The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  But this time Sean wins the argument. And on his 140th pitch—a potentially harmful total that we, like many managers before us, find easier to rationalize while emotions are high and history is happening—he gets the final out, just as he had done six times previously as a reliever. “Goddamn, starting is easy,” Gonsalves says. Sean pumps his fist. Isaac hugs him in front of the mound, the rest of Sean’s teammates surround him, and then the local TV news crews replace them. Sam grabs Feh and tells him to dump a water-cooler ice bath on Sean, and Feh says it’s a great idea, and Sam beams because he had a great idea and the manager agreed to follow it! A few players sneak around the back of the dugout, then cut through the bullpen and soak Sean, and he gasps as he struggles to continue the interviews. He gets his breath back and says he hopes kids out there are inspired by his performance. He says it was just a game like any other, that he’s not sure what his future holds but he’s starting to think he’d like to do some sort of activism. As the cameras roll, Isaac Wenrich walks past, and with a mug he gratuitously slaps Sean Conroy’s gay ass.

  * * *

  That night, we’re at the bar. Every night at least some of the Stompers start drinking at Town Square (where a host mom bartends, and whence free drink tokens have a habit of collecting in the players’ pockets throughout the week) before walking across the town plaza to Steiners, where one of the bartenders lets each player put down a $20 bill and drink the rest of the night on that. But tonight Sean and Sam and I go straight to Steiners, where Thursdays are called “Thursgays,” and where a couple of radio hosts who came to report on the game for a local LGBT program offer to buy Sean drinks. Amid it all, Sean tells Sam he has to admit something.

  “I lied,” he says.

  About?

  “On my happiness survey today. I lied. I wrote 7 for ‘locked-in,’” the highest rating on our scale. “I was probably really a 5. I just didn’t think there was any point in admitting that to myself.” He wants us to know so that when the season ends and we try to make the numbers mean something, our data won’t be skewed.

  In August, Billy Bean will ask Sean to talk to David Denson, a twenty-year-old first baseman in the Milwaukee Brewers system who’s about to become the first openly gay player in affiliated ball. Denson will ask Sean about the media attention and the effect coming out has had on team chemistry. “I basically told him it was worth it,” Sean will say.

  But before that, not long after the first pitch on Pride Night, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum requests that the Stompers send the scorecard from Sean’s start to Cooperstown. Everyone signs it, even me: We know it’s the only way we’re ever going to get there. Five months later and almost three thousand miles east of Sonoma, on a nothing-special Saturday, Isaac makes a pilgrimage from his home in Pennsylvania to see the scorecard on display. He texts Sean to ask him if he’s seen it, and Sean texts him back to say, I’m standing at the exhibit right now. It’s a complete coincidence, the latest in a long line of unlikely events that had to happen for a Sean Conroy relic to end up in a baseball museum next to the bat Alex Rodriguez used to drive in his two thousandth run and the cap Cole Hamels was wearing when he no-hit the Cubs. Standing in their off-season Stompers attire, Sean and Isaac pose for pictures in front of a glass case labeled “TODAY’S GAME,” where the historic scorecard sits front and center. They’re hugging again.

  * * *

  Sam and I have helped put Sean in the Hall of Fame, but we can’t keep him in the Stompers’ starting rotation. The first time I talk to him after Pride Night, he tells me he’s back to being a closer. For me, it’s a mouth-agape moment: It hadn’t even entered my mind that Feh would want Sean back in the bullpen after he’d proved beyond any doubt that he could handle a larger role. But Sean says Feh made it clear to him in the week leading up to the start that because of his lack of confidence in the team’s alternate closer candidates, the outing would be a one-off, no matter how he did. “I was always in relief in his mind,” Sean tells me.

  On June 28, three days after Sean’s Pride Night gem and his immediate demotion/forced relocation back to relief, our indy-league drama intersects with the big leagues in a way that reminds us that our conflict with Feh echoes a larger debate within baseball. Los Angeles Angels closer Huston Street makes headlines when he’s asked about the possibility of entering the game whenever high-leverage situations arise, like relievers used to in the 1980s and earlier, instead of being used strictly in save situations (which may or may not be particularly tight).

  “I’ll retire if that ever happens,” Street says. “If they ever tell me, ‘Oh, we’re gonna start using you in these high-leverage situations.’ … All right, good. You now can go find someone else to do that, because I’m going home.”

  Street doesn’t stop there. “It’s a ridiculous idea,” he continues. “It really is. The fact is, a bullpen functions best when you have roles. If you want to have a good pen, you need three or four guys that you trust. And if you trust them, give them roles, so they know what they have to do every day.”

  Is it possible that Feh put Street up to this? It sounds as if Street is speaking to us, reaching down from his privileged place at the back of a big league bullpen to say that Sam and I were silly to think we could topple an entrenched system. “There’s too many holes in the theory for me personally,” he concludes. “I can’t stand it. I think it’s an idea that’s built on paper but doesn’t work in real life. That’s really what it is to me.”

  That last comment really rankles, because it cuts to the heart of why we’ve come to Sonoma: to put “on paper” ideas like this into practice. Thus far, it seems as if those who side with Street are right. Not because the idea of less restrictive roles doesn’t work—it did work, before big league bullpens became hyperspecialized—but because everyone is so convinced it wouldn’t work now that they aren’t even willing to try it. The idea is disqualified because it can’t pass a test that no one will allow it to take.

  The irony is that we’re not trying to transport a kicking, screaming, Street-style closer back to the days before bullpens grew rigid. Street was always a closer, even at the University of Texas at Austin, where he set a record for the most saves in a College World Series. He’s been conditioned for more than a decade to come in at the end of games, and he’s clearly more comfortable doing so. Sean Conroy is the anti-Street: He has extensive starting experience, and he has no qualms about coming in early. Yet we’re using Sean as if the Angels closer’s comments had come from him.

  Street is still on my mind in the hours before Sonoma’s next game, on June 30. The Stompers are in San Rafael, and I’m scouting in Pittsburg, where the Diamonds are facing Vallejo’s slow-motion southpaw, Demetrius Banks. Banks moves so slowly that when he’s facing the Stompers, our team narrates his trips back to the dugout by announcing the surface he steps on with each excruciating stride: “GRASS, GRASS, GRASS, DIRT, DIRT, GRASS.” (He smiles in response, but he doesn’t speed up.) In need of distraction, I pull up the Stompers’ stream on my phone and listen to Tim Livingston with one earbud. The second-place Pacifics are riding a three-series winning streak, so for the first time since the first week of the season our games have something approaching playoff implications.

  Eric Schwieger is starting for the Stompers, in his third outing after the game we lost when Erik Gonsalves and Paul Hvozdovic relieved him instead of closer-because-he’s-the-closer Sean Conroy. He and Pacifics starter Ryan DeJesus put up zeroes for four innings, and then each works into and out of trouble. It’s 4-2 Sonoma after six innings.

  Disaster starts to strike in the seventh, that dangerous, in-between inning when the hitters are often facing the starter for the third time in the game, but the manager might not be ready to bring in his big bullpen guns. Two men reach, which brings up short, pesky center fielder Zack Pace—already one of the opponents whose name I most dread, thanks to his willingness to work the count and his extra-small strike zone. He takes a called strike and fouls
off the second pitch, then shortens up his already compact swing and grounds to Moch … who takes his time while Pace busts it down the line and beats the lackadaisical throw. “That doesn’t go down as an error, but that is most definitely a mental mistake by Mochizuki,” Tim says. Frickin’ Pace. Frickin’ Moch. Frickin’ baseball.

  With runners at first and second, the Stompers up by one, and a right-handed hitter due up, Schwieg’s day is done at 102 pitches. Godsey walks to the mound, takes the ball, and signals for … Jon Rand.

  It’s not the move I would make. Rand has a 1.56 ERA through his first six games, but we know he’s not that good, both because we have eyes and because the stats say so: His FIP is 3.64, and FIP predicts future ERA more accurately than ERA itself. He’s struck out only 7 batters in 17 1/3 innings. This smacks of a move made because it’s the seventh, which modern managerial law says is too soon to use an elite reliever—the same situation we faced two weeks earlier, and effectively the same response, with Rand replacing Hvozdovic in the script. Yet the game could be decided here. If the batter makes an out, the sport’s actuarial tables say that the Stompers will have a 75.4 percent chance of winning. But if he singles and Martinez scores, the Stompers’ win expectancy will drop to 38.1 percent. For that reason, this plate appearance has a Leverage Index of 4.08—which means it “matters” more than four times as much as the average plate appearance. Sitting in Pittsburg’s sparsely populated stands, I’m a mechanical man, performing my functions on autopilot with most of my consciousness centered on the game in San Rafael. “Wish Sean were pitching,” I text Sam.

  The Stompers get a break: Pacifics manager Matt Kavanaugh pinch-hits with lefty Tyger Pederson, who’s three years older, two inches (and forty pounds) smaller, and way worse at baseball than his brother Joc, who’s already hit 20 homers in 257 at-bats for the Dodgers in his first full season. Tyger (not a nickname) is slugging .233. Rand strikes him out swinging. I remind myself that managerial moves usually don’t make or break games: In many cases, the worse choice works out, and in some cases, the better choice backfires.

  In the top of the eighth, the broadcast gives me good news. “Sean Conroy has gotten up in the Stompers’ bullpen, starting to toss the ball a little bit,” Tim says. I exhale. We dodged one bullet, and it looks like we won’t have to dodge another. But after two outs, Tim delivers another report on the pen. “Conroy, who got up and threw just a little bit, maybe to get the arm loose, has come off the hill,” he says. “He’ll probably be called upon in the eighth inning if Rand gets into trouble.” Instead of using Sean to forestall a rally, we’re waiting until he’ll have to escape one. That’s like deciding to treat the symptoms of a disease instead of using an available vaccine. The top of the eighth ends, and Rand returns to the mound to face Matt Chavez, Maikel Jova, and Jeremy Williams, the Pacifics’ 3-4-5 hitters, all righties.

  Chavez works the count full, then lines a changeup into left for a single. Rand is officially in trouble. Where’s Sean? Not up yet, but no rush.

  Sean finally gets up again after a fouled-off first pitch to Jova, but the second pitch is smacked down the right-field line for a double. “And you wonder now, leaving in Rand to face the three right-handed hitters in the eighth might be coming back to bite the Stompers here,” Tim says. Oh, I wondered a while ago.

  Isaac stalls with a mound visit, but Sean needs more than one pitch to warm up, so Rand stays in to face Williams. Rand needs a strikeout here, but he’s the last guy we want pitching in a strikeout situation. On 1-1, Williams singles through the right side. The game is tied. And Tim’s next words pour gas on the fire that’s burning in my brain: “Now Gonsalves will get up in the bullpen, and Conroy will sit down. And it’s not a save situation.”

  I text Theo, who’s listening at home.

  “This bullpen usage is driving me crazy,” I say.

  “Me too,” he answers. “How do we let Rand face possibly the three best righties in the league?”

  On the broadcast, Tim is singing the same tune. “This has been an issue for the Stompers, in the sense that Lentini’s out in center and technically the manager,” he says. “Jerome Godsey has kind of been the de facto pitching coach. But this is a situation that the Stompers should’ve prepared for, with three right-handed hitters coming up, and the three best hitters that the Pacifics have, as they leave Rand out there. Conroy’s someone who can go two innings if they need him to.”

  At last, the Stompers summon a right-handed reliever—the wrong right-handed reliever, Gonsalves, who’s in there not because he’s the pitcher most likely to get an out, but because Conroy’s the closer, and the closer’s the closer because he’s the closer, bro. On his second pitch, Danny Gonzalez commits Gonzo-on-Gonzo crime, singling into right to score Jova and give the Pacifics a 5-4 win. It’s a 5-4 final in Pittsburg, too, in favor of the Admirals, but I can tell I’ll remember the game I didn’t go to much more clearly than the one I actually saw. As I’m packing up the camera, I get a text from Theo. “I was sick to my stomach listening to that,” he says.

  The Stompers just made another stupid mistake attributable to the type of illogical, by-the-book thinking sabermetricians disparage. Worse, we’re supposed to be the team that doesn’t make stupid mistakes—not necessarily the biggest or the fastest or the strongest, and certainly not the most experienced, but the smartest. Every fan knows the feeling of listening or watching while his or her team self-destructs, but this was worse. Not just because we have some skin in the game, but because, to some extent, we’re responsible. We’re not fans far away from the action, whose only recourse is to yell at the TV or send a snarky tweet. This happened not while we watched, but on our watch. We could have done something to stop it.

  I’m fed up with Feh, but I’m just as annoyed by our own inaction, which puts me at odds with Sam. Before the Stompers’ season started we were so often in accordance that we could have called our podcast Two Guys Agreeing. But now there’s a noticeable tension, which comes out in colder communication. (We both dread confrontation, which might be contributing to our trouble with Feh.) We’re in a bad mood because of the loss, and our postgame text exchange sounds like bandmates squabbling on Behind the Music. I suggest that Sam, Theo, and I meet with Feh about Sean. “Be real,” Sam says. The rest of us already agree, I say. Isn’t Feh the one we need to talk to? “If you want nothing to happen, yes, go ahead and rush into a conversation that will lead nowhere,” he says. “Get kicked out of the dugout. Etc. So on.” He tells me to skip scouting in Pittsburg, to come to San Rafael and discuss what to do. I ask if we can call Theo tomorrow—I don’t need to skip scouting for us to talk. “Yes you do,” he responds. “The plan is going to come out of the conversation Theo and I have. You can be there or not, but that’s where the plan is coming from.” The fact that I think this is a matter for a brief phone call, he adds, is the “biggest problem. Bigger problem than Feh.”

  Sam is being too tentative: He’s so unwilling to get in anyone’s way that he even objects when I thread an extension cord through the stands to power our camera in Vallejo, because he’s worried someone might trip. (No one ever does.) I can’t figure out why we’re fighting when we’re on the same side. This dispute over saves vs. leverage is a predictable clash, something we saw coming from the second we signed up. We’ve tried the subtle suggestion route, and while we haven’t been blackballed, we’re dangerously close to becoming bystanders, which would be just as bad. If we were building a foundation for the future—trying to set up a system, a Stompers Way that would stand the test of time—I’d be all for more baby steps and buy-in and building consensus. But it’s not clear to me that our manager is interested in diplomatic discussions, and we’re a third of the way through a three-month season, after which we won’t see the guy again. This, it seems to me, is the time to stop tiptoeing, and if someone stubs a toe—well, we never thought this experiment would be completely painless. If we want to do things differently, we’re almost certain to ruffle a few feath
ers.

  As a player, Feh has honed instincts that we’ll never develop. As a manager, though, he hasn’t earned our deference. We don’t work for Feh, we’re backed by his boss, and we found Sean. We matter as much to the franchise as Feh does, and he was warned about what we’d be doing before he took the job. The worst thing we can do is do nothing and let Feh feel secure in his fiefdom while needless losses add up. We can continue to be tactful, cajoling instead of pushing or pulling or provoking a fight, but we have to state our case clearly. I’m not so naïve that I think Feh will roll right over if we ask him politely, but one way or another it would pop the pimple.

  Early the next morning I email Feh, needing to do something to assuage my anxiety. The subject isn’t Sean—that will wait until after the San Rafael summit—but the batting order. I crib some stats from The Grapevine and do my best to sound ecumenical, unthreatening, and almost unconcerned, as if the order hasn’t been bugging me since Opening Day. I even sprinkle in a little light flattery.

  “Hey Feh,” I begin.