Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (17 page)

That night, after long-tossing in the outfield before the game, Willis was designated the first man up in the Tides bullpen. He never got into the game.

“I’d like to say I think he’s got a chance to pitch well again,” Rosenfield said as he watched him warm up. “But I just don’t think it’s there anymore. I can’t tell you why it isn’t there, but it just isn’t.”

Two days later, Willis decided Rosenfield was right. He retired. Itch or no itch, it was time to go home. Again.

COMEBACK KID

The Tides won on Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Night.

Even with all their travel troubles and their lack of a starting pitcher, they came back from an early 3–1 deficit to beat Syracuse, 5–3. Five pitchers split up eight and two-thirds innings. The last out of the ninth inning wasn’t needed because a huge thunderstorm swept into Norfolk, and even though the umpires tried briefly to keep the teams on the field long enough to get the last out, it wasn’t going to happen. They waited thirty minutes to see if the rain would let up before calling it a night.

Nate McLouth was the Tides’ hitting star for the evening with three hits and two RBIs. That raised his batting average to .205. As unimpressive as that sounded, it was a long way from where he had been a month earlier.

Literally, McLouth had been in Knoxville, Tennessee. Professionally, he had been out of a job, another example of a fallen star trying to find himself again in Triple-A.

“I believed the phone would ring,” he said. “But until it did, I couldn’t be certain.”

For a long time, McLouth had been on the always-going-up escalator. Growing up in Muskegon, Michigan, he began drawing notice from colleges and professional teams by the time he was a high school sophomore. He could hit, he could run—he stole 179 bases in 180
attempts in high school—and he was an absolute whiz as an outfielder. He was good enough to remind people of the line that Ralph Kiner, the longtime New York Mets TV broadcaster, had used to describe the way Garry Maddox, who won eight Gold Gloves, played center field for the Philadelphia Phillies. “Two-thirds of the earth is covered by water,” Kiner said. “The other third is covered by Garry Maddox.”

McLouth wanted to go to Michigan to play baseball, and he committed in the spring of 2000 to play for the Wolverines. That’s why he wasn’t taken until the twenty-fifth round of the amateur draft that spring by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Everyone in baseball knew McLouth was going to college. The Pirates took a late-round flier, figuring they had nothing to lose.

That summer, McLouth played on a travel team and wowed scouts every time out—including those from the Pirates. After seeing him play up close one more time, the Pirates decided it was worth offering serious money to see if there was any chance they could talk McLouth out of going to college.

“I was a few weeks away from enrolling,” McLouth said. “There wasn’t any doubt in my mind that this was what I wanted to do. Then the Pirates came in with this offer and I had to listen.”

The offer was a $400,000 signing bonus, plus money to go to college if he decided at any point that was what he wanted. McLouth talked it over with his parents. “The good news was that they trusted me to make my own decision,” he said. “My ultimate goal was to get to the major leagues. I wasn’t sure one way or the other was quicker, but there was a lot of money up front regardless of how it turned out. I thought it was the right thing to do.”

McLouth progressed steadily through the minor leagues for five years, making it to the majors in 2005 at the age of twenty-three. By 2007 he was the Pirates’ starting center fielder, and a year later he was their lone representative on the All-Star team. He also won the Gold Glove that season.

“In some ways, everything was great,” he said. “I was playing well, doing what I’d always wanted to do. But the losing in Pittsburgh was tough. You tried to tell yourself that you had to go out every day
and do your job even when the team was completely out of contention. But August was always difficult. We were so far out of it, the weather was hot, the ballpark was half full at best. That part was no fun.”

That changed in June 2009 when the Pirates, knowing that McLouth was going to begin to cost them big money the following season, traded him to the Atlanta Braves for three prospects. That was one reason the Pirates were so bad for so long: as soon as a good player was in line for a big contract, he would be traded.

But something happened to McLouth after he went to Atlanta—something he hasn’t completely figured out to this day. He was still a wonderful outfielder, but his hitting statistics went completely south. During his All-Star season in Pittsburgh, he had hit .276 with twenty-six home runs and ninety-four RBIs—and had stolen twenty-three bases. In 2009, his power numbers were still reasonable—twenty home runs and seventy RBIs—but his batting average dropped twenty points.

A year later, he was involved in a collision in the outfield with Jason Heyward that left him with concussion-like symptoms. Even though he missed a good deal of playing time and struggled after the collision, he insists that wasn’t the reason for the falloff.

“The thing is I don’t know what the problem was,” he said. “I struggled to hit before the collision. It was frustrating because I knew it was in there somewhere, but I couldn’t figure out how to find it. That’s the thing about baseball, especially hitting. You struggle and you make a small adjustment. That doesn’t work, so you make another one. The next thing you know you’ve made six different adjustments, you have a swing that looks nothing like the swing you had when you were going well, and you still can’t drive the ball with regularity.

“It would be easier if you could point at one thing like an injury and say, ‘That was it,’ because then you think you know the answer. When it isn’t one thing, you spend a lot of time wondering if it’s ever going to get better.”

The Braves sent McLouth to Gwinnett for a few weeks in August to try to take some pressure off him and to give him a chance to work out the issues with his swing. He came back in September, got hot for
a while, and then slid back to where he had been during the summer. When Bobby Cox put together his postseason roster that October, McLouth was surprised to find he was one of the twenty-five names on the list.

“After all those years in Pittsburgh, to be in uniform for postseason was a cool thing,” he said. “I honestly didn’t think I would make it with the way I’d played. I just wish I could have made more of an impact than I did.”

Cox kept McLouth on the roster because of his defense, and that was how he got into three games—as a defensive replacement. He did get to bat twice and got a hit, but the Braves lost the division series to the Giants in four games.

In 2011, his play
was
affected by injuries. He was on the disabled list on three occasions and hit only .228 when he did play. The Braves released him at season’s end, and the Pirates offered him a chance to return to Pittsburgh. By then, the Pirates had an All-Star, Andrew McCutchen, playing center field for them, but McLouth thought there was playing time there for him—and he would be back where he had enjoyed his best success as a baseball player.

“It made sense,” he said. “I knew the organization, and it looked like the team was better than it had been when I was there. I knew I’d have to play well in the spring to earn playing time, but that was fine with me.”

He played well enough in the spring to make the team as a part-time outfielder. But his bat was colder than spring in Buffalo. He wasn’t accustomed to playing one day and not playing the next, and he couldn’t get into any kind of hitting rhythm. “If I ever had a hitting groove in the spring, I lost it when the regular season started. I’m not complaining; I knew the deal when I signed with them. It just seemed like even when I did drive the ball on occasion, I hit it right at someone.” He smiled. “Of course that’s what everyone says when they aren’t going well.”

That’s true. Chris Giménez, a catcher with the Tampa Bay Rays, spent most of the 2012 season shuttling between Tampa and Durham. After being sent down to Durham in July, he sat in the dugout
one night and said, “I’d like to tell you I hit a really
hard
.190 up there, but I can’t say it with a straight face.”

Just as a bloop single looks the same as a screaming line-drive single in the box score, a screaming line-drive out looks the same as a pop-up. In the end, the numbers don’t lie. By late May, McLouth was hitting .140, and it really didn’t matter if it was a hard .140. “Actually, there is no such thing as a hard .140,” he said, laughing.

It was no laughing matter when Pirates manager Clint Hurdle called him in to his office just before Memorial Day. McLouth knew what was coming. Hurdle told him he had two options: He could go down to Triple-A Indianapolis, play on a more regular basis, and try to work out his hitting problems down there. Being honest, though, Hurdle couldn’t promise how much he’d play, because the Pirates had some prospects there who needed at-bats. The second option was to be released and see if he could make a better deal someplace else.

McLouth asked Hurdle if he could think about it overnight. When he thought about it, the answer was easy: he needed to go someplace where he would have a chance to get more at-bats. He wasn’t sure where that was, but at the moment it wasn’t going to be with the Pirates or, for that matter, with Indianapolis.

The next day he went back to see Hurdle and asked for his release. Hurdle wasn’t surprised: players want to play. McLouth is one of those guys everybody likes. Hurdle wished him well, and he went to clean out his locker.

“The next week was torture,” McLouth said. “I wondered if maybe I wasn’t going to get a chance to go someplace. I was thirty years old, and the thought that I might be done crossed my mind.”

One man’s bad break is another man’s good break. In this case it actually
was
another man’s break—Nick Markakis’s broken right wrist—that gave McLouth the chance he needed. When the Orioles had to put Markakis on the disabled list in early June, they needed to sign someone for Norfolk after Bill Hall had been called up to the Orioles as an extra bat on the bench.

McLouth’s agent, Mike Nicotera, got a call offering McLouth a spot in Norfolk. After ten days at home, McLouth would have walked
to Norfolk if need be. The good news when he got there was that manager Ron Johnson had him in the lineup regularly. The bad news was that his bat still hadn’t warmed up. He hoped the three-hit, two-RBI performance on Cowboy Monkey Rodeo Night was a start.

“Funny game,” he said later. “At 4:55 in the afternoon we’re sitting on the runway in Philadelphia, and I’m thinking there’s no way we’re getting to Norfolk in time for the game. Then we get here, I get three hits, and we win. Maybe it’s a sign. Maybe I’m about to get something going.”

All Ron Johnson knew as the rain thundered down with the clock about to strike midnight was that his team had won a game he never expected to win. “All I want to do right now is go home and get some sleep,” he said. “If those umpires hadn’t called the thing, I’d have gone in there and called it for them.”

It had been a long, hot, rainy day—and night—in Norfolk.

There were no incidents with the protesters. All the animals survived their romp in the outfield.

STILL ONE STEP AWAY

The rhythms of a Triple-A baseball season are very different from those of a major-league season. In the majors, stability is a key to success: the fewer roster changes that are made because of injuries or nonperformance, the better off teams are most of the time.

Many players have long-term contracts that include no-trade clauses so they know with absolute certainty where they will be working, which brings a sense of security that can be felt in a clubhouse. For years, when you walked into the New York Yankees’ clubhouse you knew that, sooner or later, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Andy Pettitte were going to be there. They would talk about almost any situation with the calmness that comes from having seen just about everything there is to see.