The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

by Ben Lindbergh

  I try to slow the revolving door in our time-honored way: with a spreadsheet. I ask Hans Van Slooten, a developer at Baseball-Reference.com, for a list of players who have been active this season in leagues above ours but who haven’t played recently, hoping to find an unemployed local with upper-level experience. (It’s too late in the season to convince players to travel.) Most of the listed players are injured, but some were released, and a few aren’t far away. I narrow the search to Brett Krill, a twenty-six-year-old outfielder who played twenty-nine games in Triple-A for the Giants in 2014. He hasn’t hit well since A ball, but if he made it one step from the majors, there’s a limit to how bad he could be. He wants $1,000, which would cover his mileage costs plus two weeks of salary. It’s not an unreasonable request, but it’s crazy money by Stompers standards. I try to talk him down, but he won’t budge. Eventually, Theo and I convince Eric to approve the expense. I text Krill to tell him to get on the road—and after all of my efforts he says he’s made other plans that preclude his playing for us. The spreadsheet won’t help here. Another crisis arises when Moch—perhaps sensing some vulnerability—asks Theo for more money with weeks left to go, claiming that he can’t afford to keep playing without the share of Feh’s salary that he used to receive. Fortunately, his host family foots the bill.

  In the waning days of the season, the clubhouse feels like a foreign place. After two months, I could have stuck all our happiness surveys in the right lockers without looking. But as the influx of warm bodies fills the empty spots once assigned to other Stompers, rookies cramming two to a cubby so the veterans can have slightly more space in a cramped, run-down room that smells of sweaty male no matter where one sits, I have to depend on the nameplates to tell me where (and who) everyone is. The newcomers are nice enough, and they give us their all, but I barely consider them Stompers: They wear the uniform, but they don’t have the history, and while most of them make it into the team picture they’re missing from our mental images. A few months after the season, Sam texts me, “What was Pete’s last name? Pete on our team.”

  * * *

  Baseball is a game that likes to take breaks. To stay sane in the dugout, one has to find distractions. This isn’t easy when you’ve seen the same four teams play dozens of times: By the last third of the season, we’ve heard every ad, memorized every walk-up song, made a mental picture of every player, and watched every way in which a fan could collapse during the dizzy-bat race. Players pass the time by staring at pretty girls, picking out anatomical details one wouldn’t believe someone could see at the grandstand-to-dugout distance, especially through a backstop screen. (It’s just as impressive as picking up the spin on a slider.) I stare at sunflower-seed shells. Not the ones that get passed from player to player in big plastic packets, but the ones that have already been crushed and spat out. There’s a desert of spent shells in front of each dugout, where they’ve accumulated over months, maybe years. It’s impossible to pinpoint the place where shell ends and dirt begins; wait long enough, and the distinction disappears. Each shell was expelled from the mouth of a young man who wanted to make the majors, but who had to know that just by being at that field, leaning over that railing, and using his tongue to propel that shell as far from the fence as possible, he was doomed to fall short. Inning after inning, game after game, each piece joins the countless fragments spit from the mouths of other young men, carrying with it some excess saliva that in turn carries the nucleotides that make up the polynucleotides that wind together in ways that in almost all people say, “Nope, not good enough.”

  Somewhere in those piles, there are Joel shells, and Isaac shells, and Metzger shells, and Hibbert shells, all in unmarked graves. There are Sean shells, also, and this is unacceptable. We don’t want Sean to sink into a mass of other unremarkable baseball players until no one knows who he was. We want him to rise to the top.

  Sean has set six goals for himself in 2015, none of which was “bring back the fireman model of bullpen management.” We’ve probably prevented him from achieving more of these goals than we’ve helped him check off.

  • Have a permanent residence.

  • Go to a minor league baseball tryout.

  • Master a song on guitar, and record it in one take.

  • Have an income.

  • Stick with a healthy routine; sleep, diet, exercise.

  • Get my guitar.

  We haven’t helped his income, unless $400 per month (for three months) counts. A host family is the most transient residence imaginable. And although his whole season is a kind of audition, he can’t attend an actual tryout when he’s stuck in Sonoma. So we try to bring the tryout to him. For weeks, we’ve watched passively as other teams took our players. Now we want to take an active role and give someone away with some say in where he goes.

  If any major league team will keep an open mind about Sean, it’s the one that employs Pat Venditte, an ambidextrous switch-pitcher who throws no harder than Sean. So Sam emails the Oakland Athletics—specifically David Forst, who’s a few months away from being named GM of the team after a decade as Billy Beane’s assistant. Sam sends Forst a four-page primer on Sean: his stats, his splits, his spray chart, his PITCHf/x comparisons, and a study on how the Pacific Association stacks up to affiliated. (“In our estimation, a player who performs above average in our league is probably suited to something a little higher than short-season ball, but lower than high-A,” Sam says.) Forst decides Sean is worthy of being scouted, a victory in itself. He promises to dispatch a scout to an upcoming start.

  Sam and I are like proud parents fussing before their kid’s college interview. We want Sean to look perfect for his big day. “Conroy shaved beard and got haircut,” Sam texts me two weeks before the scout is due to arrive. “Looks 15. Has the bad face.”

  “Tell him to grow it back before the A’s come,” I answer.

  When the appointed day comes—August 25, a home game against Pittsburg—I anxiously scan the spectators. The scout stands out immediately: young guy, looks like a player, equipped with polo shirt and radar gun. Sam is in the dugout, so I scout the scout. He alternates between watching Sean and checking his phone, lackadaisically raising the gun on (almost) every pitch. I know he’s seeing whatever he needs to, but I still want to Clockwork Orange his eyes so he won’t miss a crucial moment that might show that Sean is minor league material. Sean’s stuff has looked sharper, but he doesn’t disappoint, rebounding from his worst start of the year to go six scoreless, allowing four hits with no walks and five strikeouts. It’s all the more impressive because he’s aware he’s being watched. (We warned him in advance.)

  Before the outing is over (a bad sign), I see the scout stand and head for the exit. I intercept him and introduce myself, fishing for his thoughts. He says Sean pitched well and looks like he knows what he’s doing, and that he’s sending Forst an email about him right now. He doesn’t disclose what the message will say. We can guess, though, when we hear from Forst nine days later. “We’re not going to be able to do anything at this time,” he says. “As we look towards our rosters and depth chart for 2016 we’ll keep him in mind, but adding someone right now is not something we’re able to do.”

  It’s the story of Sean’s career: pitch well in games, fare poorly in tryouts. This time he did both on the same day.

  * * *

  Even as we bleed players, the Pacifics surge, and we struggle to stay over .500 for the second half, I take heart in some successes. Santos, after four more relief outings as impressive as his first one, makes a start against the Admirals and goes seven shutout innings with nine strikeouts. After that, he’s entrenched in the rotation, although we still use him out of the pen on his throw day between starts, extracting every quality inning we can. Baps, the throwback who bats with bare hands and applies eyeblack with charcoal, misses time with a hamstring strain that seems to sap his power, but he still gets his singles when he returns to the lineup. At midseason, I send for some samples of Axe bats, a new
brand with an axe-shaped handle instead of a knob. The redesigned grip is supposed to protect the hitter’s hamate bone and improve bat speed and control, and it’s found its way to a few early adopters in the major leagues. Not everyone wants to try the new bat—Taylor Eads’s “stick with what’s worked” attitude is the norm among athletes—but Baps embraces it. Shortly before hurting the hammy, he hit the hardest ball HITf/x tracks all season, a 102.4 mph bomb that dies in Arnold’s outfield like every center-field fly. Only three other hitters touch triple digits all year. “Must be nice to be strong,” Tommy Lyons says, seeing Baps get jammed and muscle a single regardless.

  But it’s not enough. Here’s something else Taylor told us, long before he left: “The best teams don’t need managers. And I feel like we’ve kinda got one of those teams here.” We did at the time, but we don’t anymore. The departures take their toll: Our overpowering offense from the first two months of the season shrivels and dies down the stretch.

  The Admirals still suck, the Diamonds are still about average, and the Pacifics are still good. By far the biggest difference is the Stompers’ Icarus act. In June and July we so outclassed the competition that Chris emailed me to say, “You guys need to move up a league.” In August, we’re much worse than San Rafael and somewhat worse than the Diamonds, whom Yoshi pronounced terrible in mid-June (before they signed Scott David). We’re still taking pitches and walks. But our OBP is empty, because we can’t hit. Compounding the problem, we have terrible timing when we do get the bat on the ball. Not only are we worse overall, but we’re also way worse with runners in scoring position, when offense matters the most.

  The problem crops up on both sides of the ball: We can’t seem to stop stranding our runners or stop our opponents from plating theirs. There’s probably no deeper significance to this trend: In the majors, it’s routine for teams composed of mostly the same players to go from “clutch” to “unclutch” in consecutive seasons through chance alone, depending on when their hits happen to come. In half of a seventy-eight-game season, unclutchness is even less likely to signify some weakness of character or mental malaise. Nonetheless, our batters’ inability to get big hits and our pitchers’ inability to prevent them reinforce the deepening sense that we’ve entered the darkest Stompers timeline.

  Like a mourner who’s recently lost a relative, I comfort and torment myself by retreating to my memory and replaying scenes from the heady days of June: Feh asking our dugout, “Who wants to face us?!”; Rand gloating that a battered opposing pitcher would “sleep like a baby tonight”; Moch describing our lineup as a “never-ending merry-go-round”; Tommy Lyons coaching at first, his arms and legs so covered in the shin guards and elbow guards worn by Stompers hitters who’ve reached base that Isaac says he looks like the first robot base coach, and Tommy obliges with a brief robot dance; Kristian saying we were so used to mundane doubles and singles that “we only get hyped for home runs now.” I recall another rally from a game we won, back when we never stopped scoring. “Pretty sure this guy knows it’s only a matter of time,” Feh had said, referring to Pacifics starter Nick Hudson, who had held the Stompers scoreless through three. “The clock is ticking.” Later, after we’d knocked Hudson out on a Hibbert single and a Serge sac fly, Feh dusted off one of his signature sayings: “Sands of time, boys. Saaaands of time.” And after a two-out run in the same game, Isaac added, “Welcome to the gauntlet, baby. You might get through two of us, but you ain’t getting through all of us.”

  Serge, Feh, Joel, Isaac, Hibbert. All gone, ghosts from a first half when if we weren’t coming back it was only because we were never behind. Saaaands of time: The grains are still slipping away, but the hourglass has turned over and time has switched sides.

  14

  BURN THE SHIPS

  Baseball is a game of failure, the cliché goes. Baseball is also a game of clichés—most of them clichés because they’re true, but this one sucks. Baseball is not a game of failure. That line about failing seven out of ten times and still making the Hall of Fame? Not if you’re a pitcher, in which case you can succeed six out of ten times and you’ll probably get released. Not if you’re a fielder, when if you succeed only nine times out of ten they’ll make you a DH. Not if you’re a manager, and failing fifty-one times out of one hundred means a losing season. Baseball is a game of zero sums, every loss corresponding to another’s victory. Hitters fail more often than not, but baseball is a perfect .500.

  There’s a relatively new cliché about failure in baseball that I like a lot more: The other guy lives in a big house, too. Not all failure corresponds to a lack of effort. Or a lack of desire. Or a lack of preparation. Or a lack of skill. We lose, sometimes, because the other guy is also really good.

  I hear that one a lot—though not much around the Pacific Association, where nobody lives in a big house—but not as much as I hear the latest sports cliché: Burn the ships. The story goes that the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés ordered all his ships burned upon reaching the New World so that his men would have no choice but to conquer and colonize. The legend has lately taken over clubhouse motivational speeches: In Los Angeles, former GM Ned Colletti told it in two separate spring training speeches. (The second time, he attributed the bold decision to Alexander the Great, which, according to Molly Knight, the author of The Best Team Money Can Buy, inspired the batting practice T-shirts the Dodgers wore that season to mock Colletti: “Burn The Ships” on the front, “ATG”—for Alexander the Great—on the back.) In Kansas City, the veteran outfielder Raúl Ibañez told the story to fire up the team in September 2014. It was such a hit that Royals pitcher Jeremy Guthrie went to a crafts store and bought four wooden boats; the team was going to burn them—start actual fires!—in the clubhouse after each postseason game. (The scheme was scrapped, not for fire-safety reasons but because the celebration after the Royals’ first postseason win was so frenzied that Guthrie’s plans got overwhelmed.) Our podcast listeners send us new “Burn the ships” references almost weekly: T-shirts for sale with the slogan, football clubhouses that have stenciled it on the walls.

  The legend is mostly not true—Cortés scuttled many of his ships, but left some—and often misinterpreted. (Guthrie thought the lesson was “to burn the boats so no one can come and grab us from behind,” while Colletti thought the point was “scaring the Aztecs.”) It is also, perhaps most embarrassingly, recycled from the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October. No matter! I think about ships on fire a lot as we pile up losses in August.

  • We lose two out of three at home to Pittsburg to start the month.

  • Then, after winning five of six against Vallejo, we lose five of six to San Rafael.

  • Then, after edging Pittsburg in two of three, we get swept by Vallejo.

  The losses go down easily at first. We have already locked up a spot in the league’s one-game championship, and we won the first half by such a runaway that we’ve all but locked up home field for that game, which goes to the team with the better overall record. (Our lead is so big that at one point Eric Gullotta sincerely proposes forfeiting an entire series against Pittsburg so he can take the whole team to Reno.) It’s probably not a coincidence that, in 1981, when a midseason strike caused MLB to implement similar rules—first-half division winners were guaranteed a playoff spot—none of the four first-half champs also won the second half. Urgency is a hell of a drug.

  The only reason the second half would matter to us is that we can clinch the league championship—and avoid the championship game—by winning both halves. Secretly, though, a lot of us are looking forward to that game. Especially because we’re sure it will be in Sonoma.

  Except that we look up in mid-August and realize we are in danger of blowing home-field advantage. It will take an epic collapse on our part, and a furious charge on San Rafael’s. The Pacifics are doing their part.

  Before we play San Rafael in the second week of August, I get to their field about four hours before game time. As I sit in the bleachers, p
reparing a scouting report and waiting for the Stompers’ van to roll up, Matt Kavanaugh gathers his team behind home plate. I think I’m going to have an opportunity to eavesdrop on a speech. By this point, I hate Kavanaugh, who helped incite the fight between Mochizuki and Schwieger, as much as the rest of the Stompers do; we think he’s a phony, that he complains too much, that he’s the sort of jackass who withholds peanut butter and bread from our clubhouse because he thinks it’ll help him win. We call him Captain Try-Hard, and he always seems anxious to try even harder. We are all pretty sure his team hates him, too; we hear stories that half his guys want to play for us next year, that he is always criticizing Matt Chavez over tiny things and that Chavez hates him, that he’s almost been fired, that he’s lost the clubhouse. He bugs us all. I can’t wait to hear this speech.

  But instead of addressing the team, Kavanaugh takes a seat behind home plate and cheers San Rafael’s rookies through some truly brutal karaoke. Jake Taylor, who’s 6-foot-5, built like Jose Canseco, and tearing through our league in his first week of play, sings every range-stretching movement of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” then dances and struts through a voice-cracking performance of the Four Seasons’ “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” They’re having so much fun. They’re also winning—after losing a late-July series to us, the Pacifics go 22-5 in the next month, while every other team in the league has a losing record. As we’ve struggled with the loss of so many of our stars, picking up spare parts based on who would pay for their own flights, the Pacifics’ front office has been building a powerhouse. Not only have the Pacifics done a better job of retaining their talent—or, depending on your perspective, a suspiciously poor job of promoting it—but they’ve also beaten us at our own game, aggressively upgrading at weak positions by working their deep connections and willingness to spend, while we either dragged our feet or found that spreadsheet players were unwilling or unprepared to travel cross country with weeks left in the season. As our lack of contacts has come back to bite us in the second half, the Pacifics have added: