Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (3 page)

Tomko was right about his shoulder—he had blown it out. Not wanting his last baseball memory to be walking off a mound with his arm hanging limp, he came back after the surgery and dropped all the way back to rookie-league ball briefly, and then to Class A, pitching in Stockton, California, against a bunch of kids who seemed to hit rockets off every pitch he threw. In six starts he pitched to an ERA of 7.52.

“I couldn’t get anyone out,” he said. “It was embarrassing. There was almost no one watching, but a lot of those who were kept screaming at me, ‘Go home, old man. You’re done.’ ”

Tomko knew their reaction to the pitcher they were seeing at that moment was understandable. But he still believed that locked inside somewhere was the pitcher who had not only won a hundred games in the major leagues but also pitched there for fourteen seasons, been given the ball as a starter 266 times, and struck out 1,209 batters in 1,816 major-league innings.

“The doctors had told me it would take a while to feel healthy again,” he said. “Of course I’m like everyone else who has ever been any good: I thought once the pain was gone, I’d be who I was before the injury. It’s never that simple. I still thought I could make it back. But I also thought maybe I owed it to my wife and kids to just face the reality of it all and go home.”

His wife talked him into not coming home. Slowly, Brett Tomko began to become again the pitcher who had spent all those years getting big-league hitters out. He worked his way back up the minor-league ladder, reaching Triple-A Sacramento by the end of the season. And yet he still wasn’t back. The best offer he could get for 2011 was
a minor-league contract from the Texas Rangers. He took it, even though he knew he had no chance to make the team out of training camp; he hadn’t even been invited to major-league camp.

“I can’t tell you how many times I was ready to hang it up,” he said. “We’d had twins four days after I hurt my shoulder in ’09, and I missed them every day I was away. But I couldn’t walk away.”

On April 20, with the season barely under way, the Rangers called Tomko up, needing some middle-relief help. As luck would have it, his first appearance in the majors was on the same mound where he had hurt himself nineteen months earlier.

“I came into the game and got through the inning, got the side one-two-three,” he said. “It felt like it was supposed to feel, like I was a major-league pitcher again.

“After I got the third out, I started to walk to the dugout, and it hit me that I had made it all the way back—that I hadn’t let the day I got hurt be the end. I got two steps into the dugout and lost it—I mean completely lost it. I didn’t want everyone to see me crying like that, so I went straight into the runway where there’s a small bathroom, went inside, and locked the door.

“It took me a while to get my act together. After a couple minutes [manager] Ron Washington came and knocked on the door. ‘Big guy, you okay in there?’ he said. ‘You all right?’

“I told him I was fine. When I came out, he was smiling because he knew what had happened. He didn’t say another word. He didn’t have to. I knew he got it.”

Tomko smiled at the memory. “Sometimes going full circle in life isn’t a good thing. In this case, it was as satisfying as anything I’ve ever done.”

The most poignant stories in sports are never about the multimillionaires who make their games look easy but about the guys who love their games, even though they often fail while playing them.

The exploits of LeBron James or Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or Miguel Cabrera may awe us, but they hardly produce a lump in the
throat. But when Adam Greenberg gets a second at-bat in the major leagues, seven years after being hit in the head during his first at-bat, we all stop and watch and smile and get a chill. When Jimmy Morris makes it to the major leagues at the age of thirty-five—after blowing out his arm and leaving baseball entirely to become a high school coach—and then pitches a total of fifteen innings over two years, it not only becomes a Disney movie; it becomes one that leaves us wiping tears away during the final scene.

What made
The Rookie
special was that it was real—you couldn’t make it up. There isn’t a baseball player alive, especially among those who have had to fight to get to the major leagues, who hasn’t seen the movie at some point. Without fail, when Morris’s story comes up, they shake their heads in amazement because they all understand how remarkable it is that he pitched those fifteen innings in the majors.

“Fifteen minutes in the majors means you’re a great baseball player,” said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland—who never got his fifteen minutes above the Triple-A level. “People just can’t understand how good you have to be to get there at all.”

Those who have been there and come back, and those who have gotten only as far as Leyland got, know what it means to get that call, to get called in to the manager’s office and to hear those three simple words: “You’re going up.”

“No one grows up playing baseball pretending that they’re pitching or hitting in Triple-A,” said Chris Schwinden, who in 2012 pitched for five different teams in a period of five weeks. “No one goes into his backyard and says to himself, ‘Here’s Schwinden on the mound for the Buffalo Bisons.’ ”

He smiled. “No one dreams of pitching in a minor-league park when it’s forty degrees at first pitch and there are two thousand people in the stands. And yet almost all of us do it—some for a little while, some for a long while. The reality is almost always different than the dream.”

Schwinden is in many ways symbolic of the reality. In 2012 he was called up to the major leagues on three different occasions. He was also released by four different teams. While his case may be
extreme, being moved from team to team and level to level is something many—if not most—baseball players go through. Almost without exception they all spend time in the minor leagues. All of them—even those who go on to be multimillion-dollar-a-year stars—can remember that first call-up. For others, who dance with stardom and then return to the minors, getting called back up may be even more gratifying because the first time around they take it for granted. For some, a brief trip to the majors, even if it lasts only a few days, is the highlight they carry with them long after they have retired. And there are others who never get that call even once.

As Schwinden points out, they all grow up dreaming of playing in the big leagues—in the massive ballparks with forty thousand or more fans screaming their names as they make a heroic play on the mound, at the plate, or in the field. No one dreams about playing in Triple-A.

Charlie Montoyo has managed the Durham Bulls since 2007. He has spent most of his life in the minors and still hopes his chance to prove himself in the majors will come someday soon. Ron Johnson, who returned to the minors as Norfolk’s manager in 2012, hopes for the same chance.

“The good news is we’ve got a great bus,” Johnson said one night prior to a nine-hour trip to Gwinnett. “Nobody beats our bus.”

Both men love their game and are devoted to it but have seen firsthand how unimportant it can feel when real life—in the form of crises involving their children—has intervened. Montoyo keeps a photograph of his two children inside his cap at all times as a reminder to himself that a missed umpire’s call isn’t
that
important.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t argue,” he said, smiling. “But I try to remember that the ump has a family too, and he’s probably trying just as hard as I am.”

There are so many stories about minor-league life that telling even a handful of them in one book is virtually impossible. But some stand out because they are about persevering. A lot of baseball is about persevering.

“It’s very easy to say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a big leaguer, I don’t
belong here,’ ” Scott Elarton said of minor-league life. “But the game usually gives you what you deserve—good or bad. And you realize, especially when you get away from it, that you’re going to live a lot of your life as an ex-ballplayer. That’s why a lot of us figure out that hanging on for as long as you can possibly play the game is a good thing. It really isn’t hanging on—it’s savoring what you’ve got.”

Of course
that
is easier said than done.

Every player knows how much the first call-up means. Which is why there is almost always a celebration of some kind in a Triple-A clubhouse when someone gets the call for the first time. Everyone understands what an extraordinary moment it is in a player’s life. Those who have been called up remember what it meant to them; those who have not know how much they want it to happen.

J. C. Boscan’s story isn’t quite the same as Jimmy Morris’s, because he never stopped playing. He signed with the Atlanta Braves in the summer of 1996 at the age of sixteen and spent the next fourteen seasons bouncing around the minor leagues. He first reached Triple-A in 2002 but couldn’t take the next step, because, even though he was a solid catcher, he just couldn’t hit well enough to be regarded as a serious big-league prospect.

He left the Braves for a couple of years to play in Double-A and Triple-A for the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cincinnati Reds. He signed back with the Braves in 2008, because the people running the organization had so much respect for him as a clubhouse leader and someone who would set a good example for younger players that they were willing to bring him back—knowing he was unlikely ever to play in Atlanta.

Two years later, playing in Gwinnett, he had his best offensive season. Nothing spectacular, but a career-high five home runs and a batting average of .250—higher than his lifetime average of .222. Late in August, Boscan began to hear that he might be on the September call-up list.

Every year on September 1, major-league teams can expand their rosters to as many as forty players (the regular roster size is twenty-five). Rarely do they bring up more than five or six players. Those who are brought up usually provide depth in the bullpen or on the bench or are young players being given a taste of the major leagues. Every once in a while, a team will give a player a “good-guy promotion”—bring him up so he can make major-league pay for a month as a reward for being a good guy and not complaining about being stuck in the minor leagues.

Boscan had been in the minors for fourteen years and had never seen the inside of a big-league clubhouse except during spring training. At thirty, he was a long way from being the bright-eyed teenage prospect the Braves had brought to the United States from Venezuela in 1997.

On August 31, the word in the Gwinnett clubhouse was that the Braves were going to make their call-ups after the game. Boscan remembers being more nervous that night than at any other time in his career.

“I walked on the field that night, and all I could think was, ‘If I don’t get the call tonight, it’s never going to come,’ ” he remembered. “I honestly thought this was my last shot and my best shot to ever get to the majors. I could barely keep my mind on the game. All I could think about was what was going to happen after it was over. I was praying to God to let this be my time.”

When the game ended, Boscan sat in front of his locker and picked at the postgame meal. Hitting coach Jamie Dismuke had been designated by manager Dave Brundage to bring players into his office so they could be told they were going to make the thirty-seven-mile trip down I-85 to Turner Field. As Dismuke worked his way around the clubhouse, that thirty-seven miles felt more like a million to Boscan.

The first player called in was Freddie Freeman, the twenty-year-old phenom, who was hitting .319 and was considered a lock call-up. He came out of Brundage’s office with a huge smile on his face and was engulfed in congratulations.

Dismuke continued his rounds. One player after another walked around the corner to Brundage’s office and came out wearing the giveaway grin. The congratulations continued. No one had made a move to leave because this was a happy night—for those going up.

Six players had gone in to see Brundage—entering as Gwinnett Braves and coming out as Atlanta Braves—and there was no sign of Dismuke for a couple of minutes. Boscan’s heart sank. That was it—six guys. His dream had died.