“Usually guys that haven’t played in that long don’t get picked up midseason because in indy ball people don’t get that kind of time outside of spring training.”
(Forty-three minutes elapse.)
“You should ask the other players and manager what they think so far I heard it wasn’t good.”
(Fifty-four more minutes elapse.)
“Just remember, you wanted me to dump Hurley for that guy when we were 11-2.”
He wraps up by comping Eads to Chris Burke, a former teammate of his in the Astros’ system who was drafted tenth overall but never amounted to much in the majors, thanks to what Feh says was a swing built for aluminum bats. I take the high road, knowing he has every right to rub it in now but hoping I’ll get to gloat later.
For me, every Eads fielding opportunity and plate appearance after the text barrage from Feh is like a mini–Breaking Bad finale. The stakes are so high that the rest of the game feels like filler. Taylor strikes out swinging in his first at-bat of game three, but he tells me he’s seeing the ball well and hopes to hit a couple hard. He snaps his 0-for-6 streak his next time up, swinging at the first pitch and bouncing a grounder through the middle to score Hurley from second. My smile is wider than his.
There’s little time to enjoy the hit before the next defensive crisis. The first batter in the bottom of the inning lifts a fly to left that tails toward the corner. The ball bounces off the palm of Taylor’s glove, then off, and finally into the palm of his bare right hand as he slides feet-first. He’s greeted good-naturedly when he gets back to the dugout, but I’m aware of how disastrous a different ricochet could’ve been.
In the top of the fifth, Taylor makes up for the scare with a two-out, bases-loaded ground rule double to the right-center-field gap, scoring two runs. I will the ball not to be hit to him for the final few innings, and Vallejo’s hitters comply. His third game ends on a high note, and the Stompers’ first half ends with a sweep. Eads’s error, misplay, and bobble did no damage, and he’s shown he can hit. And the Stompers are now 26-11 with a +72 run differential, the only team in the league with a record over .500.
By game 4 of the Eads era, some players are starting to come around. During one of Taylor’s at-bats, Sam and Andrew Parker are at the dugout railing, discussing Collin Forgey, Sean Conroy’s spring-training roommate, who was one of our first cuts because he rubbed Feh and Theo the wrong way. Parker had been a believer that Forgey could play. “But he wasn’t as good as this guy is,” Parker says, pointing to Taylor, whose outfield misplays still outnumber his hits.
Erik Gonsalves chimes in. “I sense a bit of sarcasm there?”
“No way, this guy is super legit,” Parker says. “That guy is such a ballplayer, he doesn’t even dip. He just eats the tin.” Gonzo still can’t tell if he’s serious.
“Look,” Parker continues, “if it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So this guy looks like a ballplayer, he’s a ballplayer.”
Taylor doubles again that day, one of twenty Stompers hits in a strange 16-5 loss. (No major league team has ever scored so few runs despite so many hits.) I’m in San Rafael, and Sam texts me Eads’s slash line, presented without comment: “.272/.429/.454.” The next day, Yoshi calls a team meeting before the players leave for Vallejo. He tells the rookies to talk to the veterans, and reminds them that they should be putting in extra practice and asking for advice. Isaac, Hibbert, Moch, Walker, and Carranza chime in to say the same thing. Yoshi tells Sam that Eads didn’t display enough remorse for his misplays, which strikes us as silly. Essentially, he’s asking for eyewash, a more public display of penitence. We know Taylor felt terrible, and he always shows up early to take flies and hit buckets of balls.
If the criticism was intended for him, Taylor responds, going 2-for-2 with three walks and three steals—more than he had in his whole senior season at Spring Hill, where Coach Sims wouldn’t give him the green light. This time, Sam texts “.500 obp.” On the nineteenth, as Taylor goes 3-for-3 with three doubles, a walk, and a sacrifice fly, Sam texts “.353/.521/.588,” then “.388/.520/.611,” then “.421/.538/.684,” and finally “.421/.555/.684.” Sam has a limited texting plan and uses his messages sparingly, so this onslaught is a sign that he’s as excited as I am. The doubles are sprayed to all fields—line drive to right-center, grounder down the right-field line, liner to left-center—and the resulting stats are Spring Hill–esque. Nothing Taylor does before games looks good, but at the moment he makes contact off live pitching, we can see the hitter who produced eye-popping numbers. His calloused bare hands blur—he doesn’t wear batting gloves, because he “got tired of buying them”—and his wrists flick, and the ball soars somewhere, harder than anything he hits in batting practice.
Each time Eads gets on base or makes a catch (which he now does without incident), Parker looks at Sam and says, “Quaaack.”
“It’s tough joining the team halfway through their year, and it’s like, ‘Oh, here’s a new guy,’ and the next thing you know I dropped a fly ball and I’m like, ‘Oh, now they really hate me,’” Eads says before his first home game. “The last few games I’ve been getting a few more high fives in the dugout, people starting to talk a little more. You gotta earn it. It’s not given. Everything is earned.”
I’ve already noted that Hurley is the third-best hitter in the Pacific Association with at least thirty plate appearances through July 19. If we indulge ourselves and drop that threshold to twenty-five, though, the best hitter in the Pacific Association through July 19 is Taylor Eads. One game after that—his seventh with the Stompers—he draws his eighth walk, tying Feh’s full-season total.
It’s a small sample, but as Sam says to me, “It was also a small sample when people were burying him. They were trying to get rid of him. They were legitimately trying to get rid of him.”
Somehow I resist the urge to text Feh.
* * *
For every list of undrafted position players, there’s also a list of undrafted pitchers. And for every Taylor Eads, there’s a Santos Saldivar, the right-handed pitcher who debuts for the Stompers a day after Eads’s error, when I’m desperate for a spreadsheet signee to make a strong first impression.
Santos is fifth on the 2015 seniors leaderboard for adjusted FIP, behind four drafted pitchers: eighth-rounder, seventh-rounder, eighth-rounder, sixth-rounder, Santos. In 87 senior-year innings at Baton Rouge’s Southern University, the Division I alma mater of Lou Brock and Vida Blue, he struck out 115; in 143 2/3 combined innings as a junior and senior, he posted a 2.63 ERA, with no homers allowed. He was passed over anyway, punishment for the sin of being a small righty.
By the time I come across him, Santos has already made his pro pitching debut for the River City Rascals of the Frontier League, the team Paul Hvozdovic pitched for in 2014. He lasted only 3 1/3 innings, allowing three runs on four hits and four walks. The Rascals released him shortly thereafter. I do my due diligence despite that inauspicious start, calling Roger Cador, Southern’s longtime baseball coach, who vouches for Santos and gets his assistant to send me Santos’s cell. Cador confirms that Santos is bilingual, which is a plus, since Gregory Paulino—whose English gets better by the day, uncovering a quirky sense of humor—is still the only native Spanish-speaker on the Stompers’ roster.
Next, I ask for a scouting report from Steve Brook, River City’s manager and director of baseball operations.
“Santos had one decent start for us against a pretty solid hitting club,” Brook says. “He’s a good guy … just didn’t showcase the strikeout stuff that we anticipated based upon his college numbers. FB in the mid to upper 80s with limited movement. Decent SL. Not much of a CH. Hope this helps.”
It hurts, actually, since it almost makes me cross Santos off my list. It’s one thing to sign players who make major league teams turn up their noses. It’s another to sign an indy club castoff. The Frontier League is more competitive than our league, but not by so much that a guy who went o
ne and done there would normally be a big Pacific Association prospect. As I see it, there are four possibilities:
1. Santos wasn’t at his best because of a nineteen-day layoff after Southern’s conference-title game.
2. Santos is good, but Brook is a bad evaluator.
3. Santos isn’t good enough for the Frontier League, but he is good enough for the Pacific Association.
4. Santos sucks, and he somehow struck out twelve D1 batters per nine innings without any transferable skills.
I decide to take a chance on the answer not being behind door number four. For one thing, my other undrafted pitching targets, Taylor Thurber and Matt Fraudin, have signed with Frontier League teams despite my most persuasive tweets, texts, and voice mails. More importantly, Santos can’t be worse than Jeff Conley, who’s struggling, or Ryusuke Kikusawa, a righty Yoshi recruited, who has an 8.44 ERA through his first three games. Even if he’s not suited to starting, he might make a shutdown reliever who’d give us more leeway to use Sean Conroy the way we want.
When I reach him, Santos is home in Houston. Like Taylor Eads, he considers himself retired, and like Andrew Parker, he’s planning to be an accountant. I ask him to explain the River City saga. When he signed with the Rascals, Santos says, he was told he’d be taking the place of starter Clint Wright, who had a torn labrum. But after his sloppy start, the team told him Wright was going to try to pitch through the injury. I offer him a chance to show Brook that he’d made a mistake.
Santos is wary because of the way things went in River City, but after taking a weekend to weigh his options, he tells me he can’t pass up the opportunity. “Just need a one-way ticket up there and we have a deal,” he says. I book his flight for the next morning, and he joins us in time to see Sean get a save on July 14. “You guys are going to like me,” he says, with endearing immodesty. “I pitch like him.”
Santos set Southern’s record for strikeouts, which is all the more impressive because he was a teammate of Jose De Leon, who was drafted by the Dodgers. Statistically speaking, Santos’s senior season is probably better than any De Leon had at Southern, but De Leon didn’t have a senior season: The Puerto Rican right-hander, who stands 6-foot-2, was drafted in 2013, after his junior year. Shortly before Santos’s start for River City, De Leon rose from Rancho Cucamonga in the Cal League to Tulsa in the Texas League, where he posted a Santos-esque strikeout rate, fanning 105 batters in 76 2/3 Double-A innings. After the season, MLB.com will list him as the second-best minor league prospect in what might be baseball’s best farm system. When Sam asks Santos who was better, Santos says, “Probably me.”
Santos’s debut out of the bullpen is scheduled for the next day. He’ll follow Paul Hvozdovic’s first start of the season, another hurdle for a “Ben and Sam” signee. Paul has the league’s second-best walk rate, and we want to try him in a more prominent role. Our experiment works: Paul throws six scoreless innings, allowing no walks and only four hits (one of which was the ball that fell in front of Taylor). Now he has the lowest walk rate in the league.
The seventh inning belongs to Santos. The shortest pitcher on the shortest team, he’s listed, very charitably, at 5-foot-10: He’s grown a fake inch since his fake 5-foot-9 at Southern, an egregious stretch even by the standards of baseball’s notoriously flattering measurement system. In the footage we shoot from behind home plate, he looks like an eighth grader from the goatee down, an effect enhanced by his baggy pants, which billow in the wind. Normally, the pitcher’s head comes close to touching the top of the frame, but there’s a lot of sky above Santos.
This would be the time for a tortured transition sentence about how Santos’s stuff is as big as his body is small. Compared to most of our staff, it seems as if Santos throws everything: He has, in descending order of usage, a four-seam fastball, a slider, a sinker, a curve, and a changeup. His four-seamer sits 89–90, spiking as high as 93; his curve comes in at about 70 but often dips into the 60s. (One of his curveballs sinks to 61, one tick above the minimum speed that BATS can record.) When he finishes, he corkscrews off to the first-base side, using all of his inches to generate pace and spin. He has too many weapons, at too many speeds, to be predictable, and nothing he throws stays straight. Going from facing Paul—who has great control but throws three pitches in a narrow velocity band—to facing Santos is like switching from an acoustic act to the Wall of Sound. The Frontier League must be special if this is “decent” stuff there.
Like every visitor to Vallejo, Santos has trouble transitioning from the nearly flat ground in the bullpen to Mound Everest, our name for the Admirals’ nonregulation, Aggro Crag–esque pitcher’s surface. (The first time we see its steep slope, we complain to the league. When we get no response, we drop the matter, figuring the mound must hurt the Admirals on the road as much it helps them at home.) He hasn’t pitched in a real game since his start for the Rascals six weeks earlier, so his velocity is off its peak. He’s cold: “I thought it was warm in California,” he told us in a betrayed tone on his first night with the team, after borrowing Sam’s sweatshirt, which he can’t take to the mound. And he also has trouble seeing Isaac’s signs, so Isaac switches to hand signals. None of it matters. Santos is dominant, striking out five of the six batters he faces. A weak grounder to second is the only ball put in play, and he never reaches a three-ball count. I watch from the dugout, Taylor’s second miscue temporarily forgotten, trying to hide how giddy I’m getting. “You look like a little kid right now,” Paul says, starting to smile because I can’t stop. No one will grumble about how we signed Santos instead of someone on the veteran-approved players list.
“Absolutely sensational performance,” Tim says on the radio stream. “Unbelievable stuff.” Santos was right. We’ve found a second Conroy.
* * *
At worst, we’ve clinched a spot in the title game by winning the season’s first half, and I’ve managed to transfuse new and better blood, on both the roster and the coaching staff. But my relationship with Yoshi, which was cordial early on, grows rocky as he gains greater responsibility and his authority comes into conflict with mine.
The trouble starts during the waning days of Feh’s tenure, when Feh agrees to cede some control of bullpen management to Yoshi after Sam, Theo, and Yoshi meet in San Rafael to discuss the excruciating (and easily avoidable) June 30 loss to the Pacifics in which Jon Rand was forced to face the middle of the order. On July 4, Yoshi’s first game as bullpen boss, Matt Walker goes four scoreless innings against San Rafael but runs into trouble in the fifth, getting two quick outs but then loading the bases with walks and allowing a two-run single to Zack Pace. In the midst of the walkfest, Walker jogs to the dugout to superglue a cut on his right hand, which is bleeding and killing his control of the changeup. I assume his outing is over when he gets Johnny Bekakis for the final out of the fifth, but bloody hand and all, he comes back out for the sixth and allows a leadoff single to Matt Chavez and a two-run homer to Jeremy Williams, which wins the game. Later, Yoshi admits he was too tentative—that because he was new to his role, he was reluctant to assert himself (Sam and I can commiserate) and allowed Walker, whom he dismayingly describes as our “ace,” to try to gut it out and get a win. It’s a mistake, but at least he admits it instead of doubling down and insisting that “the ace is the ace.”
Three days later, though, Yoshi fails his second test on the same material. Sean starts and gets through the eighth with a 2-1 lead. He’s been extremely economical—his pitch count is at 80—but the times-through-the-order penalty is more about familiarity than fatigue, and he’s about to face the heart of Pittsburg’s order for the fourth time in the game. “Pull him,” Sam texts me from San Rafael, where he’s scouting and following along online. Before Yoshi returns to the third-base coach’s box, I sidle up and ask, “New arm for the ninth?” It’s supposed to sound more like a helpful suggestion than an instruction, but he doesn’t seem to take it well. “No,” he says, and walks away. In the ninth, Sean loads the bases
without getting an out. Paul, a longtime starter who doesn’t seem as comfortable entering games mid-inning, relieves him and allows all three runs to score, then coughs up three of his own, all in fourteen pitches—an impressive pitch-to-run ratio. The Stompers lose 7-5.
The next day, Mike Jackson holds Pittsburg to one run over seven, striking out nine. “They’ll never pull a starter again,” Sam texts from San Rafael. This time I ask Yoshi what I hope is an even more innocent question—“Is Jackson done?”—and he almost sprints away, muttering, “Don’t ask me, it’s bad luck, we lost yesterday.” Apparently his takeaway from the previous game isn’t that I might’ve had a point about pulling the starter, but that I jinx the Stompers when I ask questions. On the plus side, Jackson is done for the day: Yoshi takes him out, and the Stompers win 4-3.
After that I lie low until the day after Taylor Eads’s first game, when I knock on the door to the manager’s office, which by then belongs to Yoshi. Like the rest of the clubhouse, it’s far neater than it was when Feh was in charge. Yoshi sits at the desk directly in front of me, facing the wall, while Captain manspreads in a folding chair. I ask Yoshi if he has a second.
“I was thinking that since Taylor doesn’t have a strong arm, it might make sense for him and Hurley to switch in left and right,” I say. “If they’re comfortable playing those positions, of course.”
Yoshi considers. “Taylor’s arm is terrible,” he says. (To Yoshi, almost every rookie is terrible and in dire need of discipline.) “We’ll have to talk to him and Mark.”
I’m already withdrawing, my limited mission accomplished. “Okay, thanks,” I say. “Should I ask, or do you want to talk to them?”
When he answers, Yoshi suddenly sounds cold. “No,” he says. “You don’t talk to players.”
I’m so taken aback by his curt response that I can’t come up with one of my own. I head back to my laptop and hard drive, which are set up on the clubhouse freezer for anyone who wants to watch video. I wonder whether he was trying to say he’d prefer to talk to Taylor and Hurley himself, or whether he was actually telling me not to talk to players, period.
The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Page 24