Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (45 page)

“I’m one of those lucky people who found a niche early that I’m completely comfortable with,” Mobley said. “My family [he has two grown children] grew up here, and I enjoy the people I work with. I guess I’m the one minor leaguer who has no aspirations of ever becoming a big leaguer.”

Just don’t call him a bush leaguer.

IT’S NEVER OVER TILL …

Brett Tomko was back in uniform … again.

He had gone home after David Bell had given him the news that the Reds were releasing him from Louisville and wondered if he had finally reached the end of the line as a baseball player. Louisville had been his twenty-fifth stop in his eighteen years as a professional pitcher—ten in the majors; fifteen in the minors. Maybe that was the final number. Maybe it was time to jump off the carousel.

Or maybe not.

He had been home in Phoenix for a week with Julia and the twins, who were now a month shy of turning three, when the phone rang. It was Joe Longo, his agent. The Arizona Diamondbacks were interested in signing him for the rest of the season. Tomko wasn’t too surprised to hear that the call had come from the Diamondbacks: he knew that David Bell would put in a good word for him with his brother Mike, who was their farm director.

Even so, when Longo said “Arizona,” for a split second Tomko thought the perfect storm had landed in his backyard: not only was he being offered a job, but the Diamondbacks were right there in Phoenix. He could live in his own home and pitch again.

Then he came back to reality. The Diamondbacks’ offer was to go to Mobile, Alabama—which was 1,640 miles from his backyard—and, beyond that, in the Double-A Southern League. That was the
offer: BayBears or bust. Tomko sighed, packed again, and got on a plane to fly to Alabama.

He still believed he could pitch—as he had told Bell before leaving Louisville—and, sure enough, given the ball in Mobile, he had two good outings in a row. He even got a couple of wins, something that hadn’t happened in Louisville even on those nights when he had pitched well. The Diamondbacks noticed, and on August 24 they moved him up to Reno—which was in contention for the PCL playoffs.

“It all happened very quickly,” Tomko said. “On August 1, I was in Louisville pitching for a last-place team. The next day I’m released. Three weeks later I’ve been to Mobile and I’m in Reno pitching for a team where the games actually kind of matter. The stadium was full, which was nice too. The important thing was I was still playing baseball.”

He was playing in the twenty-seventh city of his career.

Tomko wasn’t expecting the Diamondbacks to call him up in September. He still believed he could help, just as he believed he could have helped the Reds. But he was thirty-nine, and he had been released less than a month earlier. He knew his chances for a call-up were somewhere between slim and none, and slim rarely shows up in Triple-A in late August.

So he put his head down and kept grinding. He got two starts in Reno before the playoffs began. They were a lot like his starts in Louisville: reasonably good, but not as good as Tomko would have liked. Still, he was on the playoff roster when the Aces began the postseason against Sacramento—a team that Tomko, not surprisingly, had pitched for in the past.

“Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of places where I
haven’t
pitched,” he joked.

The first-round playoff series was a best of five with no off days, meaning each team would need five starting pitchers unless one of the managers decided to start someone on three days’ rest. That was, generally speaking, frowned upon in the minors, even in postseason. Aces manager Brett Butler let Tomko know that if there was a fifth
and deciding game, he would go with his No. 5 starter and not bring back game-one starter Charles Brewer on short rest.

Which meant, if the series came down to a fifth game, Tomko would have the ball.

He was still in the game.

There are two kinds of Augusts in major-league baseball. There are the Augusts when a team is in contention and the ballpark is full or close to full every day. It may be hot, but you almost don’t notice, because the games are important and the electricity in the building fills you with adrenaline.

“When you take the field at home and you hear the crowd, the only thing you feel at that moment is the rush,” said Nate McLouth, who had gone from unemployed in early June to starting in left field in Baltimore in early August. The Orioles were contending for the first time in fifteen years, and even though the fans were only just beginning to notice, the feeling in Camden Yards each night was different than it had been the previous fourteen Augusts.

Then, the Orioles had been going through the other kind of August. The kind where you drag into the ballpark in the middle of the afternoon—or, worse, the middle of the morning for day games—and stay in the air-conditioned clubhouse until the last possible moment. During Augusts like that, you tell yourself there’s still a lot to play for: your future, your pride, and those who loyally show up night after night even when the team is going nowhere.

Still, it is tough to take the field to the sounds of silence. It isn’t fun, for example, to be a New York Met and play in a ballpark technically called “Citi Field” but dubbed by New York radio talk show host Steve Somers “Citi Morgue.”

“The only good thing about a season like that is you find out a lot about guys,” said Tony La Russa, who had managed through very few of those seasons during thirty-three years as a major-league manager. “The guy who still comes to play, even when it doesn’t matter, is
the guy you want to keep around. The guy who has already mentally packed it in, you probably don’t want.”

He smiled. “Of course they’re all in the big leagues, making big-league money, living the big-league life. It isn’t exactly all bad.”

It is a lot better than August in Triple-A, regardless of a team’s record. Charlie Montoyo’s mantra that he kept repeating to his players: “It’s a lot less hot in August when you’re winning than when you’re losing,” was true—up to a certain point.

Montoyo had been through five Triple-A Augusts as the manager of a contending team. He preferred that to the August he was living through in 2012, with a team that was under .500 and would be packing its bags to go home as soon as the season ended on September 3.

“You come to the park every day, and you give your best effort,” Montoyo said. “You have to do that for your players. Some of them are going to be September call-ups. They’re all fighting for that chance. That’s really what they’ve got left to play for now. That and making sure they have a job next year.”

That’s what John Lindsey was playing for in August. He hadn’t had a job with a major-league team at the start of 2012 and had gotten to Toledo (via Laguna, Mexico) only in June. The Mud Hens weren’t in contention either, and Lindsey was about 99 percent certain he wasn’t going to be a September call-up to the Tigers. Most of the time when an older player gets a September call-up, it is to a non-contending team that wants to reward him with a month in the majors. The Tigers were fighting for their lives in the American League Central, and their late-season needs were more about relief pitchers and defense.

Lindsey couldn’t pitch, and he wasn’t especially good playing defense. He knew his season would end in Toledo. The larger question had become where he might be in 2013.

“I think the good thing about the last couple months is that I’ve proven I can still hit and I can still hit with some power,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt the work that I did last off-season, the weight I lost, have added time to my career. I would hope that someone will want to give me a job next year.”

Lindsey had become the Mud Hens’ everyday DH, hitting cleanup more often than not. He had responded with fifteen home runs and forty-seven RBIs once he had joined the team, in only sixty-five games. If you did the math on those numbers over a full Triple-A season that meant Lindsey would hit about thirty-three home runs and drive in 105 runs. Those were numbers that would get people’s attention.

Lindsey had something else going for him, even though he would turn thirty-six in the off-season.

“If you had a clubhouse full of John Lindseys, managing would be the easiest job in the world,” said Phil Nevin, Lindsey’s manager the second half of 2012. “He’s the first guy here every day. He does exactly what you ask him to, and he’s just the kind of example you want for younger players to be around.

“That can be an issue at Triple-A. Sometimes you have older guys moping around, constantly pissed off at their lot in life. John’s just the opposite.”

Of course there were reasons for that. Lindsey had spent twenty-two days in the major leagues … and a total of eighteen years in the minors. In spite of Tony La Russa’s theory that it took about ten days for a player to develop a “major-league attitude,” he wasn’t even close to having one. He had spent so much time on the other side—the vision problems that had slowed his development, the years in independent ball, and the half season in Mexico—that he was grateful to be in Toledo.

“I’ve probably enjoyed this season as much as any in my career,” he said. “Part of it is that when spring training began, I didn’t know if I’d be playing anywhere. I knew I wanted to try to play, but I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance—especially this close to the big leagues. If I can get a contract before spring training and go to camp with a chance to show people what I can still do …” His face twisted into a smile. “Of course no one knows better than I do how much easier that is said than done.”

Even so, Lindsey knew he was back to being just an accident away. That was a long way from Laguna.

SYRACUSE

Zach Duke knew as well as anyone in baseball the truth of “being an accident away.”

He had been burning up the International League in 2005 as a twenty-two-year-old phenom when the phone call had come from Pittsburgh. Oliver Pérez, one of the Pirates’ starting pitchers, had broken his big toe kicking over a laundry cart in the clubhouse during a post-start fit of temper. The Pirates needed someone to take his place, and they wanted the young lefty, who had a 12-3 record with a 2.32 ERA at the end of June, to be that person.

“The funny thing about my career is how quickly the highs and the lows have come,” Duke said with a laugh. “I started out as a non-prospect [drafted in the twentieth round by the Pirates in 2001] and then became a hot prospect and then, suddenly, someone they were kind of building their future around.”

He shook his head. “And then a crash to earth.”

There weren’t very many players still stuck in Triple-A in August 2012 who were not counting the days until the end of the season. Duke was a rare exception. He was happy to be on the roster of the Syracuse Chiefs and, more important, happy to feel as if he could pitch successfully again.

“When you get released, it really doesn’t matter how they phrase it or what they tell you,” he said. “The bottom line is you’ve been fired.
You aren’t good enough to do your job. That’s a terrible feeling. Going home to your partner and saying, ‘I’ve been fired, I’m out of work,’ is about as low as you can get professionally.”