Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (5 page)

Four months after that meeting, Elarton walked into the spacious clubhouse at Bright House Field and found a crisp, clean uniform with the number 59 on it hanging in a locker that had his name on it. A number of veteran players, guys he had pitched against in his first baseball incarnation, came by to say hello and welcome him.

“If you’ve been a player, a baseball clubhouse is a very comfortable place to be if you’re in uniform,” he said. “Even if you haven’t been around for a while, if you’re in uniform, then you feel like you belong. If you’re not in uniform, then you don’t. It really doesn’t matter who you are or who you’ve been, that’s the way it is.”

Players talk often about the fear of someday not having a uniform or a locker anymore. Elarton had taken that a step further when he had shown up in Denver as a “civilian,” as players call anyone not in uniform. Putting on a uniform again, even surrounded by so many unfamiliar faces, was comforting.

His negotiations with the Phillies after Amaro’s visit had gone smoothly except for one small glitch: performance incentives. Elarton didn’t want any. The Phillies were offering a fairly typical two-way contract: If he was on the major-league roster, he would be paid $600,000—which was $120,000 over the major-league minimum because it included bonuses for making the team. If he was in the minors, he would be paid a very high Triple-A rate: $15,000 a month.

“Take the incentives for making the major-league team out,” Elarton told Michael Moss, partner of his long-time agent Ron Shapiro, who had also represented Cal Ripken Jr. and Kirby Puckett in the past.

“You want them
out
?” Moss said, stunned for obvious reasons.

“Out,” Elarton answered. “I don’t want money getting in the way of me making it back to the majors. If it’s a close call and it’s me or another guy and they have to pay me extra if I make it up, they may call the other guy up. I don’t want to take a chance on that happening.”

Moss called Amaro back to tell him he had an unusual request. Amaro had never in his life had a player ask for
less
money potentially, but he laughed when he heard what Elarton was thinking.

“Tell Scott that, being honest, the amount of money we’re talking here will have
no
influence on whether he gets called up or not,” he said. “If he pitches well enough to earn the bonuses, he should get them. But if we need him in Philadelphia, this money isn’t going to get in the way. I promise.”

Elarton was still a tad doubtful when Moss told him what Amaro had said but finally agreed.

He arrived in Clearwater with a simple goal: pitch so well during spring training that it would be impossible for the Phillies to send him down.

“Realistically, there weren’t any spots open—especially for a starter,” he said. “All you had to do was look at the rotation and you knew there wasn’t any chance. They had stars and veterans. I hadn’t pitched, except for three starts in Charlotte in 2010, since 2008. Intellectually, I knew the deal. But as a competitor I was going there to show them I was still a major-league pitcher. If I didn’t think I was good enough, there wasn’t much point in my being there.”

The first three times Elarton got into games, he showed them. When he was on the mound facing real hitters, it all came back like riding a bike. His unorthodox delivery, all arms and legs coming at the batter from his six-foot-seven-inch frame, had hitters who hadn’t seen him before way off balance.

“First three times I pitched I didn’t have to pitch from the stretch once,” he said, smiling at the memory. “It almost felt like I was back in Houston and it was 2000 again.”

That was the year Elarton won seventeen games pitching for the Astros before injuries and a taste for the nightlife sent his promising career off the rails. Twelve years later, back in the March heat of Florida’s west coast, he was twenty-five again. He could tell by the looks he was getting from his teammates in the clubhouse that they were noticing.

And then, not surprisingly, he came back to earth. It wasn’t as if he crashed; he descended more slowly than that, pitching reasonably well but not lights out the way it had been at the start of camp. As
March came to a close, he knew the numbers he had been concerned about in February were clearly stacked against him. Nevertheless, with a week left before the team broke camp, he was still on the roster.

“I was in early one morning to work out before I was supposed to throw a bullpen,” he said. (When pitchers throw on their days off, they do so in the bullpen, thus everyone in baseball refers to those workouts as “throwing a bullpen.” Many pitchers shorten the phrase to “My bullpens have been good lately.”) “I was on a bike when [pitching coach] Rich Dubee came in. I said, ‘Hey, Rich, what time am I supposed to throw this morning?’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Need to talk to you in Charlie’s office.’ ”

Charlie Manuel was the Phillies’ manager. Elarton knew he wasn’t being invited in for breakfast. “In baseball there are two reasons you get called into a major-league manager’s office and both are bad,” Elarton said. “The first one is if you’re being taken out of the rotation—or benched. That’s not good. The second one is a lot worse.”

This was the second one. Rubén Amaro was sitting with Manuel when Elarton walked in, a clear sign of what was to come—if Elarton had needed one. Both men were very complimentary about Elarton’s spring: He had worked hard, done everything they had asked. They believed he was capable of pitching in the big leagues again if he could improve his command. (Another pitching term, which, in English, means being able to throw pitches to the exact spot where a pitcher wants them. Missing by an inch can be the difference between a swing and a miss and a line drive.) But as he knew, the team was blessed with starters like Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, and Cole Hamels—not to mention guys like Joe Blanton and Vance Worley who weren’t stars but had solid big-league résumés.

Manuel finished with the inevitable line ballplayers have been hearing for as long as the minor leagues have existed. “Go down and keep working hard and there’s a good chance you’ll be back up here. It’s a long season.”

Elarton was disappointed, though not surprised, yet also elated. He had gone from standing behind a barrier trying to wave Amaro down the previous August to being on the cusp of making a big-league
roster seven months later. He knew Manuel’s words—although clichéd—were true: it
was
a long season, and if he pitched well in Triple-A, there was a chance he would make it to Philadelphia. He believed he was good enough.

He thanked Amaro and Manuel for the chance they had given him and packed up his locker to move across the complex to the minor-league camp. The walk from the big-league clubhouse to the minor-league clubhouse took only a few minutes, but it was as if Elarton had traveled through time and space to another dimension.

“The minute I opened the door all the memories flooded back,” he said, a smile crossing his face. “It was as if I was a kid pitcher on my way up again except that I was thirty-six years old. I took one step inside and there it was again, the smell.”

Athletes talk often about the smell of failure, of disappointment, of fear. This smell was different.

“This was the
smell
,” Elarton said. “The minor-league clubhouses in Florida are usually built for about fifty guys, and at that time of year there are two hundred guys trying to figure a way to move around in there. It smells—big-time.”

Baseball players understand that no one goes straight to the big leagues. Once upon a time, an occasional player might bypass the minor leagues either because of extraordinary talent or because a team needed instant publicity. Nowadays, no one does that—even phenoms like Stephen Strasburg, Bryce Harper, and Mike Trout spend
some
time in the minor leagues.

But they all assume that their journey will go in only one direction—up. They all believe that once they walk out of a minor-league clubhouse heading for the big leagues, they aren’t coming back. Of course many do come back. Some end up on an escalator that takes them up and down to the point where they feel dizzy.

Danny Worth, who made the Detroit Tigers’ postseason roster in 2012, had been sent back down to the minor leagues eleven times in four years before making it back to Detroit late in the 2012 season.

“Every time you get sent down it hurts,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you know it’s coming or not. You can do one of two things: you
can sulk and say you got screwed, or you can be honest with yourself and say, ‘I haven’t played well enough to stay up there.’ It’s really pretty simple.”

Scott Elarton had ridden the escalator, particularly near the end of his first baseball incarnation—even dropping briefly back to Double-A at one point. “You rationalize it by saying it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been hurt,” he said. “But after a while it doesn’t matter. You look around and there are plenty of guys who have been hurt, plenty of pitchers who have had shoulder surgery more than once.

“You want to think you’re going to wake up one morning and you’re going to be twenty-five and your shoulder is going to be completely healthy. Then you wake up and realize that’s never going to be the case again. One morning I woke up and decided it was time to go home.”

That is … until that summer afternoon in Denver, standing behind a barrier with his son, when he decided it was time to try again—one more time.

And so, on this late March morning in Clearwater, Elarton stood for a long moment and looked around the packed minor-league clubhouse. Then he took a deep breath and went to find his locker. No one even looked up at him. He was another face in the crowd. He was back where nobody knows your name.

THE WALK-OFF HERO AND THE .400 HITTER

Scott Elarton’s story was different from most because he had decided to start over again after almost three years away from baseball. But the call into the manager’s office, and the speech (“work hard and you’ll be back”), and the long walk from the major-league clubhouse to the minor-league clubhouse, was a scene being repeated throughout March in thirty spring training camps.

For some, it was more difficult than others. When Scott Podsednik, who had been in the Phillies’ camp at the same time as Elarton, got the call into Charlie Manuel’s office, he wasn’t completely shocked. But Podsednik was so horrified by the thought of playing in Triple-A again that his first thought, as Manuel told him how well he had performed in March (he had hit .343 for the spring), was, “I don’t know if I can do this again.”

Podsednik had just turned thirty-six. He was seven years removed from a moment about which baseball players literally fantasize from the time they first pick up a bat and glove: on a cold October night in Chicago he had hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of game two of the World Series. Podsednik was a leadoff hitter, someone who specialized in getting to first base and then stealing second (he’d stolen 120 bases in the previous two seasons), and he hadn’t hit a single home run during the 2005 regular season. But he turned on a
2-1 pitch and watched it sail through the air into the right-field seats as if, in that instant, he had somehow become “the Natural.”

The term in baseball nowadays is a “walk-off home run.” It didn’t exist until Kirk Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Dennis Eckersley in game one of the 1988 World Series and Eckersley referred to it as “a walk-off,” meaning, quite simply, that when someone does what Gibson did to him in that game, there’s nothing left to do except walk off the mound into the dugout and then into the clubhouse.

Referring to a game-winning home run in a World Series game as a “walk-off” doesn’t quite capture the drama of it. The stadium explodes with noise, and the hero is mobbed at home plate in a manner he has never experienced before—regardless of how long he has played the game.

“I’m a much better hitter when I don’t try to hit for power, because that’s not what I do,” Podsednik said on a warm March morning just before the Phillies’ exhibition season was to begin. He had worked out for an extra hour following the team’s morning workout. “I wasn’t trying to hit a home run when I went up there. But I managed to turn on the ball and it just took off. When I realized it was going out, I had to pinch myself for a minute to be absolutely sure I was awake.

“It’s almost hard to come down from that kind of thing. After we ended up winning that Series [in a four-game sweep], it seemed as if we were back in spring training talking about trying to do it again about an hour later. It just happened
so
fast.”

Everything happens fast at the elite levels of sports. If you get hurt and don’t produce, having been a hero doesn’t mean much.

Podsednik’s road to that moment in 2005 hadn’t been an easy one. He had dealt with injuries for what felt like his entire career and had played most of eight and a half seasons in the minor leagues before finally making it to the majors on a full-time basis in 2003, at the age of twenty-seven.

“There had been times when the thought that ‘this just wasn’t meant to be for me’ had crossed my mind,” he said. “For a lot of years, every light at the end of every tunnel was a train.”