Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball
ALSO BY JOHN FEINSTEIN
One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game
Moment of Glory: The Year Underdogs Ruled Golf
Living on the Black: Two Pitchers, Two Teams, One Season to Remember
Tales from Q School: Inside Golf’s Fifth Major
Last Dance: Behind the Scenes at the Final Four
Next Man Up: A Year Behind the Lines in Today’s NFL
Let Me Tell You a Story: A Lifetime in the Game
Caddy for Life: The Bruce Edwards Story
Open: Inside the Ropes at Bethpage Black
The Punch: One Night, Two Lives, and the Fight That Changed Basketball Forever
The Last Amateurs: Playing for Glory and Honor in Division I College Basketball
The Majors: In Pursuit of Golf’s Holy Grail
The First Coming: Tiger Woods, Master or Martyr?
A March to Madness: The View from the Floor in the Atlantic Coast Conference
A Civil War: Army vs. Navy
Winter Games
A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour
Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball
Running Mates
Hard Courts
Forever’s Team
A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball
A Season on the Brink: A Year with Bob Knight and the Indiana Hoosiers
Copyright © 2014 by John Feinstein
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Jacket design by John Fontana
Jacket illustration © Mike Janes / Four Seam Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Feinstein, John.
Where nobody knows your name : life in the minor leagues of baseball /
John Feinstein.
pages cm
1. Minor league baseball—United States—History. I. Title.
GV875.A1F37 2014
796.357′64—dc23 2013030645
ISBN 978-0-385-53593-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-385-53594-6 (eBook)
v3.1
This book is dedicated
to the memory of Rob Ades.
A friend in deed.
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Cast of Characters
Introduction
1 Scott Elarton: Starting Over
2 Podsednik and Montoyo: The Walk-Off Hero and the .400 Hitter
3 Lindsey, Schwinden, and Lollo: The Mayor, the Traveler, and the Ump
4 Slice of Life: Rolling with the Punches in … Allentown … Pawtucket … Norfolk
5 Johnson and Montoyo: Managing Expectations
6 Slice of Life: Sent Down … Called Up …
7 Schwinden and Podsednik: Life on the Roller Coaster
8 Slice of Life: Wally Backman: Second Chances
9 Slice of Life: All Roads Lead to Norfolk
10 Nate McLouth: Comeback Kid
11 Elarton: Still One Step Away
12 Slice of Life: On the Road in Pinstripes
13 Slice of Life: Managing … Indianapolis
14 Schwinden and Lindsey: Home Sweet Home
15 Slice of Life: Jamie Farr Would Be Proud
16 Slice of Life: Weekend in Toledo
17 Brett Tomko: More Than Nine Lives
18 Mark Lollo: Traveling the Umpiring Road
19 Slice of Life: Managing the Highs and Lows
20 Slice of Life: I-75
21 Elarton: Pigs (Not) in the Bigs … and the Ever-Present Revolving Door
22 Slice of Life: Columbus
23 From Montoyo to Longoria: Hot Summer Nights in Durham
24 Slice of Life: Charlotte
25 Podsednik: Hot Streak
26 Ron Johnson: Real Life Gets Serious
27 Maine and Schwinden: Comebacks
28 One At-Bat in Eight Years
29 Elarton: Fighting Father Time
30 Voices of the Minors
31 The Endless Month
32 Slice of Life: Syracuse … Washington … Columbus …
33 Tomko and Lindsey: It’s Never Over Till …
34 Slice of Life: Syracuse
35 Lollo: A Bad Call
36 March to September
37 Lollo and Tomko: Ending
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CAST OF CHARACTERS
SCOTT ELARTON—Pitcher. A one-time first round draft pick who won seventeen games for the Houston Astros at the age of twenty-four, his career was brought to a halt in 2008 by injuries and drinking issues. In August 2011, Elarton realized he wasn’t finished with baseball, and he talked himself into a tryout with the Philadelphia Phillies … that ended up exceeding his wildest expectations.
RON JOHNSON—Manager, Norfolk Tides (Triple-A team of the Baltimore Orioles). Johnson is fifty-seven and has spent most of his adult life in the minor leagues. He played in twenty-two major-league games and likes to say, “I’m in the twilight of a mediocre career.” It is that approach that makes him a perfect Triple-A manager, because he loves coming to the ballparks—any ballpark—every day. Johnson’s other saying about Triple-A life is very direct: “If you don’t like it here, do a better job.”
JON LINDSEY—Designated hitter. Lindsey is a footnote in baseball history: He had played more minor-league games without a major-league call-up than any player in history. In 2010, his unwanted streak came to an end. Lindsey liked to say he was “an accident away,” from a return to the major leagues. “Not rooting for anybody to get hurt,” he would say. “But people do get hurt. It’s just a fact.”
MARK LOLLO—Umpire. At thirty years old, Lollo had finally made it to the major-league “call-up list” in 2011, meaning he got to work a handful of games at the big-league level and was in line to move up to the majors in the near future. But 2012 was more difficult: there were fewer call-ups and there were questions about his umpiring future.
NATE McLOUTH—Outfielder, Baltimore Orioles. A perfect example of the vagaries of baseball life, McLouth went from being an All-Star in Pittsburgh in 2008 to Atlanta to Pittsburgh, where in 2012 he was released while hitting .140. He wondered if his career might be over before he got a chance in Triple-A Norfolk and made the most of it, ending up as the Orioles starting left fielder in the 2012 playoffs. In a five-month period he went from out of baseball to signing a $2 million contract to play in Baltimore in 2013.
CHARLIE MONTOYO—Manager, Durham Bulls (Triple-A team of the Tampa Bay Rays). At forty-seven, Montoyo is considered one of Triple-A’s best managers—his team has reached the postseason six times in seven seasons in Durham, and the Rays loved the way he develops players. But he hasn’t been able to get a serious sniff for a major-league job, even though he’s been successful and is highly respected.
SCOTT PODSEDNIK—Outfielder. A World Series hero in 2005, hitting a walk-off home run in game 2 for the Chicago White Sox, helping lead to their four-game sweep of the Houston Astros. Two years later he was looking for a job. He became a baseball wanderer, going from Kansas City to Chicago to Philadelphia to Boston—getting hurt and dropping back to Triple-A along the
way. He began 2012 in Lehigh Valley, Triple-A team of the Philadelphia Phillies, thinking he should retire, and ending up on a head-spinning baseball odyssey.
CHRIS SCHWINDEN—Pitcher. He lived through one of the most remarkable seasons in baseball history in 2012, but not for the reasons a player would want his season to be considered remarkable. In a five-week period he was released and then picked up by four different organizations. In thirty-seven days he went from New York to Buffalo to Las Vegas to Columbus to Scranton Wilkes-Barre and—at last—back to Buffalo, where he finally found a home that wasn’t a hotel room.
BRETT TOMKO—Pitcher. A one-hundred-game winner in the major leagues. Tomko came all the way back from a serious shoulder injury suffered while he was winning his one-hundredth game in 2009. He started over in rookie league ball where he was—his words—“absolutely terrible”—but pitched his way back to the major leagues in Texas two years later. He started the 2012 season in Louisville, Triple-A team of the Cincinnati Reds.
Introduction
JUNE 2, 2012
On a spectacular late spring evening in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a sellout crowd of 10,100 people packed Coca-Cola Park, the five-year-old stadium that has served as the home for the Lehigh Valley IronPigs since 2008. Dusk was rapidly approaching. The temperature was seventy degrees with just a hint of breeze. It was a Saturday night, and clearly the ballpark was the place to be in the town of just under 120,000 that was made famous by Billy Joel’s 1982 ballad.
Sellouts, or near sellouts, have become commonplace since the franchise that once resided in Ottawa as the Lynx moved to Allentown and became the Lehigh Valley IronPigs. And with the Pawtucket Red Sox in town for a twi-night doubleheader, the park was jumping with noise as the second game began.
The IronPigs had just, thirty minutes earlier, come from behind for a 5–4 win in game one, and game two had also started promisingly for the home team. The PawSox had been forced to start Tony Peña Jr.—normally a reliever—because the scheduled starter, Ross Ohlendorf, had opted out of his contract a day earlier to sign with the San Diego Padres.
Such is life in the minor leagues: today’s starter for Pawtucket could become tomorrow’s starter for Arizona. Or, just as often, it happens the other way around.
Peña had lasted three innings. Arnie Beyeler, the Pawtucket manager, would have taken Peña out at that point even if he hadn’t given up six runs. He had thrown fifty-four pitches, well beyond the number a manager normally wants to see a reliever throw. And so, when the IronPigs came to the plate in the bottom of the fourth leading 6–4, Beyeler went to his bullpen.
In every minor-league ballpark, there is no such thing as nothing going on between innings. Fans expect entertainment that goes beyond hits, runs, and errors, and they get it.
There are all sorts of contests for fans to participate in, and there is always some kind of entertainment going on to distract those in the stands. To put it in perspective, one of the biggest disappointments of the 2012 season in Durham was when George Jetson Night was rained out.
In Allentown, one of the more popular fan-participation contests is called Whack an Intern. And yes, it is family entertainment … not what you might otherwise think. A large box with four holes cut in the top is brought out to the third-base line. Four of the Pigs’ summer interns crawl beneath the box. Two fans are selected and handed plastic bats. Each time an intern pops his head out of one of the four holes, the fans attempt to whack him. The fan who connects most is the winner.
While almost everyone in the ballpark was paying rapt attention to Whack an Intern, the reliever called into the game by manager Beyeler jogged in from the left-field bullpen. When the public address announcer introduced him, there wasn’t a hint of a reaction from the crowd. The plastic bats ruled at that moment.
The relief pitcher was Mark Prior, who had last pitched in a major-league baseball game on August 10, 2006. In the almost six years since then, he had pitched a total of forty-eight innings (an average of just eight innings per season) in the minor leagues, for three different organizations—San Diego, Texas, and the New York Yankees. He was thirty-one years old, and there was no way his presence on the mound, throwing his warm-up pitches, was going to distract anyone from the announcement of who had won Whack an Intern.
This was remarkable only if you happened to remember who Mark Prior had once been. In 2001, coming out of USC, he had been the No. 2 pick in the amateur draft in all of baseball. The only reason he wasn’t No. 1 was that he had notified the Minnesota Twins—who owned the No. 1 pick—that he didn’t want to play for them. The Twins drafted local hero Joe Mauer instead … a pick that ended up working out just fine for them.
Prior signed with the Cubs for a $10.5 million bonus, a record for a first contract that wasn’t broken until 2009, when Stephen Strasburg signed with the Washington Nationals for $15 million. Prior was in the majors by 2002, and a year later, at the age of twenty-two, he won eighteen games for the Chicago Cubs and finished third in the Cy Young Award voting in the National League. He and Kerry Wood had led the Cubs to the National League Central title, and to within one win of the team’s first World Series appearance since 1945.
Prior was the pitcher on the mound during one of the more infamous moments in Cubs history—when Steve Bartman made his grab at Luis Castillo’s foul ball in the eighth inning of game six of the League Championship Series that year. If Moises Alou had caught the ball, the Cubs, leading 3–0 behind Prior’s pitching, would have been four outs from the World Series.
The Cubs never got there, though, and Prior never became the star he was universally expected to become in the eyes of those who knew baseball. In 2003, Prior was to the game what Stephen Strasburg was to baseball in 2012—except that he’d never had Tommy John surgery on his pitching elbow.
For Prior, the injuries began a year later; a torn Achilles started it, and then they came one after another. He stayed healthy enough to win eleven games with the Cubs in 2005 but went on the disabled list with a strained shoulder in August 2006, after having been on the DL for two months earlier in the season. When he did get on the mound that year, he was as miserable as he had been brilliant three years earlier: a 1-6 record with a 7.21 ERA.
After deciding against surgery in the off-season, he pitched one inning in the minor leagues the next year before being forced to undergo surgery. The Cubs released him at the end of 2007, which started his minor-league odyssey: San Diego for two injury-plagued seasons, during which he never pitched; Texas for one; the Yankees for one. He pitched a total of twenty-one times in those four seasons, never staying healthy long enough to make a serious run at getting back to the majors.
He had signed with the Red Sox in May 2012 and had been working in extended spring training in Florida to get his arm in shape. Now, exactly one month after his signing, the Red Sox had sent him to Allentown to join the PawSox. His hope was to get to Boston as a middle reliever. That would be a victory—even if it was a long, long way from the days when he had been called “the future of pitching.”
On this evening in Allentown, Prior’s reality was Whack an Intern.
The names are there every single day in the newspapers, listed under the heading “Transactions.” The type size for the list of transactions is a small font used for statistical data, commonly known as agate. On almost any given day of the year in baseball, lives change … and those changes are recorded in the agate.
Scott Elarton. Brett Tomko. Chris Schwinden. Scott Podsednik. Nate McLouth. John Lindsey. Charlie Montoyo. Ron Johnson. Mark Lollo.
Nine names that serious baseball fans might—or might not—recognize. Three pitchers, two outfielders, a designated hitter, two managers, and an umpire. Each spent all, or most, of the 2012 baseball season playing in the International League at the Triple-A level, with the exception of McLouth, who went from the majors to “released” to Triple-A and back to the majors again.
All, with the exception of Lollo—umpires don’t rate making th
e agate when their lives change—have appeared in the agate multiple times during their careers. Schwinden appeared eleven times … during 2012 alone. Their stories are symbolic of what life is like for most baseball players. Only the most gifted and fortunate make it to the major leagues and then stay there until the day they retire.
Jeff Torborg, who spent most of his playing career as a backup catcher and then went on to manage the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox, New York Mets, Montreal Expos, and Florida Marlins, was asked once during the winter meetings if a trade about to be announced by the Mets was the “big one” (there had been rumors about a major trade throughout the week).
“To the guys involved it is,” Torborg answered.
Mark Prior appeared in agate type three times during 2012: “Signed to a minor league contract by the Boston Red Sox”; “Called up to Triple-A Pawtucket from extended spring training”; and, finally, in August, “Released by the Boston Red Sox.”
In every baseball season, there are thousands of these “transactions” that go virtually unnoticed. Every once in a while someone will glance at the agate section and see a name like Prior’s—or Miguel Tejada or Dontrelle Willis—and think, “So that’s what happened to him,” and then move on with his daily routine.
But every single one of those transactions is life changing for those involved. It can be the zenith or the nadir for a baseball player: a moment of overwhelming joy or gut-wrenching disappointment. It means families being uprooted—sometimes for no apparent reason—and it always has repercussions that go beyond the player himself. When someone gets called up, it means someone gets sent down, and three or four guys who think they should be called up are left to deal with yet another letdown and to ask the most ever-present question that floats through Triple-A clubhouses: “Why not me?”
A season of Triple-A baseball is filled with hundreds of stories. Some are more compelling—or surprising, poignant, funny, or remarkable—than most. This book is about a handful of men who run the gamut of life in Triple-A; men who have been stars and have fallen; men who have been rich and then far from rich; men who have aspired to those heights and never quite reached them.