Unlike Sean Conroy, I don’t believe in the “law of attraction,” as I reminded myself when I pictured Isaac’s declaration magically drawing a GM’s eye, like Sauron swiveling on his tower when Frodo puts on the ring. But as much as I’d hate to lose Isaac or Sean, or Baps or Hibbert or Hurley, part of me actually hopes it will happen. For one thing, I’m insulted that no one wants what we have: Can’t they see that we’ve built the best baseball team, with the best baseball players? For another, I want our players to get what they want, even if what they want makes us worse. A promotion to a midlevel indy league would barely improve their minuscule salaries and even more minuscule odds of making the majors, but it would still be a sign that someone is watching. It might also pay dividends down the line, if it led to the briefest of minor league looks. Some of our players plan to start batting cages, become baseball instructors at sports academies, or give private lessons to local kids. Even a day of affiliated experience would help them recruit clients and charge higher rates, as well as give them better stories to tell at the bar when they’re trying to get girls (or guys!) to go home with them.
Access to casual sex aside, signings fulfill the Stompers’ social contract: Prostrate yourself before baseball, and baseball will lift you up. If other teams start taking our talent, the franchise will have held up its end of the bargain, and Theo will be able to boast about all the guys who got out of the league when he’s recruiting next spring. (“If you play for us, you might not have to keep playing for us.”) Lastly, there’s the selfish reason: If one of our spreadsheet guys gets signed, it would make us seem supersmart. Not only would we get to see someone we like flourish, but we’d also get to take credit for finding a gem that the baseball establishment missed.
Isaac’s hopes don’t pan out immediately: Days, and then weeks, pass without any defections. The Stompers win their first three series of the second half, two of them against the Pacifics, including a 17-5 blowout in which Joel Carranza goes 5-for-6 with two homers and seven runs driven in, wiping away the inevitable Matt Chavez solo shot. Meanwhile, we’ve pulled off our perestroika with Yoshi: Not only have we settled the long-standing disagreement about how to use Sean Conroy, but there’s a clear sense that we’re all on the same side. The same guy who told me weeks earlier that I didn’t know how to behave now gives me friendly backslaps when I see him at the field. We’ve had the old-school, obstructionist-skipper experience, and now we’re finding out what the new model looks like, reaping the benefits of collaboration between front office and field staff. Most of our first-half stressors—staking our claim to dugout real estate, fighting (or worse, not fighting) with Feh, longing for Taylor and Santos, struggling to set up our scouting network and overcoming a comical sequence of technical setbacks—have been removed or defused. We no longer have to steel ourselves for any awkward confrontations. The clubhouse feels like home.
Naturally, this idyllic interlude doesn’t last. It’s almost a relief when our first player gets poached, as it is when a hide-and-seek game goes on for so long that the hider looks forward to being found. At the end of July, Joel Carranza gets a call from the Trois-Rivières Aigles, a Québécois team in the Can-Am League part owned by Eric Gagne and former NHL defenseman Marc-André Bergeron. Because of a connection with Feh, the Aigles have been sniffing around the Stompers all season. They were reputed to have interest in Carranza early in the year, and for a few days in mid-July we were convinced they were about to sign Sean Conroy. Both were false alarms, so we don’t believe this scare will be any different until Carranza tells us the Aigles have bought him a plane ticket, something indy-league teams don’t do lightly. On July 30, he goes 1-for-3 and comes out early, taking in the final few innings from a folding chair next to the visitors’ dugout, a Stomper emeritus. The next day, he takes off for Québec; two days after that, he’s DHing for the Aigles.
Joel’s ascension reassures the rest of the Stompers that there’s hope for them. But it’s still a big blow to morale, because Carranza has carried our team for most of the month. Joel isn’t much of a fielder: When he makes a diving stop down the line in early July, our bench gets on him, asking, “When did we pick that guy up?” just loud enough for him to hear. He’s not much of a base runner, either: In another game, he looks so winded crossing home plate that someone asks him if he’s tired, to which he responds, “I just ran from first to third, so yeah.” But he’s also our most potent run producer. Carranza has hit safely in seventeen of his last eighteen games for the Stompers, posting a .405/.460/.618 July slash line in 100 plate appearances and producing about 60 percent more offensive value over that span than the next-hottest Stomper, Yuki Yasuda.
Joel was one of the few Stompers with whom we were never at ease, although he hit so well that we were happy to have him. He was the closest thing on the team to a star: In Sonoma, a high-pitched, synchronized scream of “We love you, Joel!” accompanied his every at-bat, as he sauntered to the plate holding the barrel of his bat, the length of it angled upward under his armpit such that the handle would pat him on the back every time he took a step. Like all the holdovers from 2014, he predated our arrival, so he knew we weren’t a permanent part of the scenery. And while he wasn’t outright unfriendly, we didn’t get the sense that he was happy we were there.
Feh considered Carranza a confidant, but Joel was also one of the first to announce that the mood seemed improved when Feh was suspended. In an earlier game, I’d heard him commiserating with Isaac about Feh’s umpire harassment an inning after commiserating with Feh about Isaac’s pitch selection. Upon hearing that Feh had been fired, he told Theo, “Feh was a great ballplayer. I’ll leave it at that.”
The way he treated us also seemed to depend on the day and the audience. In a game in mid-July, Sam wrote out a report on Pacifics starter Max Beatty, a twenty-four-year-old former Padres farmhand who entered the outing with the league’s lowest FIP among pitchers with at least 30 innings. In addition to the usual breakdown of pitch types, patterns, and velocities, Sam wrote, “He’s good,” which was intended to put our hitters on high alert but inadvertently violated an unwritten rule against complimenting opponents. Joel erased the line, and later grumbled to teammates about Sam’s description of Beatty’s breaking ball. Sam sought out Joel in the clubhouse after the game and asked whether the report had been wrong, looking to avoid making the same mistake the next time. “It was nails, thanks,” Joel said, ending the exchange with an unconvincing smile. (At Sam’s suggestion, I wrote “He’s horseshit” on our next Beatty report, just to make amends. It went over well.)
Our camerawork may have helped Joel get a job—at Yoshi’s request, I patched some clips together to send to the Aigles’ manager, just before Joel was signed—but he rarely watched video before games, even when we offered to queue it up. When we open our safeful of happiness surveys after the season, we discover that he didn’t take that exercise seriously, either. Even when he did deposit a slip, he rarely filled it out honestly; instead he’d write, “I don’t know. How happy are you?” or circle all seven ratings. Except, that is, for his last slip of the season, on which he wrote, “Thanks for everything guys,” either a masterful troll or an odd attempt at sincerity that assumed we wouldn’t see all the earlier, insincere responses when we unlocked the box. It’s as confusing a sign-off as the hug he gives me the last time he leaves the clubhouse, the only indication that I’ve brought him happiness since I handed him an ice pack after he suffered a groin strain and told him to enjoy the shrinkage. (He laughed and told me to shut up.) In twenty-eight games for Trois-Rivières, Joel hits .267/.362/.433, a comedown from his Stompers stats, but he helps the Aigles qualify for the postseason (a first for the franchise), and after two playoff rounds the team wins the Can-Am title. It’s a storybook end to his season but, from the Stompers’ perspective, it plays out offscreen.
Joel’s departure seems to break the seal on the Stompers. Ten days later, Brennan Metzger is signed by the RailCats, an American Association team
in Gary, Indiana. Both the Stompers and the RailCats are professional teams, but the RailCats are much more professional, with a real radio station and real video broadcasts and a real ballpark built just for them. Metzger slugged only .389 for Sonoma, but he stole five bases, played a solid right field, and drew enough walks to put up a .407 on-base percentage. We’re sorry to see him go. So is Yoshi, since it might mean more terrible Taylor Eads in the outfield.
Six days after Metzger goes, it’s finally Isaac’s turn. He joins the Florence Freedom of the Frontier League, and his absence hurts even more than the others. In addition to being the best power hitter on our post-Carranza roster, Isaac was an adept defender (leading the league’s catchers with a 43.5 percent caught-stealing rate) and a vocal leader, the guy who during the first week of the season told Feh to “Keep your ass in center” when Feh spoke semi-seriously about pitching part-time. The dugout gets quiet without him incongruously singing “Jeepers Creepers” when someone takes a close pitch, or telling Jeff Conley “Fuck the first inning” when Jeff gives up a few early runs, or saying, “Sounds like a library in here, and I don’t like studying” when the relievers move to the bullpen and the dugout chatter dies down. He was also a big, bearded symbol of assimilation—both ours and Sean’s. At first we found him intimidating, for no better reason than a primitive, instinctive response to someone large and loud and hairy whom we assumed wouldn’t welcome outsiders. Before long, he made us feel more at home than almost anyone else. And not only us. “I’ll tell you what, national exposure for the Stompers,” Isaac said soon after Pride Night. “That makes me happy. Hey, Sean, thanks for being gay, man.”
Isaac hits .250/.304/.438 in eighteen games for the Freedom, who lose in the wild card round to River City, Paul and Santos’s old team. Like Joel, he posts pictures of his playoff run on Facebook. In the images, both players wear their new uniforms, celebrate with their new bands of brothers, and show no signs of missing Sonoma. Isaac’s other life makes me much more jealous than Joel’s. Months after the season, Isaac posts a video that shows him on an empty field, doing a four-way drill that covers every catcher movement: leap up and lunge for an invisible ball on its way to the backstop; block an invisible dirt-ball down the middle; block to the right; block to the left; repeat. The first comment, a “Good luck bro,” comes from a former player, a late-round pick in 2011 who washed out of affiliated after six games and played part of a season in indy ball. He’s Isaac’s age, but he’s left baseball behind. “Just still chasing it,” Isaac answers, adding that he’s in the Frontier League and hoping to move up. “Is this gonna be your last year if u don’t get picked up?” the ex-player asks. Isaac says no: He loves it, he’s getting better every year, he can’t consider quitting because he continues to progress. There’s no reason why this exchange, or a dozen others like it from my other Stompers Facebook friends, should make me sad. Yes, the implacable aging curves say that Isaac has probably come close to peaking, and he’s almost impossibly far from the “it” he’s chasing. But baseball makes him happy, and there are worse ways to spend one’s twenties than happily failing to become one of the best 750 players in pro ball. Offices and cubicles can wait.
I still feel sad, in spite of myself.
Counting Feh’s reassignment to the Atlantic League, we’ve now sent talent to all four higher-level indy leagues. On the Pacific Association’s online transactions page, the entry for each loss says, “traded to outside league.” “Traded” implies a two-way exchange, but most of these moves don’t bring back compensation. Officially, Carranza and Metzger are traded for “future considerations,” which in practice translates to “In the future, we’ll consider raiding your roster again.” When the Freedom ask for Isaac, I tell Theo to counter by asking for my old crush Collins Cuthrell, who ranked just below Eads on the 2015 seniors spreadsheet but signed with Florence right after the draft. Cuthrell is slumping, and Florence just activated an injured outfielder, so I figure there may be a chance to profit from a roster crunch. There isn’t. Florence declines our request for Cuthrell but kindly offers to send us rookie catcher Matt Rubino, who’s batting .053 after eight games and is about to be bumped by Isaac. We accept, because Florence has the hand and we have no hand at all. It’s getting crowded on the clubhouse memorial wall.
“Prom season started when Joel [got signed],” Theo texts to Sam. “All of these guys are used to being homecoming kings. Now the guys still here are looking around wondering why they don’t have dates. Metzger got a date? Isaac’s getting a date? Joel’s been getting laid for three weeks by his date. Fuck, even Serge and Feh are going to the dance! What about me?!” That wallflower feeling coincides with a steady decline in the team’s self-reported mood and self-confidence ratings, which we discover when we unlock the survey safe at the end of the season.
For most of the season, the bench has been such a strength for the Stompers that we’ve worried about where to find playing time for second stringers who could have been starters in Vallejo or Pittsburg. Very rarely does such depth survive a season. When fans fret about having more players than positions, the solution is always simple: Wait for the surplus to resolve itself. Now, Yoshi has to siphon from that strength just to fill out a lineup card. Parker, the best backup catcher in the league, becomes the best starting catcher in the league. An amorphous combination of Baps, Kristian Gayday, and T. J. Gavlik covers first, third, and DH. Taylor fills in for Metzger.
Rearranging our remaining assets plugs the holes, but it doesn’t replace the production. Not only have we lost players, we’ve also watched some remaining guys get worse. Kristian, who had five multihit games in his first eight starts of the season, followed that up by going eight games without one, and then another eight games before the next. Over that stretch of sixteen games and 60 plate appearances, he hit .157/.267/.177. “I might lead the nation in most cockshots not hit anywhere,” he said. Mechanically, he was a mess that everyone thought they could fix, the way armchair scouts always do when guys inexplicably suck. In the midst of that stretch, I heard Baps tell Kristian it looked like he was trying to hit homers, and I saw Feh reposition his hands during practice and declare a breakthrough when Kristian homered on the next batting-practice pitch. “He has the load and the timing, he just needs swing control,” Feh said. “The load is the hard part.” The swing control must have been pretty tough, too, because Kristian continued to struggle. When Diamondbacks scout Chris Carminucci came to see the Stompers, he told me Gayday wasn’t getting his foot down early enough, so I filmed Kristian from the roof of the first-base dugout, showed him how he looked from the side, and passed on the tip, hoping in vain that it would help. For a time, we contemplated cutting him, especially since his offensive struggles seemed to cause (or at least coincide with) a breakdown in his defense. Eventually he pulled out of the nosedive, maybe because the suggestions helped or maybe because he was so sick of hearing them that he decided to make them stop. From his nadir on July 10 through the end of the season, Kristian hits .236/.344/.364, posting a 98 wRC+—almost exactly league average. Average is useful, but it isn’t exciting. The guy who made us delirious when he broken-bat homered on his second swing as a professional goes deep only two more times in his remaining 364 swings.
The only thing that saved Kristian’s job during his deep dry spell was that Gavlik hit even worse. T. J. made the team because he looked slick in spring training at several positions, but it’s bad news when your utility guy gets regular at-bats. After his first few starts, T. J.’s OPS fluctuates within a mediocre range, peaking at .709 and bottoming out at .567. Sam and I don’t try to replace him, because we suspect he’s the victim of bad luck: T. J. ranks fifth on the Stompers with an average HITf/x exit velocity of 72.6 mph at Arnold Field, and he leads the team with a 37 percent overall “hard-hit rate,” based on subjective hit-hardness ratings entered into BATS by the Corduroy Crew. Despite his hard contact and encouraging batted-ball profile—he ties for fourth on the team in line-drive rate—he finish
es with a .261 batting average on balls in play, the third-lowest figure among Pacific Association players with at least 80 plate appearances. If the season lasted six months, T. J.’s luck might have changed, and more of his squarely struck balls might have fallen in. But it stops after three months, freezing the stats forever at a time when T. J. is the least-productive Pacific Association hitter who never played for Vallejo.
Taylor Eads, too, tanks when we need him to deliver. From the day that we argued with Yoshi about benching him through the end of the year, his slash line is in freefall: His seasonal OPS declines in all but three of his remaining twenty-three games. Yet what we like about Eads still stands out in the stats. Among Stompers hitters, only Andrew Parker has a higher average exit velocity at Arnold Field than Taylor’s 76.5 mph, and Parker is the closest a human can get to The Hulk without turning green and ruining a perfectly good pair of purple pants. Taylor also leads all hitters with at least 70 plate appearances in pitches per plate appearance (5.15) and walk rate (17.7 percent). He does grind opposing pitchers into dust, as Chris Long predicted. He just doesn’t make much contact, and while he hits the ball hard, he doesn’t elevate.
If Sam and I were inclined to attribute players’ on-field performance to their psychological states, we’d consider it highly significant that Taylor’s downfall began right after the move we feared—and warned Yoshi—would shatter his fragile confidence. Maybe it is significant. Or maybe Yoshi was the prescient one: Maybe Taylor really was too good to be true, and those mechanics really were too awkward to work, as any scout who’d seen him at Spring Hill had evidently decided. Either way, we bought Taylor “as is,” and we have to live with his flaws: A team can’t rebuild a bad swing with weeks left in a season, especially when it doesn’t have a hitting coach and the player won’t cooperate. During our mid-July victory-lap lunch with Taylor, when we were convinced we’d signed a superstar, he told us about a friend of his from home, Ryan Eades, a pitcher taken by the Twins in the second round of the 2013 draft. According to Taylor, the Twins tried to change Ryan’s mechanics in his first full season, and he never felt comfortable, posting a 5.14 ERA. In his second season, they let him go back to throwing the way he had at LSU, and his ERA shrank by more than two runs. Taylor told us that changing his mechanics is “the only thing that I wouldn’t want. I’d rather stick with what got me here.” He takes the failure of what got him here hard. I root for him to put the bat on the ball just so I won’t have to see him shaking his head and talking to himself on the way back to the bench after another strikeout. “He was a guy who hadn’t batted below like .500 since he was a kid,” Tommy Lyons tells me. “Never knew how to slump.”
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