Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (39 page)

Hal Steinbrenner had succeeded his father as the man in charge of the Yankees even before George’s death in July 2010, and Hal was far more interested in the financial bottom line than the baseball bottom line. His father had already ceded most of the final baseball decisions to Brian Cashman by then, and Hal Steinbrenner continued to leave those decisions to Cashman. Like most baseball people, Cashman saw the minor leagues as a place to develop players for the major-league team. If, along the way, you won some games, that was fine too.

Which is why Cashman hadn’t objected to the notion of leaving the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre team homeless in 2012 while the stadium in Scranton was being renovated. Once his plan to have the team play home games in Newark fell through, he knew he was asking manager Dave Miley to do the impossible by keeping the team competitive while constantly on the road—and also meeting the many demands of the major-league team.

“I know it’s been tough on the players,” Miley said, staring at his phone one evening as if he knew it was going to ring at any moment. “But in a way it’s made us closer than most Triple-A teams because we’re always on the road. That’s where teams tend to pull closer together—on the road.”

When the league reached its All-Star break—which was the same week as the major-league break—the Indianapolis Indians were 56-34 and had an eleven-game lead over Columbus in the West. Charlotte was 50-42 and led Norfolk by three games in the South. In the
North—which had six teams as opposed to the other divisions, which had four teams apiece—Lehigh Valley was 52-39 with Pawtucket at 51-41 and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre right behind at 49-43.

“If Dave Miley’s not the Manager of the Year, there ought to be an investigation,” Pawtucket manager Arnie Beyeler said. “Being competitive is remarkable. Being in contention is unbelievable.”

Miley did have a number of veterans on the team, including Jack Cust, who had hit 25 or more home runs for three straight major-league seasons from 2007 to 2009; Russell Branyan, who had hit 194 home runs in the big-leagues; Chris Dickerson, who had spent a good deal of time with the Yankees; and Kosuke Fukudome, who had come to the Cubs as a heralded star and had been a regular in both Chicago and Cleveland before finding his way to the Yankees’ system.

The starting pitcher for the Yankees (who would change their name to RailRiders prior to the 2013 season) in the team’s last game before the All-Star break was John Maine.

Maine was, if nothing else, a familiar name to New York baseball fans—specifically New York Mets fans. Only a few years earlier, he had appeared to be a cornerstone of the Mets’ staff, only to disappear after a series of shoulder injuries and a couple of run-ins with the team’s management.

Maine was not, by any stretch, the prototype personality seen in most baseball clubhouses. Even though he had been a high school star while growing up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he had no interest in turning pro after graduating. To him baseball was a means to pay for college, and he was delighted to get a scholarship to UNC Charlotte, where he majored in biomechanical engineering.

But he was too talented a pitcher for scouts not to notice. By his junior year he knew he was going to be drafted, and since he had completed all his course work and needed only to finish labs to get his degree, he decided to give baseball a shot when the Baltimore Orioles drafted him in the sixth round of the 2002 draft.

“I was twenty-one,” he said. “I told myself I’d give it four years at the most. If I wasn’t in the major leagues by the time I was twenty-five, I’d be done.”

He beat his deadline by two years, making it to the Orioles when he was twenty-three. But his career didn’t really take off until two years later after he had been traded by the Orioles to the Mets as a throw-in part of a deal in which the Orioles traded a once-solid reliever (Jorge Julio) for a once-solid starter (Kris Benson). The deal ended up being a steal for the Mets—because of Maine, the throw-in.

Benson, who had been the No. 1 pick in the entire draft in 1996, pitched one year in Baltimore after the trade, won eleven games with an ERA of 4.82, and then didn’t pitch for the next two years. He won two more games after that, before retiring after a series of injuries.

The key to the trade, or so the Mets thought, was Julio, who had been the Orioles’ closer at one point and had been a dominating relief pitcher at different points in his career. Maine, who had started eight games for the Orioles in 2005, was added to the deal only after word had leaked that the Mets were going to trade Benson straight up for Julio. That didn’t sound like enough for Benson, so the Mets convinced the Orioles to send Maine along too. He was ticketed for Norfolk (then the Mets’ Triple-A team) at the start of the season, a pitcher who might step in if someone in the rotation got hurt.

That was how he first got to the majors that year: Brian Bannister got hurt and couldn’t take a start in early May, and Maine was called up to take his place. He didn’t pitch very well, and he hurt the middle finger on his pitching hand in the process, which landed him on the disabled list. He went back to Norfolk after that, only to be called up again in early July because the Mets, even in the midst of their best season in years, were constantly looking for a fifth starter.

Maine pitched well enough in his return on July 3 to stick with the team. Orlando Hernández, one of the Mets’ three aging starters (the team had Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez, and Hernández on the roster that season), was slated to start a game on July 29, but it looked as if it might be delayed by rain, so the Mets decided to give him the night off and start Maine.

Maine responded with a four-hit shutout against the Houston Astros, and he went on to pitch twenty-six straight scoreless innings. When both Hernández and Martinez were hurt just prior to the start
of the playoffs, Maine ended up starting game one of the division series against the Dodgers. He gave up one run in four and one-third innings of a game the Mets won, and he also pitched games two and six of the League Championship Series against the Cardinals—beating Chris Carpenter in game six to extend the series to seven games.

“It all happened very fast,” Maine said. “I mean, halfway through the season I was pitching in Triple-A, and then I’m starting against the Cy Young Award winner [Carpenter] in game six of the LCS. I went from the guy who watched everyone else in the clubhouse get interviewed to being one of the guys everyone was interviewing.”

Maine was able to handle it. He was honest and unspoiled, someone who hadn’t been in the spotlight enough to resent it or to fall back on clichés. When the 2007 season began, he was the Mets’ No. 3 starter, and he went 4-0 in the month of April with a 1.35 ERA. That won him the National League Pitcher of the Month award. He became a fixture in a corner of the Mets’ Shea Stadium clubhouse playing chess with relief pitcher Aaron Heilman, outfielder Damion Easley, or—most often—outfielder Shawn Green.

Chess-playing baseball players are slightly less unusual than an overweight jockey, but there aren’t many of them. The 2007 Mets had four chess players in their clubhouse, which may have accounted—at least in part—for their approach to the pennant race, which, when the team ended up a game out of first place, was labeled by critics as too cerebral and lacking in emotion.

Maine certainly couldn’t be blamed for the team’s late-season collapse. On the second-to-last day of the season he pitched seven and two-thirds innings of one-hit ball against the Marlins (the only hit was a roller to third in the eighth inning) and kept the Mets tied for first place with the Phillies. It was Glavine, the future Hall of Famer, who got knocked out in the first inning the next afternoon, sealing the Mets’ fate.

Maine finished the season 15-10 with an ERA of 3.91. Since he was a year short of arbitration, the Mets signed him for only $450,000 for 2008. Maine was 10-8 in early August that year when
he was put on the DL with a strained rotator cuff. It turned out he had a bone spur in his pitching shoulder, which doctors removed after the season was over. At the time the injury appeared to be just a blip, and the Mets signed him for $2.6 million the next year rather than go to arbitration.

The injury wasn’t just a blip, though. It was the start of a trend. The doctors had to do the surgery twice because the spur was so big they didn’t get all of it the first time. Even then, Maine never felt right the next season. He missed most of the second half of 2009 because of “arm fatigue,” the euphemism the Mets came up with to describe his on-again, off-again appearances on the mound.

“My velocity was down about ten miles an hour,” he said. “It hurt. I’d get a [cortisone] shot and pitch, it would wear off, I’d sit awhile, get another shot, and try to pitch again. I was miserable.”

Maine had pitched too well for the Mets simply to give up on him. Hoping he would be healthy again in 2010, they gave him another one-year contract, this one for $3.3 million. But Maine wasn’t the pitcher he had been in 2006 and 2007 or during the first four months of the 2008 season. By mid-May his ERA was over six runs a game, and as he warmed up for a start in Washington on May 20, pitching coach Dan Warthen was convinced something was wrong with him. He asked Maine if he was okay, and Maine said he felt fine.

When Maine walked to the mound to pitch in the bottom of the first inning, he looked out to the left-field bullpen and saw long reliever Raúl Valdés warming up. “That really unnerved me,” he said. “I mean, if they didn’t think I could throw, scratch me. I thought I could pitch when I warmed up and told Dan that. I pitched to one batter [a five-pitch walk] and I look up and here comes Dan signaling to the bullpen. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the ups and downs I’ve had in baseball, that night might have been the most disappointing.”

Maine came out after pitching to that one batter. After the game Warthen said that Maine wasn’t always up-front about how his arm felt, and went so far as to say he was dishonest about how his arm felt at times. Most teams value someone who tries to play through pain.
The Mets, who have a history of insisting that players are “day-to-day,” only to see them go on the disabled list for long stints, apparently didn’t want Maine to try to take the ball if he was less than 100 percent.

A month later, Maine underwent surgery on his shoulder again. His Mets career was over. He signed with the Colorado Rockies during the off-season and was sent to Colorado Springs at the start of the season.

“I was awful,” he said. “I went to spring training thinking I had a chance to get a job [with the Rockies], and really, being honest, I wasn’t good enough for Triple-A. I remember when it hit me. I had two outs one night and I gave up hits to the No. 7 and 8 hitters in the lineup. They probably should have come out and gotten me then, but they let me pitch to the No. 9 hitter. He hit a three-run home run.

“
Then
they came and got me. I was so angry at myself and so frustrated I just decided that was it, I was done.

“The year before, when I was trying to rehab in St. Lucie [where the Mets’ minor-league complex is located] after the surgery, it kind of hit me that the game was going along just fine without me. I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to think about finding a way to get along without the game. I was getting close to thirty, and I’d initially said I wouldn’t pitch in the minors beyond twenty-five. Well, I’m way past twenty-five … and there I am back in the minors and getting shelled. It was time to go home and decide what to do next.”

Maine had pitched forty-six innings in Colorado Springs to an ERA of 7.43, walking thirty-seven batters. In that last start, the home run had climaxed an outing in which he gave up eight runs in four and two-thirds innings.

He went home to Charlotte, where he and his wife, Kristi, lived during the off-season (they had met in college), and began playing coed softball with some of his friends. Late in the summer, just for the heck of it, he began throwing to one of his friends and realized that, for the first time in three years, he could throw a fastball without
shoulder pain. It was Kristi who encouraged him to take one more shot—if only to find out what it might feel like to pitch with a healthy shoulder.

Maine signed with the Red Sox early in 2012 prior to spring training, knowing he probably wouldn’t be 100 percent in April because he hadn’t pitched at all since the previous June. When it got to be May and he was still in extended spring training in Fort Myers, he got impatient.

“I’m thirty years old and I’m down there with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds,” he said. “Plus, I thought I was ready to at least try it in Triple-A.”

He asked for his release, went home again, and waited for the phone to ring. It was a month later when the Yankees called. They were willing to send him to Scranton/Wilkes-Barre after a short stint to get his arm stretched out in extended spring training at their minor-league base in Tampa. Maine agreed, even after being warned that because the Yankees were currently a team without a stadium, he wouldn’t be pitching any home games when he got to Triple-A.

“It’s funny because we’ve got a lot of older guys on this team,” he said. “I think that’s one reason why we’ve dealt pretty well with being on the road all the time. We’re all here because we decided to be here. I could be at home, figuring out what I want to do next. I’m pretty sure I’ll have options … and there are a lot of guys on this team who are the same way. We all believe we still have some baseball left in us, so we’ve chosen to be here. I have no complaints. I wanted a chance to prove I could be a starting pitcher again, and they’ve given it to me.”