The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  Five minutes later, Feh emails again.

  One thing you will learn is when a guy has already shown you what he can do with your own eyes, it’s a big chance to go off numbers, and someone’s recommendation especially when I don’t really know the persons accountability on judging talent. I’ve seen plenty of guys that had great numbers and potential come and not be what they were supposed to be.

  The frustrating thing is that Feh isn’t wrong. Taylor is still an unknown, to a certain extent, and thirteen games is too small a sample to prove that Hurley is hopeless. In such abbreviated time frames, scouts see talent that stats might miss, and Feh is a more experienced in-person evaluator than I am. He has promised, since the day Sam first interviewed him, to make each hitter on the team the best hitter on the team. He has spent years studying hitting mechanics, and he invests hours drilling and adjusting our young players. Early returns validate his coaching: Daniel Baptista is in the middle of a franchise-record 16-game hitting streak to start the season, and he swears by Feh’s advice and drills—especially one where a pitcher sets up a few feet to the side of the mound and throws batting practice from “behind” the batter, forcing the batter to keep his hands back and maintain a firm front side. There’s only one hitter on the team who laps up Feh’s hitting instructions more studiously than Baps: Mark Hurley.

  All I can do is stay in touch with Coach McCall, sending him texts to see if anything is imminent, assuring him that Eads is the first person we’ll call when we have a vacancy, and dreading a message that says the White Sox have signed him. At one point, Kristian—my first crush, a player I’m pulling for as hard as anyone on the roster—rolls an ankle, and even with his health at stake, I think unclean thoughts: If Kristian is out for a while, we could move Baps to third, and Carranza could play first, and DH would be open for Eads. I’m like a starving cartoon character who pictures basting turkeys in place of people. Every occupied roster spot starts to look like Taylor Eads.

  * * *

  Well, every roster spot save one. Even at the height of my Eads-mania, there’s a special place in my psyche for the stats-based signee who’s not only exceeded our highest hopes for his on-field performance, but also made the Stompers national news: Sean Conroy.

  When he left his hometown of Clifton Park, New York, to spend the summer with the Stompers, in response to a phone call from a stranger who had sorted a spreadsheet and seen his name near the top, Sean Conroy wasn’t worried about making his first-ever trip to California, or being away from his family for longer than ever before, or whether he’d have trouble retiring professional hitters. Nor did he lose sleep over an unknown that no previous player had dared to confront: what his teammates would say when he told them (and team management, and probably the press) that he was gay, which would make him the first openly, publicly gay player in professional baseball.

  The only thing Sean was “just a little bit apprehensive about,” his mother, Terry, recalls, was how he was going to get from San Francisco International Airport to Sonoma, the last sixty-five miles of his cross-country trip.

  “I told him to take a bus to Petaluma, and he was reading online how to get to the bus, and then he texted me when he got there and he said, ‘My ride’s here,’” Terry Conroy says. “And then the next text was, ‘My ride left without me, so I took the bus anyway.’ It was a good experience for him, figuring it out on his own.”

  How could a just-turned-twenty-three-year-old who was about to become a trailblazer be worried about a bus? “He was so busy, I don’t think he had time to think about [anything else],” Terry says. Sean had unfinished baseball business. Less than a week earlier, he had been on the mound at Falcon Park in Auburn, New York, trying to take the Rensselaer Engineers to a title. On May 8, he started for RPI in the Liberty League Tournament and beat the University of Rochester, throwing 106 pitches over 7 1/3 innings. On May 9—the next day—he came out of the bullpen to close out a 10-5 win over the Rochester Institute of Technology in the second game of a doubleheader sweep, throwing 20 pitches in 1 2/3 scoreless innings to send the Engineers to the NCAA Division III Regional Tournament. In RPI’s next game, on May 13, he earned a four-out save in a 2-0 victory over Keystone College. And two days later, he started against SUNY Cortland—the number-one team in all of Division III baseball—and took a tough-luck loss, allowing two earned runs over seven innings but exiting with a 6-5 deficit after his defense committed three errors behind him. A few days later, he moved out of the Phi Kappa Tau frat house and set off for Sonoma. He was three credits short of a degree, but baseball wouldn’t wait.

  Some aspects of Sean’s baseball background are the same as every other professional player’s. He remembers swinging one of those short plastic bats with the big barrels when he was barely old enough to stand, and he grew up going to his father’s rec-league softball games. By the time Jack Conroy stopped playing, Sean was old enough to start, and his father coached him in tee-ball. “When I was five I got my name in the newspaper because I actually hit the ball off the tee,” Sean says. “That was the big story.” For an engineering-school student with a tax-analyst father, he has enviable athletic bloodlines, including his cousins Ethan and Owen Pochman, converted soccer players who placekicked for Brigham Young. Owen Pochman played two seasons in the NFL, completing eight of seventeen field-goal attempts. He wrote a memoir called I’m Just a Kicker and dated a Playmate of the Year.

  Backyards are a common component of athlete origin stories, which abound with batters who learned to hit lefty or to aim toward the opposite field because pulling a pitch might have meant breaking a window. The Conroys’ backyard was long but narrow—more than 100 feet long, and about 20 feet wide—which made it perfect for pitching and long toss. When Sean was seven, one of his father’s friends taught him to throw a curveball. That’s younger than kids are supposed to be when they start snapping off breaking balls, but it never hurt his arm. An all-star in almost every league he belonged to, he never counted on becoming a big leaguer, but he was determined to try until the competition convinced him to quit. “I remember in fifth grade a teacher telling us to pay attention because none of us are going to be professional athletes, and I remember disagreeing with her,” he says. “She said statistically speaking, it’s not likely.” To be fair, she hadn’t seen our spreadsheet.

  Sean’s fastball tops out at 85 mph, so he never overpowered his opponents. “There were always people throwing harder than me,” he says. “I never considered myself a power pitcher. I was always control and spin.” Finesse doesn’t turn heads at tryouts, and Sean didn’t make his high school team as a sophomore. “Everyone I was playing with knew how I pitched in games, but it just didn’t come through in tryouts.” Even high school sophomores are supposed to throw hard.

  He made the team as a junior, and as a senior he started dropping down to give right-handed hitters less of a look at his stuff. He adjusts his arm angle and pitch selection by the outing, depending on what he has in his arsenal. “When I have the 82 mph fastball, I try to drop my arm slot a little lower so it’ll drop more, so it still looks fast,” he says. Ninety-five percent of his pitches are fastballs or sliders, split about evenly. Naturally, he has a knuckleball, which he’s saving for a free strike against someone who doesn’t expect it.

  To us, Sean seems cerebral, maybe because it suits our self-image; we serve the Stompers in an intellectual capacity, and we want to see something of ourselves in the players we sign. It’s not because he’s a bookworm: The lone book in the clubhouse belongs to T. J. Gavlik, who carries a round-cornered copy of Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August that our sources say he started in the summer of 2014. (“Those three nights in August sure are taking a lot longer than expected,” one veteran remarks to me.) Textbooks excluded, the only book Sean has read in the past several years is The Secret, the self-help best seller about the mystical power of positive thinking. Sam and I haven’t discovered The Secret, which might explain why our fastballs are slow and the un
iverse hasn’t seen fit to reward us with an unbeatable team or a manager who values what we say.

  When we ask Sean questions, he pauses for a few seconds to construct a thoughtful response—just long enough that we worry he won’t answer at all. (He’s the same way with texts.) He questions baseball beliefs about bunting and pitcher usage, although he’s not a student of sabermetrics per se. And he’s a master of the metagame, the highest level of strategy in any competition that pits people against other people. It’s the part of a head-to-head sport that develops in and around the actual rules, that tests not how fast you can run or how hard you can throw but how well you can anticipate what your opponent thinks you’re thinking.

  I discover Sean’s interest in tactics when we bond over Super Smash Bros., the 1999 Nintendo 64 game that’s spawned three sequels and a fierce professional Smash circuit. It’s a four-player brawler that pits well-known Nintendo characters against one another in a battle to knock everyone else off the edges of an arena suspended in the sky. Every successful attack drives up an opponent’s damage counter, and the higher the damage counter climbs, the farther a character flies after subsequent attacks—not unlike pitchers, who get hit harder the deeper they go into games. The Stompers’ N64 is always on, from the moment the clubhouse opens to the time when the players start to toss in foul territory before first pitch. Sean is the best of the Stompers at Smash—pro gaming is his backup plan if baseball doesn’t pan out—but I’m a match for him, thanks to the countless hours I logged as a kid instead of practicing sports. He likes playing me, he says, because he can’t tell what my next move will be. After one white-knuckle game, he tells me that he tries to bring the intensity of our Smash showdowns out to the mound.

  Sean approaches pitching with the same studious desire to stay one step ahead. No one else on the Stompers’ staff shakes off signs as often. “I always know what I want to throw, and it’s difficult for the catcher to be thinking along the same lines as me,” he says. (“The slider’s the one I like,” I hear him remind Parker, semi-sarcastically, before a game.) But he still wants his catchers to call pitches, because he can learn from their suggestions even if he rejects them. “My line that I told my catcher last year is, ‘I like when you call pitches, because you confirm to me what the hitter’s thinking I’m going to throw,’” Sean says. In other words, Sean considers the catcher a proxy for the hitter: The catcher is trying to outthink the batter, but the batter is alert to the danger of being outthought. Even if the batter reads the catcher’s mind, he’ll still be surprised when Sean does something different. On one pitch during spring training with the Stompers, Sean shakes off the catcher three times, but he keeps putting down the same sign. The fourth time, Sean acquiesces and throws what the receiver wants. It results in the only hit he allows all spring.

  Sean stopped watching Major League Baseball when he was ten or twelve, bored because he “didn’t get everything going on.” But when he got my call in April and realized that his career didn’t have to die in Division III, he tuned in again to pick up tips from the pros, the way he watches Smash matches on YouTube and Twitch. “I just love watching pitchers pitch,” he says. “I don’t care [which team] wins. I want the pitcher to win.” This goes triple for his own outings. The first time I set up my laptop to show Sean the pitches from his previous start, he’s as glued to the screen as a four-year-old watching weekend cartoons, silent and motionless except for an occasional smile or soft snort when he paints a corner with a sinker or induces an ugly chase with his slider. After that, he’s hooked. The day after he gets into a game, I can count on a tap on my arm or a conspiratorial question: “Do you have my video?”

  Compared to his complex approach to pitching, Sean’s openness about his sexual orientation seems simple. But his transparency as a person makes him as tough to anticipate as his deceptive pitch selection. Thanks to the lack of public precedents, no one expects a pro baseball player to be gay. And if a pro baseball player is gay, no one expects him to say so: Previous players who’ve come out have either been driven from the game despite their private lives not appearing in the public eye (Glenn Burke) or waited until long after retirement to disclose their orientation (Billy Bean). So Sean does the opposite of what everyone expects, just as he does on the mound: He hides nothing. When he came out to his parents, they embraced him immediately but worried about whether others would. “I think it was in tenth grade,” Terry Conroy recalls. “I said, ‘I think you should kinda keep it in your back pocket until you get through high school. It’s just a better life, because I know what life was like when I was in school.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’”

  He didn’t. Sean’s high school teammates knew he was gay. His college teammates knew he was gay. And he went west knowing that soon the Stompers would, too. “I learned in the newspaper that he was hoping to be the first player to come out,” Terry says. “But he thought he’d have to be at a higher level for it to matter.”

  On June 10, the night of the Stompers’ first loss, Eric Gullotta drives Sean and a few other players back to Sonoma from San Rafael, so that Theo—Sean’s usual chauffeur—can take a more direct route to his home in Santa Rosa. Prolonged exposure to Eric’s raunchy humor in a confined space can make a man do desperate things to change the subject, which might explain why Sean picks this time to let Eric in on his nonsecret. “We were just talking about life after he dropped everyone else off,” Sean says. “So when it was just me and him in the car it just felt like the right time. I had already told a few players and I wanted him to hear it from me so he didn’t think I was trying to hide it from anyone.”

  The news trickles down to Theo, and then to me and Sam. Our first reaction is excitement: Our small-time team has a chance to help a player make history, thanks to a spreadsheet that discriminates based only on stats. Not only has our statistical scouting method yielded an impressive pitcher, proving that a pair of writers with scant baseball experience could contribute to a team, but it’s also given one player an opportunity to break a barrier that matters much more. And even more serendipitously, that player is a psychology student who’s as intrigued as we are by the sport’s interpersonal puzzles.

  Our second reaction is uncertainty: What can we do to make Sean’s experience easier? The country has come a long way since Burke and Bean, but the prevailing beliefs of pro baseball’s conservative clubhouses are still inscrutable. In March, New York Mets infielder Daniel Murphy responded to a spring-training visit from Bean (now serving as MLB’s Ambassador for Inclusion) by telling reporters, “I disagree with his lifestyle,” and “I disagree with the fact he is homosexual.” Will there be similar “disagreements” between Stompers? And even if no players object to Sean’s presence, might the extra attention trained on the team impair its performance? For years, we’ve seen insinuations that a gay player would be “a distraction.” Those fears have always seemed flimsy, a way to whitewash bigotry, but until now we’ve never had the chance to provide proof.

  There was only one ugly incident in Sean’s amateur career, which occurred in the Albany Twilight League. “Sean struck a kid out,” Terry says. “I was sitting there, and I believe he said, ‘I can’t believe that faggot struck me out.’ So then the next time he came up, Sean struck him out again. That was it. He didn’t say another word.” Considering Sonoma’s proximity to San Francisco, one would expect the community to give an openly gay player a warm welcome, but our players’ attitudes are unknown. The first time Sam talks to Theo after we learn about Sean, they agree that any player who makes trouble for Sean won’t have a home with us. “We’ll cut all twenty-one if we have to,” Sam says.

  Theo sees Sean’s revelation as a way for everyone to get what they want. The Stompers have a Pride Night scheduled for June 25, just before Sonoma County’s Pride Weekend. If the team structures the game around the rookie, then Sean gets to set an example, and the team gets to make its Pride Night—as Theo puts it—“a more genuine event, rather than just, �
��Hey LGBT people, come watch baseball.’” And the best way to make Sean the centerpiece of Pride Night is to have him start, which we want him to do anyway. It’s a crafty move by Theo, who wants to see Sean’s role expanded just as much as we do. This is a way to use his role as the head of the Stompers’ business side to compel Feh to give him what he wants on the baseball side: It’s easy for Feh to complain about losing his closer for competitive reasons, but this night will be bigger than baseball.

  On June 19, the Stompers put out the press release. As soon as I see it, I scramble to the clubhouse, not knowing what I’ll witness. A prepared address to the team? Torches and pitchforks? A Sister Sledge sing-along?

  Instead, I find nothing out of the ordinary. It’s still early, and players are ambling in one by one or in little one-car-capacity clumps. Sean is sitting outside the clubhouse, fiddling with his phone. I ask him to take a walk, and we stroll down the concourse toward third base, stopping when the concrete bulk of the visitors’ clubhouse blocks us from the view of the rest of the team. I ask him if he’s had any problems. He says no. I ask if he’s planning to talk to the team. He says probably not in any formal meeting. I tell him that we’d love to spread his story, and that we hope he’ll tell us if there’s any way we can help. He says he will. Then we walk back to the clubhouse. All told, the interaction takes two or three minutes. I can’t tell what I am when I talk to him: a team official, a reporter, or just a guy who got him into this situation and wants his experience to go smoothly. I feel a little nosy, as if I’m trying to horn in on his moment. We’re new to knowing Sean is gay, but Sean is not new to being gay, nor is he new to having everyone around him aware of it. He can handle things from here.