by Bret Boone
The game was under way when I pulled into the parking lot. Davenport’s Modern Woodmen Park is a typical minor-league venue, which means it’s terrific. You probably know that a renaissance in ballpark design began with Baltimore’s Camden Yards in 1992 and continued in San Francisco, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and other cities. What most fans don’t know is that the same trend has transformed ratty, leaky old bush-league yards into showplaces where you and your family can have more fun than Six Flags for pennies on the dollar. There’s an amusement park next door to Modern Woodmen Park, a Ferris wheel rising up behind the left-field wall, music playing, local beers for two dollars apiece
Hungry and beat after three hours on the road, I was dying for coffee. No coffee. Also no spread in the clubhouse, and by “no spread,” I don’t mean no grilled fish and prime rib. I’m talking no spread. Not a Pringle.
My first night there, the Snappers got beat 8–0. Two nights later we came out swinging, took a big lead, and wound up losing 15–8. I told Fran Riordan, Beloit’s manager, “That’s the worst professional performance in history.” Riordan laughed. He’s a little younger than I am, an ex-outfielder who never got within a mile of the majors but paid attention. As a manager in the low minors, his main job isn’t to rack up victories. It’s to deliver worthy players to the next level without messing them up. He needs to correct any blatant bad habits, weed out any obvious psychos, help kids from Latin America transition to life in the United States, help his twenty-two- and twenty-three-year-old former collegians learn to be leaders to nineteen-year-old teammates who got signed out of high school, and always, always be ready for surprises.
I spent three games in Riordan’s dugout—not saying much, just watching. Before game time I fielded grounders with Snappers infielders, keeping an eye on their footwork. I wore a Mizuno glove Jake gave me when I left home. He’d written his name in it. Fourteen years after playing most of 2001 with a glove David Bell had signed, I picked grounders in Iowa with a Jake Boone–autograph model.
After infield I talked shop with the Snappers’ hitters. These kids were former high school or college phenoms, and by former I mean last year. The veterans were twenty-two or twenty-three. They liked hearing war stories of Home Run Derbies and at-bats against Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens. I worked in plenty of tips they could use, like how to turn a pitcher’s decency against him.
“Here’s how.” Stepping to the plate, I took a phantom fastball on the arm. “Oww! Arrr!” Fell down like I’d been shot.
“You wouldn’t try this against Clemens or Pedro,” I said, “or some other SOB who couldn’t care if he kills you. But most pitchers aren’t like that. They feel bad. They don’t want to hurt you. Especially young pitchers. They’ll shy away from the inside corner the next time you come up. That gives you a big edge. You can forget about the fastball in. You’ve just eliminated one of his pitches.”
I sat with Beloit’s catchers, talking about how to read a batter’s body language. My dad was the best at that. Jason Varitek was a master. Russell Martin’s good at it. How does a hitter change his stance from at-bat to at-bat? The position of his hands? His breathing? A great catcher can read hitters’ minds. That’s as good as giving his pitcher a free strike on every guy who comes up.
After three games in the dugout, I switched from my uni to street clothes and spent the last game of the Beloit–Quad Cities series in the stands. You get a better view of the pitcher and hitter from there. From behind the backstop you can watch the pitcher, catcher, hitter, and plate umpire war over the strike zone, the most valuable 460 square inches in sports. Now I was more of a scout than a roving instructor. If a kid on the other team had an extra-sharp breaking ball, or a quick first step in the field, or raw power he hadn’t tapped due to bad technique, I’d text Keith Lieppman in Oakland. If I really loved the kid I might also text Dan Feinstein, our director of pro scouting and player development, assistant GM David Forst, and Grady Fuson, Beane’s special assistant. Grady’s an old family friend, so I’m straight with him. The Quad Cities kid you love SUX. Trade for the ss!!
Fuson would text back seconds later. Shut up rookie evaluator, what do u know??
It’s not exactly how scouting went in Gramps’s day.
Between games I fielded calls from young players I’d met during spring training. Calls, not texts. Texts are fine between friends, but if you’re a first-year pro and I text Get yr head outta yr ass & watch the pitcher’s fingers, you might think I was mad. So it’s phone calls for kids in the minors. Some want advice. “How do I hit a guy throwing a hundred?” Some just want to hear a friendly voice. I traded calls with a smart, talented kid who wanted to quit because his dad was calling him ten times a day, saying how his batting average fell the night before, or how many at-bats he’d had since his last homer. I spent an hour talking that youngster off the ledge. I think you’re going to see him in the majors someday. He’s that good. And he’s proof that a ballplayer’s challenges can be mental, emotional, familial, financial, and even spiritual, not just physical. It’s a miracle that anybody makes it.
After dinner, texts, and phone calls, I sat down to relax at the Davenport Ramada Inn. There I was, alone on the road. It occurred to me that there were rows of beers and bottles of Absolut in the bar downstairs. I’ve had my relapses down through the years, and it’s still a daily battle not to drink. I knew I could bring a bottle up to my room and nobody would ever know. Nobody but me.
Me, forty-six years old, with four children who rely on their dad.
I stayed in my room with my laptop.
You know what I love? Google Earth. I always felt like I’d wasted my time in the classroom at USC. What did I know about the world outside the foul lines? I’d been to Havana for an exhibition. Flew in, played ball, got on a plane, and flew home. I played for the minor-league Calgary Cannons and against the Montreal Expos and Toronto Blue Jays, but what did I know about Canada? They liked Coke without ice and sang two national anthems. I’d been Ichiro’s teammate, known in Japan as Ba-Boom, but never set foot in Japan.
I wished I’d expanded my horizons. So I sat in my hotel room Google Earthing places I always wanted to visit. Niagara Falls. Mount Rushmore. The Grand Canyon. The Great Wall of China. The Taj Mahal. The Internet’s a hell of a thing—you can fall asleep watching a live feed from the Taj Mahal and wake up in Iowa, ready to go to the park.
Next I flew to Atlanta for the Southeastern Conference college baseball tournament, another step in my scouting education. As I player I had a good eye for talent. I’d see a rookie come up in September and say, “That kid’s a big leaguer.” There are telltale signs. Upper-deck power in batting practice, obviously. A young pitcher’s ability to throw two different pitches for strikes, especially if one of them goes 95. An infielder or outfielder with a knack for turning his back to catch a ball hit over his head—that gets your attention. But there’s something that means even more to me. If a kid with some talent looks bad at the plate, I like to watch his next at-bat. Suppose he got fooled the first time up—swung from his heels at a changeup, struck out, looked sick. Looked embarrassed. How does he react? If he takes the same approach the next time up, hoping to run into a fastball, I am not impressed. If he cuts down his swing—flicks his bat to put the ball in play—I’m still not impressed. But if he looks for a changeup the next time, even if he doesn’t get one, then I love that guy. Because he’s thinking. He knows he looked bad before. He knows the other team knows. He knows or at least suspects that climbing the ladder in pro ball isn’t about showing off your strengths as much as it’s about fixing your weaknesses. That’s the guy I pull for. And if he gets the changeup he’s looking for and rips it on a line somewhere, even if he lines into a double play, I’ll meet him on the top step of the dugout and tell him what a stud he is.
And now that I’m in management, I can tell Grady Fuson and Billy Beane about him.
It’s not like I want to be Mr. Superscout. That was Gramps’s dream. I haven’t se
ttled on exactly what my future in the game should be, so I’ve spent two seasons soaking up expertise at every level. That’s a process with no end to it.
Scouting college ball, for example, is a crapshoot that keeps getting crappier. In my USC days, 20 homers was a prodigious number. Then the bats went ballistic. The Green Easton and Black Magic bats of my era morphed into 33-inch drop-seven models that weighed in at 26 ounces. (My USC bats were drop-three models, 33 inches and 30 ounces.) College sluggers like Kris Bryant hit 30 or more homers. The NCAA responded by deadening the bats, leading to years when pitchers dominated. So they tweaked the rules again. Last year, the NCAA introduced a baseball with lower seams. The new ball flew farther. Breaking balls broke less. (It’s the seams cutting through air that makes a ball curve.) Offense went up again, leading some to say we should lower the seams on major-league baseballs.
I got a few ideas at the SEC tournament. For one, it’s clear that college ball ain’t what it used to be. That’s got nothing to do with the new college rules and everything to do with (wait for it…) money. Young players can now make so much that they’re less willing to spend three or four years playing for free. As a result, the draft skews more toward high school talent with every year that passes. A kid who goes to college has only a couple years before he’s “old for a prospect” at twenty-five. Yet purists still wring their hands when the majors’ latest rookie phenom fails to lay down a bunt. Whatever happened to fundamentals?
Here’s what happened: The pressure to win at the major-league level got so great that the best kids get rushed. Instead of being trained in the game’s fine points in the minors, they learn at the highest level. A franchise that can save future millions by sending a Kris Bryant down for two weeks will still do so; beyond that, everybody’s in a hurry. Look at Bryant’s Cubs teammate Kyle Schwarber last season. A year after playing for Indiana University, Schwarber started in the major-league playoffs. In left field. And he was a catcher! The Cubs loved his power bat, so they let him bumble around the outfield like a punch-drunk fighter. Fans were hiding their eyes, but you know what? I say good for the Cubs and good for Schwarber. There are exceptions to every rule. Schwarber’s bat was so good that it outweighed his defense. Rushed or not, his on-the-job training’s going to help him in the long run. He’ll be better in 2016, and so will the Cubs.
At the end of June I was with Beloit again. Fran Riordan had a few days off, so I returned to Class A ball to make my professional managerial debut. It was a blast—a busy, occasionally bumpy, entirely instructive blast.
As a manager in the low minors, you need to stay on top of everything. For instance, you’re coaching third base as well as managing. A-ball teams are understaffed compared to the parent clubs—there’s a manager, a pitching coach, a hitting coach, a strength and conditioning coach, and a trainer. The trainer may double as traveling secretary, making bus and motel arrangements for everybody. I leaned on the other coaches for help with everything from remembering our signs and our players’ names to printing out our lineup card. I made a point of memorizing the umpires’ names, a tactic I’ve always believed in. There are only two umps at a Class A game, as opposed to three at the Double-A level and four calling a Triple-A or major-league game. While a veteran big-league umpire can earn $400,000 a year, A-ball umps make only $500 a week. They appreciate being called by name, even if you say, “Tyler, try my bifocals!”
During the game you’re giving signals to the catcher, thinking about pitching changes and defensive shifts. Who needs the extra duties of a base coach? One of our players actually bench-jockeyed me for forgetting to wear a helmet in the third-base coaching box. “League rule, Skip!” he yelled.
I took the high road. “Zip it, you little shit. It’s not my goal to grow up to be a third-base coach.”
I made some good decisions as a manager and a bad one as a base coach. One night we were down 9–2 with one out in the bottom of the ninth. At that point the percentages say you’ve got no chance. Our second baseman, Trent Gilbert, all of twenty-two years old, whacked one into the gap. It’s bounding around out there as he rounds second base and I’m thinking, How cool would it be for him to get an inside-the-park home run? So I sent him. I’d never do that in a close game, but why not give the kid a moment? Well, they threw him out on a bang-bang play. I was kicking myself until Gilbert trotted by me, saying, “Thanks.”
We lost three in a row to the Burlington (Iowa) Bees. I was winless as a manager going into our fourth and last game at Burlington. We scored five in the fifth and held on, 6–4. Our players and coaches danced around the clubhouse after the game, taking selfies. I asked what they were celebrating. Somebody’s birthday? “Your first victory!” someone said.
If I weren’t such a cool, collected dude, I might have hugged them all.
That night I e-mailed my game report to the front office. A paragraph and a half, singling out Gilbert and a couple of others who excelled that night. A minor-league manager knows that his bosses don’t want to read a novel. They get a nightly report from every manager and pitching coach in the farm system. Still, I try to add a little personality to my reports. Tonight, we actually played the game correctly.
July brought the All-Star Game in Cincinnati. I never watched the ones I didn’t make during my playing career. (Eleven of them, if you must know.) It’s like the playoffs—you want so bad to be there that watching’s like asking for a punch in the face. I’ve still got my three All-Star rings, though. They’re not as diamond-studded as World Series rings, but each one’s worth about $20,000. I’ve also got the World Series ring each member of the 1999 Braves earned. It’s less impressive than the one the Yankees got for beating us that year, but I keep it in a safe place. I call it my second-place ring. Aaron got one of those, too, as a member of the Series-losing 2003 Yankees. Gramps and Dad each won a World Series while Aaron and I only came close—a fact that Dad will never let us forget.
These days I watch the big games. It was fun seeing Pete Rose get a standing ovation before the 2015 All-Star Game in Cincinnati. Yes, Pete had his failings, and they’re going to keep him out of the Hall of Fame forever. Fair enough, he screwed up. I’m biased, but his 4,256 hits—six great years’ worth over and above the 3,000 mark that makes anyone else an automatic Hall of Famer—matter to me. Watching him wave to his hometown crowd, I thought back to a Pete Rose moment nobody knows about.
In January 1991, Pete got out of a federal prison in Marion, Illinois, where he’d served five months for tax evasion, working in the prison’s welding shop for 11 cents an hour. On the day they let him go, his son Pete Jr., my boyhood buddy, picked him up at the prison. Petey, who told me this story, was twenty-one at the time, a third baseman in the Orioles’ minor-league chain. They were on the outskirts of Cincinnati, driving home, when they passed a mini-golf course with batting cages behind the mini-golf windmill. Pete said, “Pull over.”
They rented helmets and bats. Pete stepped into the cage and took a couple of practice swings. “Turn it up,” he told the attendant. “Fast as it’ll go.” He was facing an Iron Mike–style pitching machine, the kind with a metal arm that comes straight over the top. This being Cincinnati, everybody recognized him. They crowded around to watch the fifty-year-old Hit King, who hadn’t swung a bat in his five months in stir. Here comes the first pitch. Whack—he rips a bullet that boings off the arm of the machine, hard enough to bend it. The machine tries again, but can’t grip the next ball. Pete broke it! The fans hoot and holler. He hands the bat to Petey and says, “Some shit never changes.”
That moment meant more to me than last year’s trumped-up Midsummer Classic. Who won? Who cares? It is a joke that the All-Star Game decides which team gets home-field advantage in the World Series. I’m amazed that players, teams, and fans put up with such a crummy marketing gimmick. How can Major League Baseball let an exhibition game play a potentially deciding role in the World Series? I mean, I’m all for marketing the game in a world where MLB competes with t
he NFL, the NBA, and everything else on TV, but marketing can go too far.
Soon after the All-Star Game, I spoke to Beane, Fuson, and two other execs about a catcher in the Astros’ system. “Jacob Nottingham—he’s a beast,” I said. Nottingham was twenty years old, six-foot-three and 227 pounds. He had the most precious resource of all, big-league power potential. A couple weeks later, the A’s traded Scott Kazmir, a veteran starter with a 2.38 ERA, for Nottingham, who looked to be Oakland’s catcher of the future—until February 2016, when the front office dealt him to Milwaukee in a trade for Khris Davis. My bosses made both deals, but I like thinking my input may have played a part in their decision to get Nottingham.
By late summer 2015 I was on my way to Vermont to join the Burlington Lake Monsters, Oakland’s affiliate in the Class A New York–Penn League. This was short-season ball, where an organization’s best new prospects get their feet wet in the pros. The club’s first-, second-, and third-round draft picks were all at Burlington. The double-play combination had signed for a total of $1.2 million in bonuses. That’s on top of their A-ball salaries of $290 a week. My job was to help twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds like them think like thirty-year-old veterans.
After a couple of days of watching, I met with the position players. At first I just answered their questions.
“What was it like in the big leagues?”
“Better than you can imagine.”
“We’re going to make it, right?”
“No. One or two of you, maybe. There are more early-round draft picks working at Walmart than playing in the majors.”