing I knew, RJ [manager Ron Johnson] was calling me into the office to tell me I was going up. It was a big deal, especially after the way the spring had gone for me.”

  McLouth filled in when one of the outfielders
needed a night off and, frequently, late in games for defense. That changed on September 8 when Markakis—yes, again—took a C. C. Sabathia pitch on the left hand in the fifth inning of a game against the Yankees in Camden Yards. The hand was broken, and Markakis, as it turned out, was done for the season. The Orioles decided to move Chris Davis, normally a first baseman or a DH, to right field and put McLouth in left field.

  Soon after McLouth was moved into the starting lineup, manager Buck Showalter put him in the leadoff spot and he flourished. By season’s end he had played in fifty-five games and hit .268 with seven home runs, eighteen RBIs, and twelve stolen bases.

  He was in left field and leading off when the Orioles, after making the playoffs for the first time since 1997, met the Texas Rangers in the new one-game, win-or-go-home wild card game. McLouth walked to begin the game and scored the Orioles’ first run. In the third, he grounded a single to right to drive in the Orioles’ second run. And in the eighth he hit a sacrifice fly to right field to drive in their last run in a 5–1 win.

  That win put the Orioles into the division series against the Yankees, and there was McLouth in left field for five straight nights—two in Baltimore and three in New York—in front of packed houses.

  “It was a long way from sitting home in Knoxville in June,” he said, laughing. “It was, to be honest, what I’d always dreamed of. When I was a productive player with the Pirates, I was on bad teams. Then I went to Atlanta and played on good teams, but I wasn’t a productive player. Finally, I was able to put it altogether—be an important part of a good postseason baseball team. It was a great feeling—and it was everything I ever dreamed it might be.

  “When I was younger, I’m not sure I would have appreciated it as much. But to get to play in that atmosphere, looking around the ballpark each night, after I’d wondered if I would ever play in the majors again, was an amazing feeling.”

  The Orioles lost the series in five games, but it wasn’t because of McLouth. He hit .318 for the series, including a home run and three RBIs. While the loss was disappointing, McLouth, at thirty, had reestablished himself as a major leaguer.

  His contract called for him to become a free agent in November—which he did. But the Orioles made it clear they wanted him back. In December, he signed a one-year contract for $2 million and went to spring training in February knowing he would be fighting for a starting spot in the outfield.

  Which was all he could possibly ask for.

  MONTOYO

  Four of the International League’s fourteen managers made it to the big leagues at the conclusion of the 2012 season.

  The least surprising promotion was Ryne Sandberg’s move down the northeast corridor of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Philadelphia, to become Charlie Manuel’s bench coach with the Phillies. Manuel would be sixty-nine on opening day in 2013, and the general consensus was that he was likely to retire at the end of the season. Sandberg was clearly being groomed as his successor. That turned out to be true—but it happened before the 2013 season was over. With the Phillies struggling, Manuel was fired in August and Sandberg was hired to replace him.

  The Cubs, who had opted not to hire Sandberg in 2012, went 61-101 under Dale Sveum. Sveum was brought back for 2013, but there was talk that if things didn’t improve markedly, the Cubs would be looking for a new manager for 2014. Things didn’t get a lot better in Chicago and Sveum was fired, but Sandberg was no longer an option—he already had a big-league managing job.

  David Bell also returned to the majors—in Chicago, but not working for his dad on the South Side with the White Sox. Instead, he was hired by Sveum to be the Cubs’ third-base coach. Logistically, the move was perfect for Bell, since the Cubs trained near his home in Arizona, meaning he wouldn’t have to travel until the regular season started.

  For Sandberg and Bell, given their playing careers and connections, moving up to the majors wasn’t a big surprise. For Arnie Beyeler and Mike Sarbaugh—career minor leaguers as players and managers—their promotions were dream-come-true moments.

  Beyeler had always wondered if his playing career, “the back of the bubble gum card,” would keep him out of the majors. Apparently, his work on the field, leading Pawtucket to the Governors’ Cup title in spite of all the turmoil going on in Boston, didn’t go unnoticed. Shortly after John Farrell was named to replace Bobby Valentine as the Red Sox’ manager, Beyeler was named to his staff as the first-base coach. After twenty-seven years of living the minor-league life, Beyeler would be staying in five-star hotels and riding on charter airplanes in 2013—and, in October, savoring a remarkable World Series win in Boston.

  Mike Sarbaugh, also a minor-league lifer, got to live the major-league life too. Sarbaugh was considered a rising star in the managing world, so it wasn’t a shock when Terry Francona asked him to join his new staff in Cleveland. Sarbaugh had moved steadily up the ladder in the Indians’ organization, winning at each stop, so the move made sense.

  One other manager left his job: after working for the Braves as their Triple-A manager for six seasons, Dave Brundage opted to accept Sandberg’s job in Lehigh Valley, apparently deciding that playing in front of crowds of close to ten thousand each night was preferable to crowds of four thousand.

  There was one other change, but it didn’t involve a managing change. In fact, it involved changing an entire team. As often happens in the minor leagues, two franchises were swapped by their major-league teams. The New York Mets had feuded at different times with the locals who ran the Buffalo Bisons, and when the Toronto Blue Jays, looking to move their Triple-A affiliate closer to Toronto than Las Vegas, brought up the possibility of a swap, the Mets agreed.

  And so, Wally Backman and all those who had worked for the Bisons in Buffalo—including Chris Schwinden—headed to Las Vegas (which, for the record, is not terribly close to New York, but this was the Mets, so logic wasn’t terribly important), while those playing for Las Vegas—where Schwinden had pitched briefly in 2012—headed to Buffalo.

  That would mean changes for everyone. The city of Buffalo would now have an American League affiliate in town with an entirely different roster of players and a new manager in Marty Brown. Those who had played in Las Vegas in the PCL a year earlier would be adapting to the International League, generally known more as a fastball league than a breaking-ball league. The opposite would be true for the former Bisons. “Definitely a different kind of pitching out there,” Schwinden said. “The parks are different; I’m sure the umps are different. It will all be new—which isn’t all bad.”

  The move of the Mets-Bisons out and the Blue Jays–Silver Stars in meant there would be six new managers in the IL for 2013, starting with Brown in Buffalo and Brundage in Lehigh Valley. The other four new faces would be Randy Ready, the former major-league infielder who left the Texas Rangers’ organization to succeed Brundage in Gwinnett; Chris Tremie, who was promoted from Double-A Akron to take Sarbaugh’s job in Columbus; Gary DiSarcina, an ex–Red Sox infielder who opted to leave a cushy front-office job in Anaheim to get back in uniform and ride the buses in Pawtucket; and Jim Riggleman, a former major-league manager in San Diego, Chicago, and Washington, who succeeded Bell in Louisville.

  Riggleman had quit the Nationals abruptly during the 2011 season in a contract dispute and had gone all the way back to Double-A, managing the Pensacola Blue Wahoos in 2012. At the age of sixty he would be back in Triple-A. Players don’t like to stop playing; managers don’t like to stop managing.

  The two longest-tenured managers in the league beginning 2013 were Dave Miley, who had been managing in Triple-A for the Yankees since 2006, and Charlie Montoyo, who had arrived in Durham a year later.

  Miley would finally get off the road in 2013. Not only did his team have a newly renovated ballpark; it had a new name: the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders, a name selected during an off-season name-the-team contest.

  Montoyo had been through his worst season—in terms of wins and losses—as a Triple-A manager in 2012, but he ca
me out of it feeling good about the experience.

  “The losing wasn’t any fun,” he said. “We got buried early by that thirteen-game losing streak in April and never really had any chance to do more than try to get to .500. But when the season ended, I was pretty happy with how I dealt with it all. The pressures from the major-league club are always there, but this was even more than normal because of all the injuries they had.

  “And I think I can honestly say that none of us [pitching coach Neil Allen and hitting coach Dave Myers] ever let up or complained about everything that was going on. That can happen to anyone at Triple-A, especially during a bad season, and it didn’t happen to us. I was proud of that. I think we went out on September 3 with every bit as much enthusiasm as we did on April 5. We owe that to the players, regardless of whether they’re the next superstar or someone just trying to squeeze one more year out of baseball.”

  That didn’t mean Montoyo wasn’t more than ready to go home and see his family after the final out on September 3.

  The boys were both in school, and he was hoping that Alexander might somehow avoid a fourth round of open-heart surgery, which doctors had said was a possibility for the spring. It was the first time since he had arrived in Durham that there were no postseason games, so he was home a couple of weeks earlier than normal.

  “It actually felt kind of funny to be home that soon,” he said.

  The Rays had never pressured him to join the team in September in past years because of his unique family situation. This time was a little different. One week after the season had ended—about the same time that previous seasons in Durham had ended or were about to end—Montoyo got a phone call from Mitch Lukevics, the Rays’ farm director.

  “The team’s going to Baltimore and New York,” he said. “We’d like you to go.” He paused. “It would be good for you to be seen.”

  Montoyo understood. The Rays—with Evan Longoria back in the lineup—were making another late push for a playoff spot, and the six games in Baltimore and New York would be crucial. But that wasn’t why Lukevics wanted Montoyo on the trip. He wanted Montoyo mixing with major leaguers—from the Rays and from other teams.