Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (31 page)

“That was demoralizing,” Orr said. “I thought I had outplayed the other guys who were competing for utility jobs in the infield, and then they signed Luis. There was certainly no comparison in our résumés, so I thought maybe I was going to be sent down again.”

Nine days later, the Phillies released Castillo after realizing he wasn’t even a shadow of his former self. Orr felt better—but still not safe. “Cliff Lee kept asking me, ‘Have they told you, have they told you?’ ” he said. “The answer was no.”

There are very few boundaries when it comes to locker-room humor, especially in baseball—where players spend far more time with one another during the course of an eight-month season than
they do with their families. Orr spent most of the spring being ribbed about his uncertain status with the team. After the Castillo signing, Shane Victorino put a printout in Orr’s locker that listed potential housing opportunities in the Lehigh valley.

“All the guys were messing with me,” he said. “But I knew they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t want to see me make the team.”

Just as he had done in 2005 with the Braves, Orr made the trip north with the Phillies, still uncertain if he was going to be on the opening-day roster. Hector Luna, another backup infielder, also made the trip. Orr was sitting in the dugout during the Phillies’ last exhibition game—played in Citizens Bank Park—when Lee asked him again if anyone had told him he was on the team. Again, Orr told him no.

“Well, I’m going to find out,” Lee said—and stalked away.

In the ninth inning, Lee came back and sat down next to Orr. “You’re in,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Yup. You’re in.”

Sure enough, after the game Charlie Manuel called Luna into his office. Orr could tell by the look on Luna’s face when he walked out that he had been sent down. A few minutes later, it was Orr’s turn. He was on the team. Whether Lee had said something to Manuel about telling Orr the news or whether Manuel had been waiting to see if the Phillies made some kind of a deal that would have sent Orr to Lehigh Valley along with Luna, he didn’t know. Regardless, he was ecstatic. “I hadn’t been in the majors at all in 2010, and just briefly in 2011,” he said. “It meant a lot to work my way back there.”

Orr played well when he got to play in Philadelphia. He knew his time there might be brief once again because he was the most likely guy to get sent down when Utley came off the disabled list. “I knew it was probably coming,” he said. “I just didn’t expect it to happen when it did.”

It happened on June 7—the day before he turned thirty-three. The Phillies decided to call up Michael Martínez, who had been playing
well at Lehigh Valley, and send Orr down in his place. It was one of those player swaps that go virtually unnoticed even by those who read the agate, but that profoundly affect the people involved.

Orr was in the lineup almost every day back in Triple-A. The person most affected by his presence was Tug Hulett, who had been playing more often when Martínez was on the team. On July 22, Hulett was told he would need to pack up his locker and head back to Reading.

The revolving door of baseball never stops.

COLUMBUS

There is one player currently employed by a Major League Baseball team—in this case the Cleveland Indians—who has a degree in economics from Harvard. That would be Frank Joseph Herrmann, Harvard class of 2006, Columbus Clippers bullpen 2012.

“If I had a dollar for every time I hear, ‘Hey, you should know the answer to that question, you went to Harvard,’ I could probably retire,” Herrmann said one night with a smile. “When you’re the only one of anything, especially in a clubhouse, people are bound to notice.”

Herrmann doesn’t mind being the only Harvard grad around. He made it to the big leagues for the first time, in Cleveland, in 2010. That made him the fifteenth Harvard man to pitch in the majors, but the first since Jeff Musselman had pitched for the Mets in 1990.

“When I was coming out of high school, I thought I had a chance to play in the majors someday,” he said. “But when the chance came to go to Harvard, there was no way I could say no. I mean, how do you pass up a chance like that?”

Actually, athletes who have pro ambitions often pass up that chance. In 1995, Frank Sullivan, the basketball coach at Harvard, thought he was about to pull off a recruiting coup when Wally Szczerbiak told him he was going to come to Harvard that fall. Szczerbiak was from Long Island and had somehow slipped under the radar of the
big-time college programs. Late that spring, Miami of Ohio, hardly a powerhouse but still a more highly regarded basketball school than Harvard, offered Szczerbiak a scholarship. He accepted and went on to be the No. 6 pick in the NBA draft and play ten years in the NBA.

“I still think about what might have been if Wally had come,” Sullivan has often said. “Then again, the decision worked out pretty well for him.”

Herrmann was also recruited by some of the big-name jock schools. He was a three-sport athlete in high school, perhaps as good a prospect in football as he was in baseball, and a thousand-point scorer in basketball. But he had made up his mind to apply early decision to Harvard after baseball coach Joe Walsh invited him to campus for a visit. Once he got in, there wasn’t any doubt about where he was going to go to college.

“I don’t think my parents would have ever forgiven me if I didn’t go,” he said. “Maybe in the next life, but not in this one.”

Herrmann pitched and played the outfield as a freshman. That summer he played for a team owned by former Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette in the New England Collegiate Baseball League.

“I think Dan saw something he liked in me,” Herrmann said. “I remember he told me that I had some qualities that could help a major-league team. That was a nice boost for my confidence because I knew that he knew what a big-league ballplayer looked like.”

As a sophomore Herrmann became a full-time pitcher. By the time he was a junior, he was attracting some attention from major-league clubs but had no intention of entering the draft or even thinking about turning pro until after he had graduated. In fact, he had an internship on Wall Street that summer, which made sense for someone majoring in economics. He didn’t especially like the job, and when he got a call from a friend who said he could spend the last six weeks of the summer in Hawaii playing in a new collegiate summer league, he quit and decided to go pitch.

While he was there, Don Lyle, the Cleveland Indians’ Northern California scout, saw him pitch and recommended to the Indians that
they try to sign him. “He said I had life in my arm and they liked my potential,” Herrmann said. “They offered me $30,000 and one semester’s tuition.”

At that point, Herrmann was two semesters from graduation. Hearing what was going on, Duquette called Indians general manager Mark Shapiro and asked him to excuse Herrmann from pitching in the fall for two years so he could get his Harvard degree. When Shapiro agreed, Herrmann decided to sign. Even with that proviso, his parents weren’t thrilled.

“It was a leap of faith—in myself, I guess—on my part,” he said. “I figured I’d be getting a year’s head start and I could still get my degree. My parents were adamantly against the idea, but they said it was my decision to make.”

In fact, when he and his parents went to a minor-league game that summer in Vermont, Frank Herrmann turned to his son as they left the ballpark and said, “You’re giving up Harvard for
this
?”

He was. He kept his word to go back to school and even wrote a column for the
Harvard Crimson
while he was back on campus about his experiences pitching in the minor leagues. His rise through the minors was steady, and after he had pitched to an ERA of 0.31 at Columbus during the first two months of the 2010 season, he got the call to join the Indians in Cleveland. He made his debut in early June, facing four batters and getting them all out.

Nothing to it.

Except that facing big-league hitters wasn’t the same as facing Triple-A hitters, and Herrmann figured out why pretty quickly. “What you find out is that there are no easy outs in the major leagues. The worst hitter in a lineup is usually a guy who has hit Triple-A pitching very well or he wouldn’t be there. And the best hitters in a lineup are guys who crush Triple-A pitching. In Triple-A there are times—not all the time, but some of the time—when you can get through an inning without throwing very many good pitches. That’s never true in the majors. Never.”

Herrmann knew when he arrived at spring training in Arizona in 2012 that he would be fighting for one of the last bullpen spots on
the Indians’ roster. He didn’t get off to a good start when he gave up four runs to the Reds in an inning of work the first week in March. He pitched better after that, but the die seemed cast. On April 2, three days before the Indians opened the season, he was sent back to Columbus.

“Disappointing to say the least,” he said. “It’s definitely tougher coming back down because you know what you’ve lost—tangibly and intangibly. The first time I made it up to Triple-A, I was making $2,000 a month, and that was completely okay by me. I’ve had two years in the majors now. Even at the minimum [$482,000 in 2012] that’s a far cry from what you make down here. You get spoiled, used to the idea of being able to do things and buy things without worrying about money because you have money.

“It isn’t as if I’m broke. My wife [Johanna] has a very good job [in corporate communications for Coca-Cola] and we’ve done well while I was in the majors. But it
is
different.

“We just got back from a twelve-day road trip to Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. The last couple of days of that trip I was dragging. Those days this was a
job
. I think 80 percent of the time this is fun. I like doing my work, I like getting a chance to pitch, and I still believe I’m good enough to be back in the majors.”

He smiled. “Of course as the days dwindle and the trade deadline gets close, you see that window closing. The thing you have to understand is that for every guy at every level of the minors, the stakes every day are very high. But I think they might be highest at Triple-A because you know how close you are. If you’ve been up, you know you have it in you to get back. And yet you look around and know there are twenty-four guys on your team thinking the same thing and twenty-five guys in the other dugout also thinking the same thing.

“The day I look around and say, ‘What am I doing here?’ is the day I walk away. I’ve never had that thought. I know I want a second career out of baseball, and having a Harvard degree helps me think there’s a soft landing for me out there when I’m done. A lot of guys don’t have that. For them, it’s baseball or bust.”

He looked out at the rain pelting down on Huntington Park in downtown Columbus. Two nights earlier, the Clippers and the Mud Hens had been rained out, and they had played a doubleheader the night before.

“Last thing we need is to have to play two again tomorrow,” he said, shaking his head. “The only thing worse would be to sit around for three hours and
then
have to play two anyway. Down here, they don’t like to call off games. They want the gate.”

The way rainouts are handled in Triple-A is very different from in the majors. When a game is rained out in the majors, it is rescheduled either for an off day or as part of a day-night (separate admissions) doubleheader. A rainout still costs a team money because the walk-up crowd for a rescheduled game is almost always very small, but season-ticket holders have to pay for the game whether they show up or not.

In the minors, because there are so few days off during the season, it is almost impossible to schedule a makeup game on an off day. What’s more, since teams travel by bus or on commercial airplanes, it is much more difficult to get to and from a city for one day to play a makeup game the way major-league teams—which fly charter—often do.

There is also a rule that allows for only one separate-admission doubleheader in each city each season. That is also due to the lack of off days: the thinking is you get games in as soon as you possibly can. The only break the minor leaguers catch is that the games in a one-admission doubleheader are reduced to seven innings.

Herrmann wasn’t really thinking about any of that as he watched it rain. Manager Mike Sarbaugh had moved him into the role of closer recently, and he had pitched well three straight times since taking over the ninth inning for the Clippers.

“I like it,” he said. “I like the challenge. I like the idea that no one’s behind me, that the game is mine to try to finish. And, if it gets someone’s attention, whether it’s the Indians or someone else, all the better.”

Herrmann did get the Indians’ attention. On August 7 he was
called back up to Cleveland to try to help a struggling bullpen. Seventeen days later, he was back in Columbus. Nine days after that, he made it back to Cleveland for the rest of the season.

Escalator up, escalator down. Even with a Harvard degree, nothing in baseball is guaranteed.