Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (28 page)

“He got out of his car and I said, ‘Jordan, I have to tell you something.’ For a split second I think he was nervous, but he was pitching too well for that. I’m sure he thought I was going to tell him he was
going [up] to Louisville. When I told him he was going to Cincinnati and he had a plane to catch, I could see him processing it in his mind for a minute and then he broke into this huge smile. The first thing he said was, ‘I gotta go call my dad.’

“It’s funny, because the first time I got called up [in 1995] I think those were my exact words.” He smiled. “It’s interesting to me, being the son of a player who was also the son of a player, the number of guys whose relationships with their father were about baseball in a lot of ways. I guess it’s the oldest cliché in the book, but there is something to the idea of fathers and sons playing catch in the backyard. I know I remember the first time I did it with my dad. Obviously, I’m not alone in that.”

On Bell’s list of things to do on this particular Sunday morning was to talk to Denis Phipps. It had been Phipps who had started the five-run ninth-inning rally the night before by lining a single to center field with the Bats trailing Toledo 4–3 and two outs from another loss. When he stepped to the plate in that ninth inning, Phipps was hitting .200 and was already 0 for 4 on the night.

“What I want to do is remind him that winning players find a way to make something good happen, even when they’re struggling,” Bell said. “He’s had a tough year and I know there have been moments when he’s been discouraged, but he’s never hung his head. Last night, he came up to the plate in the ninth not thinking about being 0-fer, but about finding a way to get something started for his team. And that’s what he did.”

Phipps was twenty-seven and had grown up, like so many good players, in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. The town of just under 200,000 people had produced more than seventy major leaguers—among them Sammy Sosa, Alfonso Soriano, and Robinson Cano—and so many shortstops had come from there that it had been dubbed “the cradle of shortstops.”

Phipps was an outfielder in his seventh minor-league season and had never spent a moment in the major leagues. Bell believed he had the talent to play in the majors.

“One thing I know, because I never had overwhelming skills, is
that the difference between most major leaguers and guys at this level isn’t physical; it’s mental or emotional. Every guy in our clubhouse has the physical ability to play at the major-league level.

“But some don’t have the confidence; some don’t have the attitude or the work ethic. I tell the guys all the time that most major leaguers have two hot streaks a year at the plate, maybe three in a good year. That’s the time when they feel like they’re going to get a hit every time they come up.

“Most of the year isn’t like that. Most of the year is about grinding. It’s about being 0 for 4 and finding a way to get a hit in that fifth at-bat. It’s about taking an extra base when you can to help the team or moving a runner or making a play on defense. The guys who make it are the guys who do that, because managers notice that, coaches notice that, personnel guys notice that. You can be in the worst slump of your life, and there’s still a way to help the team. The guys who grind through those periods and find a way to contribute are the guys who ultimately make it. If you compete when it’s hard to compete, when lying down would be easy, that’s when you become a real baseball player.

“Denis could have lain down last night. We did nothing for seven innings, and we’re two outs from losing. But he had a good at-bat against a good pitcher [Chris Bootcheck] and started what turned out to be the game-winning rally. That’s what a winning player does.”

Bell spent some time that day with Phipps reminding him of all those things. Coincidence or not, Phipps raised his batting average by 20 points starting with that ninth-inning single in Toledo in late July and, on September 3, when Louisville’s season ended, got his first call-up to the majors.

“That’s the kind of thing that makes managing at this level worth it,” Bell said. “It makes up for those moments when you have to send a guy down or, worse, release a guy. Those are the moments you dread.”

Four days after his encouraging talk with Denis Phipps, Bell had one of those dreaded moments. Brett Tomko had pitched the third game of the series in Toledo and had been neither awful nor good—somewhere
squarely in between. He had pitched six innings and given up five earned runs. The Bats had actually broken a 5–5 tie in the top of the seventh to take a 6–5 lead, putting Tomko in position to win his first game of the season. But, as had been the case all summer whenever Tomko left a game with a chance to win, the bullpen couldn’t hold a lead. The Mud Hens rallied to win 10–9 in eleven innings.

Three days later, after the team had gotten back to Louisville, Bell got one of those phone calls a Triple-A manager doesn’t want to take. The Reds had decided to release Tomko. The major-league team was flush with pitching, and with several prospects at both Double-A and Triple-A who needed innings, there was no reason to keep a thirty-nine-year-old pitcher around who was muddling through with a respectable ERA of 3.78. Plus, Pedro Villarreal, a twenty-four-year-old right-handed starter who was considered a prospect by the Reds, was coming off the DL. A roster spot was needed.

When Tomko reported for work that afternoon, Bell was waiting for him.

“Hey, you got a minute?” he said as Tomko walked in the direction of his locker.

At first, Tomko didn’t think anything of it. He and Bell often talked baseball early in the day when the clubhouse was quiet. They went into the manager’s office, and Bell shut the door.

“That was my first clue,” Tomko said later. “David was an open-door manager. He wouldn’t close the door to talk about what a nice day it was outside.”

Even so, Tomko was stunned when Bell told him what was happening.

“I hadn’t been pitching that badly,” he said. “I mean, if I was getting killed, I would have said, ‘Yup, you’re right, I get it.’ But the fact is, I didn’t get it.”

Bell was completely honest with Tomko. This had nothing to do with the way he was pitching. He had told the Reds that if someone was needed for an emergency start or if someone got hurt, there was no doubt in his mind Tomko could get the job done. But it was late in
the season, and the Reds believed they had enough backup that they could afford to use Tomko’s roster spot on a younger player. It was baseball math: all things being equal, the old guy goes overboard.

“He was really, really disappointed,” Bell said. “Hurt. Surprised. Pick a word. But he didn’t vent or take it out on me at all. He handled it as well as you could handle it—which didn’t surprise me at all.

“Funny thing is we were teammates for two years, and I always felt I knew Brett well. I always liked him. But I also had the sense that he was a guy who people often didn’t understand. In baseball, if you have any outside interests, people look at you as if you’re weird. Brett was into art, and some guys just couldn’t understand that. I thought it made you better rounded and more interesting.

“There was this notion that he wasn’t tough. Believe me, he’s tough. I felt as if I got to know him more in Louisville than I did in Seattle. His attitude was so good.

“We talked that day for an hour. I told him that I knew this was hard to understand but this was the best thing for him—fair or unfair. He’s so competitive it’s going to be hard for him to stop playing, but at some point he’s going to stop playing.

“The Reds weren’t going to call him up before the end of the season. They’d made that decision. This was a chance to maybe catch on with a team that would call him up. Or, if this was the end, well, it was meant to be the end. It might be time to move on.

“Easy for me to say, no doubt. Probably hard for him to hear.”

Ten days later, Tomko was signed by the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose farm director is Mike Bell.

“Sheer coincidence,” David Bell said, laughing. “But I suspect he was highly recommended.”

I-75

While Brett Tomko was trying to keep his job in Triple-A during that late July weekend in Toledo, Danny Worth was trying to figure out how he could put Toledo in his rearview mirror once and for all.

It wasn’t that he disliked the town. He liked the people, he liked his manager, and he liked his teammates.

He just wished he wasn’t their teammate.

“When I got back the other day, several guys came up to me and said, ‘It’s great to see you, but it sucks to see you,’ ” he said. “I felt exactly the same way.”

Worth had been sent back to Toledo from the Tigers on July 24—the ninth time he had been sent down since his first call-up to Detroit in May 2010. In all, including spring training, he’d gotten—as he called it—“the tap on the shoulder” to be sent down eleven times in his career.

“Usually, there’s a routine to it,” he said. “Jeff Jones [the pitching coach] will give me the tap and tell me that [manager] Jim [Leyland] wants to talk to me. It isn’t always that way. Once [in 2011] we had flown from Anaheim to Chicago, and we got to the hotel at about four o’clock in the morning. I got off the bus, walked into the lobby, and [general manager] Dave [Dombrowski] and Jim were standing there waiting for me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t to ask me what I thought about the in-flight movie.”

Worth’s most recent return to Toledo had not come as a shock, although he readily admitted that every time it happened it was tough to take. Shortly after getting back to town, he did a pregame TV interview. He said all the right things: he knew he just had to hang in there; this was part of the game; he had to keep his head up and play hard and hope the call to go back up would come again soon.

“I fake it,” he said, smiling. “The fact is, every time you get sent down, it’s crushing because no matter how you rationalize it, the reason it happens is because you aren’t a good enough player to stay up. I simply haven’t been able to hit enough to stay in the majors. Every time you get sent down, they tell you, ‘Hey, you’ll be back up soon,’ and you know it’s entirely possible. But you also know it’s possible you might never get back. Maybe they make a trade at your position. Maybe you get hurt. Maybe they’ve decided you’re out of chances. That’s the fear: that maybe this time down is the last time.”

It had been a trade that had sent Worth back to Toledo this time. The Tigers, looking to strengthen themselves for the second half of the season, had acquired pitcher Anibal Sánchez and second baseman Omar Infante from Miami. The acquisition of Infante meant a position player had to go down. There were three candidates: Worth, Don Kelly, and Ryan Raburn. As a player with five years in the majors, Raburn couldn’t be sent down unless he agreed to the demotion; the Tigers would have therefore had to release him, and they didn’t want to do that. Kelly was out of minor-league “options”—which are so complicated most players don’t understand them—and would have had to pass through waivers to get to Toledo.

Rather than take that risk, the Tigers decided to send down Worth. They had just finished a series at home and were flying to Cleveland when Worth heard that the trade had been made. He got on the plane with the team, wondering if perhaps he might avoid the dreaded “tap.” Kelly and Raburn were on the flight too, so he knew it might still be coming.

“We got to the hotel, and Jim grabbed me getting off the bus,” he said. “They had to wait until we got to Cleveland because the trade hadn’t been final before we left.”

The only good news was that the Mud Hens were playing two hours away in Columbus. Worth called his wife, Bree, and told her it had happened again and that she would need to pack their things in the apartment they had been renting in Detroit for another move back to Toledo. They had both been through this before.

“I remember the first time I got called up in ’10,” he said. “Needless to say, I wanted to call everyone I knew. We packed the car, and I told Bree to drive so I could make all the calls. The problem is she’s a terrible driver, and she was so excited I finally had to take the wheel from her about halfway to Detroit. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

So what became of all the phone calls and texts?

“I made them anyway,” he said, grinning.

His first major-league at-bat was against John Lackey, who had first come up to the Anaheim Angels in 2002—when Worth was in high school in Valencia, about sixty miles north of Anaheim. “I remembered watching him pitch back then,” Worth said. “Now here I am in the majors and he’s pitching to me. It was a little bit scary but also quite cool.”

Sent up to pinch-hit with the bases loaded, Worth hit a roller down the first-base line and beat it out for a single and an RBI. A nice moment. It is one he thinks back to when he starts to feel depressed about the literal ups and downs his career has gone through since that night.

“I try to remind myself that ten years ago, when I was a high school senior, if you had told me I would get to the majors, I’d have said, ‘I’ll sign for that right now,’ ” he said. “I played on a really good high school team. I probably wasn’t the best player—in fact, I
wasn’t
the best player. We had six guys who people thought had major-league potential. I’m the only one who has ever gone past A-ball, much less played in the majors.