The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  But Ben and I are consumed by the contradictory pressures of those two mandates—contributing something and staying out of the way. We’re not destroying anything, but we’re ceding chances to do anything. Like the time we ask Eric Schwieger during an off-day workout whether it would disrupt his routine if, instead of starting and going six innings, he relieved and went six innings. Same workload, same eighteen outs, but with just that little twist in the scheduling. We’re trying to trick the Pacifics into loading their lineup with left-handed batters, so that when Schwieg comes in he’s got the platoon advantage more often. Secretly, we’re also trying to make it so our manager can give him a quicker hook (if it makes sense to) without imperiling his deserved win.

  To explain: A starting pitcher must complete the fifth inning to qualify for the win. If the starter doesn’t make it through five, then the win goes to the reliever who contributed the most, in the judgment of the official scorer. This usually goes to the reliever who pitched the longest. So if Schwieg goes 4 1/3 strong innings as a starter, then comes out of the game because his fastball is starting to lose zip or because we don’t want him to face the opposing lineup a third time—and suffer the substantial loss of effectiveness that most starters do in a third trip through the order—then we’ve cost him the win. But if he throws the same 4 1/3 strong innings after entering the game in the second or third inning, he’ll still get the win. This shouldn’t matter, but pitchers love the win. Taking it from them is like bait-and-switching a kid’s dessert at the end of the meal. This turns out to be a substantial obstacle to managers pulling pitchers as early as they should, but it can be avoided by manipulating the starter/reliever roles ever so slightly.

  So we bring this up to Schwieg before his first start against San Rafael. It’s only the seventh game of the season, and San Rafael is 2-4, but we’re still terrified of them—most of the roster is back from last year’s championship team, and we fear they’re one good inning away from snapping out of this slump. We tell him we figure this plan will give him a little edge, and we’ll take any edge we can against such a good lineup. He does a little mental math, just to make sure he’ll still be able to warm up on a predictable schedule, and concludes that, yeah, he could do that, he’d give it a try. He relieved much of last season, anyway; there’s no reason he has to be locked into an inflexible role that starts with the first pitch of every fifth game. We want this flexibility in our staff; he’s flexible. He suggests we run it by Fehlandt.

  Who rejects it. Feh downplays the benefit of getting more lefties into the lineup against Schwieg—“Anybody who is any good is playing every day anyway,” he says, puzzlingly, since trying to gain lefty-lefty matchups is about as uncontroversial as any strategy in the sport. But what’s most worrisome is what he says next: “We don’t have to do anything. We’re so much better than everybody else we don’t even have to try.”

  Winning has become its own obstacle.

  * * *

  We do what we can to contribute without getting in the way. If Fehlandt is uninterested in our scouting observations or unusual strategies, he’s at least willing to ask for one thing: a walkie-talkie, so that he can make pitching changes from center field. We order the smallest one we can find, along with an earpiece, and for a few moments we feel like we’ve earned our keep. “Awesome you’re the man,” he texts me. Sabermetrics.

  We also start packaging our scouting reports for the players. On a whiteboard that we carry to each game, we list the opposing pitcher’s repertoire and tendencies and prop it up in the dugout for our hitters to see. Before Schwieg takes the mound against San Rafael, we send him a pregame scouting report on the Pacifics’ hitters. The top half of the document is as simple as we can make it, with just one word per batter: In, or Spin. Andrew Parker, our catcher, has explained to us that every hitter is usually bad against one or the other—either he can’t pick up breaking pitches away and will chase, or he doesn’t have the bat speed or hands to catch up to fastballs inside. Further, each type of pitch requires a different approach to hit, and only elite hitters can “look” for both pitches at the same time. Below this super stupid-simple scouting, I list my observations from San Rafael’s first six games, four of which I have personally advance-scouted and all of which have been fed into our pitch-by-pitch data pool.

  I’m proud of the report, proud of what we’ve been able to put together this quickly: The Pacifics’ leadoff hitter, Zack Pace, is annoyingly patient but has been rolling over fastballs away, so just pound him with strikes; the cleanup hitter, Jeremy Williams, is squaring every mediocre fastball, but he hasn’t adjusted to the steady diet of bendy pitches he’s seeing; the seventh hitter, Adrian Martinez, seems almost to have vision problems that keep him from picking up pitches moving away from him and make him chase not just off-speed pitches outside but also two-seamers with tail; the ninth hitter, David Kiriakos, looks uncomfortable in any at-bat in which the pitcher makes him “move his feet” with inside pitches, so just throw him one in and then you can beat him away; and so on. The only batter I’m unsure of is the fifth hitter, Matt Chavez: “Has been late on fastballs, but he homered twice Sunday in the game I didn’t see, so I can’t really claim to have seen his full output. Don’t really have a good read on this guy.”

  Schwieger is one of the returnees I was initially sure was hostile toward us. He had sniffed at our infield shifts in spring training and razzed me for overreacting to a near-catch on Opening Night. (“Is there some sabermetric value to going ‘ooooohhhh’?”) But he has asked me for this scouting report, the first player to seek out our help. After I email it to him, he replies in minutes to say thanks. He finds me again before the game to repeat the thanks, and as the game starts he seems to be following the scouting report—and it’s working. He carries a no-hitter into the fourth.

  Then he starts to lose his mechanics a little, which is the always-there-when-you-need-it explanation for a pitcher’s struggles. In this case, even I can see that he’s falling off to the side as he drives toward the plate, and his arm isn’t able to catch up. There’s a run in the fourth, and his pitch count gets higher, and as we go to the fifth he’s sitting on a fragile 2-1 lead.

  As the inning begins, the ubiquitous Fetty Wap walk-up song “Trap Queen” plays to indicate that Tyger Pederson, the Pacifics’ eighth-place hitter, is coming to bat. Schwieger strikes him out, and the even more ubiquitous Fetty Wap walk-up song “Come My Way” tells me David Kiriakos is coming to the plate. He walks, and the top of the lineup comes up for the third time. This is where, if Ben and I were running this team by diktat, we would have a pitcher warming up, where we would consider pulling Schwieger before he can finish the fifth, even though he’s in line for the win. I glance down at the bullpen and … Erik Gonsalves is warming up. Feh’s on the same page. This arrangement might be working!

  I gather Yoshi and Jerome Godsey, who has become our last-second pitching coach (he’s the least experienced pitcher on the staff, but he’s old!), on the grass between the dugout and the bullpen. We all agree Schwieger looks gassed, and I argue that we should pull him, but it’s not my call—is it? Nobody knows. None of us has explicit authority to make a move, other than the blanket power Ben and I hold as everybody’s boss. It’s Fehlandt’s call most of all, but the walkie-talkie, which had come to life when Feh told Godsey to get Gonsalves up, is now silent.

  Schwieger allows a stolen base, and the leadoff hitter, Pace, grounds out and pushes Kiriakos to third. Facing the right-handed DH, Johnny Bekakis, for the third time, Schwieger leaves an 88 mph fastball in the middle of the plate and Bekakis bangs it into right field for a double. The game is now tied, and Schwieger can’t get a win anyway. Godsey goes out to the mound, his inexperience showing in every step—his gait is way too fast, he forgets to wear his hat, and when he gets there he waffles over whether to take Schwieger out. Even this early in the season, this has been a pattern: There’s a fine waiting for him in kangaroo court for his unconvincing pitching-coach wa
lk, and the pitchers have found it disturbingly easy to talk him out of a pitching change. He walks back to the dugout alone, and Schwieg goes to work on Maikel Jova, the Pacifics’ right fielder, for the third time. On 1-1, he throws an inside fastball—sticking to the scouting report—that Jova muscles into left field, a flare just past Gered Mochizuki’s chase. We’re losing.

  We fight back to tie it in the top of the sixth, and Gonsalves enters the game to pitch the bottom half. He allows a run, and we’re losing again. Then we tie it again in the top of the seventh. Gonzo goes back out to try to hold the line. If he can’t, the decision is going to be made by a manager standing 200 feet from where I can reason with him.

  Pace walks to lead off the inning. But then, with two strikes, Gonzo hits Bekakis with a sinker up and in. From center field, a staticky voice says, “One more”—as in, Gonzo’s leash is one more mistake. If he gives up a hit to Jova, he’s gotta come out.

  This is a complicated decision. Beginning with Jova, the Pacifics are about to send up three powerful right-handed hitters, and the guy we have warming up is a lefty, Paul Hvozdovic. I have confidence in Paul—he has looked sharp so far, and as a starter his entire career he has always had to retire right-handed hitters. But it would be an unusual move to bring in a lefty to face a string of righties.

  Our only other available right-hander, Sean Conroy, isn’t warming, partly because we have only one bullpen catcher and partly because closers don’t come into the game in the seventh inning. But I’m trying to convince somebody that Sean, our best reliever, the guy with the release point and repertoire that has stupefied every right-hander he has faced this year, is an option here. Not even trying to convince them he must come in, but that he’s an option, and that, for him to really be an option, somebody had better start warming him up.

  Godsey walks to the mound to talk to Gonsalves. Again he walks back alone. He shakes his head. “I asked Gonzo how he was and he didn’t say anything,” Godsey reports. “His eyes were dead.”

  This does not make me confident. Neither does Gonzo’s first pitch, a wild one that goes to the backstop. Pace, the lead runner, doesn’t pick it up and, to our shock, stays put; meanwhile, Bekakis is watching the ball, not Pace, so he tries to take second. Soon two runners are standing on the same bag. Isaac Wenrich makes a strong throw there and we get a gift out.

  Jova hits a hard grounder to shortstop, and Mochizuki gets the second out of the inning. Gonsalves then walks left fielder Jeremy Williams on four pitches. “He looks like shit,” I tell Godsey. “Terrible,” Yoshi says. The walkie-talkie makes a noise that we can’t decode: “frrrsheefeergrrrr.” Godsey finally goes out to replace Gonsalves with Hvozdovic, then walks back to where Yoshi and I are, watching the game not in the dugout or in the bullpen but in the grassy space between, where none of our players can hear how dysfunctional we sound.

  * * *

  We’ve been throwing inside fastballs all game to these right-handed batters, partly because it’s the scouting report and partly because Fehlandt is convinced that only two (or maybe three) hitters in the entire league can hit an inside fastball. But after seeing Eric Schwieger’s high-80s inside fastballs all game, they now get to see Paul Hvozdovic’s low-mid-80s inside fastballs.

  Paul’s third pitch, to Matt Chavez, is a fastball, 83 mph, medium-in. Chavez hits a three-run homer to center field. As he circles the bases, Godsey and I walk back to the dugout, stunned. When the players see us approaching, their chatter stops. I hear Gonsalves say one last word: “fucking.” Then, silence.

  Sean Conroy never gets into the game, and our winning streak dies a 10-6 death. There’s an unwritten rule some managers enforce that nobody can appear too happy after a loss, but as everybody packs up and slumps into the visitors’ clubhouse it doesn’t feel like anybody is posturing. What makes losing so bad for clubhouse chemistry is immediately clear: It’s not just that it makes people less happy, but also that a defeat requires blame be distributed. Not everybody lost that game equally, and nobody wants to go home with more than his fair share of it. So, sometimes silently and sometimes not, they make sure the record is clear: That guy fucked up. That guy lost it more than I did. There’s no way all-for-one-one-for-all can survive forensic blame accounting.

  There is a feeling that we lost this game because the organizers were disorganized. Nobody knew who was making the decisions—especially after Fehlandt ran into the dugout and scolded Godsey for putting in Hvozdovic. You can’t put a lefty in to face righties, he says. Even if it’s the better pitcher—even if the lefty is better against righties than the righty, you can’t do it, because (as I follow it) the righties want to face lefties, and when they see a lefty come in their mouths water in anticipation. The platoon-advantages-don’t-matter argument he made to me one day earlier is forgotten; the fact that we had no problem letting Schwieger, a lefty, face all those right-handers three times doesn’t matter. Hell, if Paul had come into the game to face a lefty, he could have stayed in to face the righties, but you can’t bring him in to face righties. I try not to dwell too long on the logic.

  Because that’s what I learn in the seventh inning: The game happens too fast for logical discussions. This is why I couldn’t win the argument to get Schwieger out earlier, or to put Paul in earlier, or to have Conroy up in a seventh-inning nonsave situation. While I’m trying to put together a logical argument, batters are hitting and pitchers are warming up and base runners are getting thrown out and Fehlandt is thinking about his next at-bat and Godsey is trying to figure out what “dead eyes” mean for a pitcher. It happens too fast to have a manager trying to make decisions from center field, and it happens too fast to have just one bullpen catcher, and it happens too fast for me to stand by passively, hoping the right decisions will get made if I just scatter bread crumbs between all of us and the obviously right decision.

  “I thought you said one more,” Godsey says, alluding to the walk of Jeremy Williams as the “one more.” Fehlandt looks exasperated. “Gonzo was pitching around Williams,” he says. We saw a wild pitcher lose a batter; Fehlandt saw a plan, executed. “He’s not going to give some cookie to Williams in that situation.”

  Fehlandt walks away, and Godsey looks at me. “You heard him say one more, too, right?”

  Our walkie-talkie is a disaster.

  * * *

  As the players eat from the postgame spread, Fehlandt hops into the stands to go find somebody with the Pacifics. He’s pissed, because early in the game, when Schwieg had a no-hitter going, somebody put a hit up on the scoreboard. “That’s so fucking bush league,” he says.

  I follow him so that, away from everybody else, we can talk about the loss. So we can talk about why bad decisions were made, why communication broke down, what I can do to help, and why I expect better. Patiently, peacefully—I think—I ask why he thinks we lost.

  “You can’t bring the lefty in there to face the righties,” he says again. “If I’m a batter, and you bring a lefty in to face me there, I’m like, these guys are fucking stupid.”

  “It’s tough with that bullpen,” I say, “because we don’t have a lot of righties ready to go. Was Sean an option there?”

  “What? In the seventh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah, Sean’s the closer.”

  “But he was our best pitcher available and those were the biggest outs of the game. He’s right-handed, he’s—”

  “If it were the eighth, maybe, but I’m not going to leave him out there to finish three innings.”

  “But you could get him to pitch those huge at-bats, then pull him when you need to.”

  “But then I don’t have a closer.”

  “Sure. But if you don’t go to him, you lose the game.”

  “But I need to have a closer. If I don’t have a closer, I can’t count on anybody else to get those last outs.”

  “But the outs in the seventh were just as important.”

  “Dude,” he says, breaking eye contact completely
, “if you tried that in the majors you would get laughed out of the game.”

  “But we lost because we didn’t get to use him at all.”

  “No, dude. The closer’s the closer because he’s the closer.”

  And then he leaves.

  As I walk to my car, Theo calls me.

  “Feh just ran over to me and told me that you’re insane. He just kept saying, ‘The closer’s the closer because he’s the closer.’”

  Losing, it turns out, is just as much an obstacle as winning.

  * * *

  Two days after that distressing defeat, the Stompers sign Jose Canseco, the almost-fifty-one-year-old 1988 American League MVP who hit 462 major league homers and wrote two postretirement tell-all books about steroid abuse in baseball. Canseco isn’t the cavalry. He’s a sideshow, a temporary rent-a-draw for teams without their own gate attractions. Fueled by three of his passions—hitting home runs, making money, and maintaining his famous physique—Canseco makes occasional cameos in the lower levels of pro baseball, doing home run derbies and DHing in games. The Stompers sign him for one derby, two games, and two postgame autograph-signing sessions over the second weekend in June, hoping to realize a 2-to-1 return on his appearance fee. While Ben and I are stressing out about winning, Eric and Theo are worrying more about making ends meet, which reminds us that from the organization’s perspective batting orders and bullpen moves are secondary concerns.

  I drive to the airport to pick up Canseco and his unresponsive fiancée and am treated to the spectacle of an absurdly large and muscular man cramming himself into my car. I ask him if there’s anything he wants to listen to on the ride to Sonoma—Golden State Warriors game, sports talk, take your pick. He looks at me like I’m the world’s simplest intern and says, with the gentle condescension of a kid talking to a doll, “The hits of the day?” When we arrive in Sonoma, the team isn’t sure how to treat him. Fehlandt, who’s suddenly not nearly the oldest or most experienced player in the Stompers’ clubhouse, is annoyed by the intrusion, while the younger players, most of whom weren’t alive during Canseco’s prime, are curious to see this PED Paul Bunyan up close.