But they all assume that their journey will go in only one direction—up. They all believe that once they walk out of a minor-league clubhouse heading for the big leagues, they aren’t coming back. Of course many do come back. Some end up on an escalator that takes them up and down to the point where they feel dizzy.
Danny Worth, who made the Detroit Tigers’ postseason roster in 2012, had been sent back down to the minor leagues eleven times in four years before making it back to Detroit late in the 2012 season.
“Every time you get sent down it hurts,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you know it’s coming or not. You can do one of two things: you can sulk and say you got screwed, or you can be honest with yourself and say, ‘I haven’t played well enough to stay up there.’ It’s really pretty simple.”
Scott Elarton had ridden the escalator, particularly near the end of his first baseball incarnation—even dropping briefly back to Double-A at one point. “You rationalize it by saying it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t been hurt,” he said. “But after a while it doesn’t matter. You look around and there are plenty of guys who have been hurt, plenty of pitchers who have had shoulder surgery more than once.
“You want to think you’re going to wake up one morning and you’re going to be twenty-five and your shoulder is going to be completely healthy. Then you wake up and realize that’s never going to be the case again. One morning I woke up and decided it was time to go home.”
That is … until that summer afternoon in Denver, standing behind a barrier with his son, when he decided it was time to try again—one more time.
And so, on this late March morning in Clearwater, Elarton stood for a long moment and looked around the packed minor-league clubhouse. Then he took a deep breath and went to find his locker. No one even looked up at him. He was another face in the crowd. He was back where nobody knows your name.
2
Podsednik and Montoyo
THE WALK-OFF HERO AND THE .400 HITTER
Scott Elarton’s story was different from most because he had decided to start over again after almost three years away from baseball. But the call into the manager’s office, and the speech (“work hard and you’ll be back”), and the long walk from the major-league clubhouse to the minor-league clubhouse, was a scene being repeated throughout March in thirty spring training camps.
For some, it was more difficult than others. When Scott Podsednik, who had been in the Phillies’ camp at the same time as Elarton, got the call into Charlie Manuel’s office, he wasn’t completely shocked. But Podsednik was so horrified by the thought of playing in Triple-A again that his first thought, as Manuel told him how well he had performed in March (he had hit .343 for the spring), was, “I don’t know if I can do this again.”
Podsednik had just turned thirty-six. He was seven years removed from a moment about which baseball players literally fantasize from the time they first pick up a bat and glove: on a cold October night in Chicago he had hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of game two of the World Series. Podsednik was a leadoff hitter, someone who specialized in getting to first base and then stealing second (he’d stolen 120 bases in the previous two seasons), and he hadn’t hit a single home run during the 2005 regular season. But he turned on a 2-1 pitch and watched it sail through the air into the right-field seats as if, in that instant, he had somehow become “the Natural.”
The term in baseball nowadays is a “walk-off home run.” It didn’t exist until Kirk Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Dennis Eckersley in game one of the 1988 World Series and Eckersley referred to it as “a walk-off,” meaning, quite simply, that when someone does what Gibson did to him in that game, there’s nothing left to do except walk off the mound into the dugout and then into the clubhouse.
Referring to a game-winning home run in a World Series game as a “walk-off” doesn’t quite capture the drama of it. The stadium explodes with noise, and the hero is mobbed at home plate in a manner he has never experienced before—regardless of how long he has played the game.
“I’m a much better hitter when I don’t try to hit for power, because that’s not what I do,” Podsednik said on a warm March morning just before the Phillies’ exhibition season was to begin. He had worked out for an extra hour following the team’s morning workout. “I wasn’t trying to hit a home run when I went up there. But I managed to turn on the ball and it just took off. When I realized it was going out, I had to pinch myself for a minute to be absolutely sure I was awake.
“It’s almost hard to come down from that kind of thing. After we ended up winning that Series [in a four-game sweep], it seemed as if we were back in spring training talking about trying to do it again about an hour later. It just happened so fast.”
Everything happens fast at the elite levels of sports. If you get hurt and don’t produce, having been a hero doesn’t mean much.
Podsednik’s road to that moment in 2005 hadn’t been an easy one. He had dealt with injuries for what felt like his entire career and had played most of eight and a half seasons in the minor leagues before finally making it to the majors on a full-time basis in 2003, at the age of twenty-seven.
“There had been times when the thought that ‘this just wasn’t meant to be for me’ had crossed my mind,” he said. “For a lot of years, every light at the end of every tunnel was a train.”
Following his World Series walk-off, Podsednik played very well again in 2006, but the injury bug bit him again in 2007. He played in only sixty-two games and hit just .243 in those games. Rather than go to arbitration with him for a third time after paying him $2.9 million that season, the White Sox released him.
Like so many players who are past their thirtieth birthday and have had good moments and bad, Podsednik became a baseball drifter. He had a good year in Kansas City in 2010, but injuries again sent him back to the minors in 2011. That was why he was in the Phillies’ camp on a minor-league contract a year later hoping to prove himself valuable enough to make the major-league team.
He had come close, but that was no consolation when the difference was being in the major leagues with a minimum salary of $482,000 a year and the planes are chartered versus the minors, where the maximum salary is under $100,000 a year—and the only charters are the ones that travel on interstates.
Podsednik had two young children at home in Texas. He knew that Lehigh Valley, the Phillies’ Triple-A team, played in an almost new stadium with facilities that were as good as one could find in Triple-A. But that just didn’t seem like enough. Not when you were thirty-six. Not when you could still feel the ground shaking under you as you circled the bases after a World Series walk-off, even if almost seven years had passed since that moment.
“I just couldn’t face it again,” he said. “I thought I was good enough to help the Phillies, certainly help a major-league team. If I was going to be away from my family, I wanted it to be in the major leagues. That would make it worth doing.”
With the Phillies’ permission, he went home to his wife, Lisa, and their two boys. The team wasn’t prepared to release him, but there was an understanding that Podsednik was trying to decide whether he was willing to go back to Triple-A or just call it a career.
He stared at the phone for ten days, hoping the Phillies would call to say he’d been traded or called up. Nothing happened. He talked it over with Lisa. They both agreed that if he continued to play well, he would almost certainly get another chance. And so, on April 8, he took a deep breath, packed his bags, and got on a flight to Allentown.
When he walked into the Lehigh Valley clubhouse, he felt himself sag. He had first reported to a minor-league team in 1994 at the age of eighteen. Now he was back again. And although he was in a very nice minor-league clubhouse that was spacious and comfortable and not filled with two hundred players in an area that could comfortably fit fifty, this was still the minor leagues. He looked around the room and saw a lot of players who reminded him of him—fifteen to twenty yea
rs earlier.
“I really wasn’t sure I could do it,” he said. “I told myself I had to have a good attitude, not sulk.”
He smiled. “Sometimes in life things are easier said than done.”
For many players, spring training is the best six weeks of the year. The Florida and Arizona clubhouses feel like summer camp, especially the first few days, when players begin arriving and friendships that have been dormant for four months are renewed.
For the established veteran with a long-term contract, mid-February to the end of March is a time to slowly work yourself into baseball shape. Pitchers need a little more time—which is why they report earlier than position players; catchers report early because pitchers need someone to throw to—but even they have plenty of time to play golf or just relax in the sun.
Before exhibition games begin, most spring training days are over before noon. Once the games begin, veterans play only two or three days a week, and when they do, they’re rarely still in the game after the fifth inning.
For the veteran trying to make a team on a minor-league contract—players like Scott Elarton, Scott Podsednik, J. C. Boscan, and Brett Tomko (to name a few)—every day is tension filled. Anytime a coach walks near you in the clubhouse, you wonder if he’s coming to get you so the manager can tell you that you’re going down. For young players who know they aren’t going to make the big-league ball club, spring training is exciting, a chance to show your bosses what you’ve got.
And then there are the bosses. Most managers arrive in camp knowing whom they want on their team in April. Injuries can force changes, and a superb spring might bring about another change or two. But managers have a plan that they lay out for their coaches in February. Every day has a purpose, even though it doesn’t always appear that way.
It can be argued that no one enjoys spring training more than minor-league managers and coaches. Many have lived the big-league life, some for extended periods of time, some only briefly. Some have never been there and can only dream about what it must be like.
They all get to live The Life in the spring—especially the Triple-A staff because they work side by side with the major-league staff until the very end of spring, when players are sent down to play for them and they have to start dealing with the disappointed looks on the faces of those who won’t be starting the season in the majors.
“The first thing I say to my team, once I have a team, is, ‘I know you guys don’t want to be here,’ ” said Charlie Montoyo, who in 2012 began his sixth season as manager of the Durham Bulls, the Triple-A farm team of the Tampa Bay Rays. “I tell them if they sulk about it, they’ll probably be with me all season. But if they put it behind them and work hard, there’s a good chance they’ll be in the majors at some point soon. I can say that because, a lot of the time, it turns out to be true.”
Montoyo was forty-six and had grown up in the town of Florida in Puerto Rico, about an hour’s drive from San Juan. He was a very good hitter and infielder as a kid, good enough to draw attention from scouts, although he was never offered a contract by a major-league team.
At the age of eighteen, he had been given the chance to go to De Anza College in California to play baseball, and he had jumped at it. He spoke no English but learned the language hanging around his friends and teammates and from watching television. “Atlanta Braves baseball on TBS and Bewitched,” he said. “I liked Elizabeth Montgomery.”
He transferred to Louisiana Tech after two years and, two years later, was drafted in the sixth round of the 1987 draft by the Milwaukee Brewers. He spent most of the next ten years in the minor leagues, making it to the majors in 1993 with the Montreal Expos. He got to bat five times that September and went two for five.
“Forget Ted Williams,” he likes to say. “I’m baseball’s last .400 hitter.”
When he retired in 1996, he got a job in the Rays’ minor-league system thanks to a former teammate, Tom Foley, who had just been hired by the team to put together a minor-league staff for 1997. The major-league team wouldn’t begin play until a year later, but they were building the organization from scratch. He’d been with the Rays ever since, reaching Durham in 2007. He had won five straight division titles and one International League championship. In 2009, he had been voted Manager of the Year for the entire minor-league system at all levels.
“Which just means we’ve had a lot of good young players coming up through the system,” he said. “If I’ve done something well, I hope it’s that I’ve helped get them ready for the major leagues. That’s what they pay me to do.”
Like almost everyone in Triple-A, Montoyo had thought about the day he might manage in the major leagues. He believed he was good enough to make the jump, but it wasn’t what drove him and it certainly didn’t consume him, as it did many of his peers.
“Anyone who has managed at the Triple-A level, anyone who has worked at that level, has moments when he thinks, ‘I wonder how I would do up in the big leagues.’ Human nature. It isn’t really about the money that much”—he paused and smiled—“although you’re certainly aware of it. What it’s really about is believing you’re good enough to do it, to compete against the best at what you do.
“Players feel it when they’re playing, and when you’ve managed awhile, you feel the same way.
“But at this point in my life, what’s most important to me is that I have a job. I have the first two-year contract of my life—which is nice. I have a 401(k) and I have insurance. I can take care of my family. It isn’t that I love baseball any less now than I did when I was a kid. When I retired”—another smile—“I should say, got retired, I knew I wanted to stay in the game. I got the chance to do that, and I’m making a living doing it. That’s what I focus on.”
Montoyo, who makes about $80,000 a year working for the Rays, has good reason to focus on being able to take care of his family. He met his wife, Samantha, when he was playing in Charleston, and they have two boys: Tyson, who turned nine during the 2012 season, and Alexander, who turned five in October 2012, shortly after the season ended.
Montoyo vividly remembers his second son’s birth.
Alexander Montoyo was born on October 17, 2007. The doctors told his parents right away that he had been born with a heart defect called Ebstein’s anomaly. It is extremely rare, a defect that forms in the womb and affects the flow of blood from the right ventricle in the lower part of the heart to the right atrium in the upper part of the heart.
“In a way, we were very lucky,” Montoyo said. “The doctors told me that ten years earlier there probably would have been nothing they could do for him. Now it’s treatable.”
Treatable—but terrifying. Within hours of his birth, Alexander had been taken by helicopter to a hospital in Phoenix. He had to have open-heart surgery a month later and a second surgery when he was four months old. Doctors told the Montoyos he might need a transplant—very dicey surgery, to put it mildly, for one so young.
Alexander fought through it all after being taken to UCLA hospital, where there were specialists who worked on children with the anomaly. Montoyo spent the 2008 season commuting to both Los Angeles and Phoenix—where he and his family live during the off-season—frequently leaving his team when it had a day off to fly round-trip out west so he could spend a few hours with his son.
Alexander had a third surgery two years later and faced a fourth—one that doctors hoped would be the last—in April 2013.
“All my life, I’ve been a competitor,” Montoyo said softly, smiling. “I’ve loved to play and compete for as long as I remember. I’m like everyone else in that I’ve never liked losing. But since Alexander was born, it feels a little different.”
He took off the Bulls cap he was wearing and looked inside it. “Whenever I feel myself starting to get frustrated or angry about something during a game, or before or after a game, I take my cap off and look inside it.”
He held it out. Inside was a photograph of Tyson and Alexander, both with big smiles on their face
s. “I look at this and I know that losing a game isn’t that important. Given a choice, I’d much rather win than lose. But it isn’t important the way it used to be for me.”
The 2012 season would turn out to be the most difficult Montoyo had experienced as a manager. But when June came around and school was out in Arizona, he could look into the stands at Durham Bulls Athletic Park on most nights and find Samantha, Tyson, and Alexander sitting there watching the game.
Which meant that he didn’t need to look inside his cap to know what was truly important in his life.
3
Lindsey, Schwinden, and Lollo
THE MAYOR, THE TRAVELER, AND THE UMP
At the moment that Scott Podsednik arrived in Allentown, John Lindsey would have been thrilled to swap places with him. Lindsey was essentially the same age as Podsednik (he was ten months younger) and had been drafted out of high school by the Colorado Rockies in the thirteenth round in 1995, a year after Podsednik.
Lindsey’s dreams were like those of anyone who is ever drafted by a major-league team. “I figured I’d be in the majors in about two years,” he said, smiling. “I remember my dad telling me back then that everyone else was thinking the same thing but I was like, ‘Yeah, I know, but I’m right.’ ”
He was off by fourteen years. On September 8, 2010—more than sixteen years after his draft day—Lindsey made it to the majors. In doing so, he set a record for the longest minor-league apprenticeship that eventually led to the big leagues in baseball history.
“Not a record I was trying to set,” he said with a laugh. “By the time it happened, I had pretty much given up. It was the second-to-last day of the season and I was packing up so I’d be ready to go home right after we played the next day, when I got called into the manager’s office.”
The Albuquerque Isotopes were in Round Rock, Texas, finishing their season when manager Tim Wallach called Lindsey in to tell him he was going to the Dodgers. Lindsey still remembers Wallach’s words. “He said, ‘John, I’m honored to be the one to tell you that you’re going to the major leagues. I know you’ve waited a long time.’ ”
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Page 4