Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball

by John Feinstein

  Sandberg had already been mentioned as a future Cubs manager and had been interviewed prior to the 2012 season for the St. Louis Cardinals job after Tony La Russa retired. He was in his second season at Lehigh Valley, and most in the league didn’t expect him to be around much longer. Sure enough, at the end of 2012, he was named the Philadelphia Phillies’ bench coach. With Charlie Manuel turning sixty-nine before the start of the 2013 season, most looked at Sandberg as the Phillies’ manager-in-waiting. The wait was shorter than he expected: Manuel was fired in August 2013 and Sandberg was named to take his place.

  “I really admire the fact that he’s paid his dues managing in the minors,” Beyeler said. “A lot of guys with his background think being in the minors is beneath them. They’ll either take a coaching job in the majors or just wait for the phone to ring. Ryne was willing to start at the bottom and work his way up. I think in the long run it’ll make him a better manager when he gets up there—which he will, very soon.”

  Sandberg had managed at Class A, Double-A, and Triple-A for the Cubs and had made no secret of the fact that he dreamed of managing the Cubs. But he was passed over for Mike Quade when Lou Piniella retired in 2010 and again at the end of the 2011 season, when new general manager Theo Epstein hired Dale Sveum. Some thought Epstein passed on Sandberg because he didn’t want to ask a Cubs icon to manage such a bad team. The Cubs were certainly bad in 2012—they lost 101 games under Sveum. Others thought Epstein wanted “his own guy,” and no one would ever see Sandberg as anybody’s guy but his own.

  Now that Sandberg is managing in the big leagues, his players would be well advised not to bring what Tony La Russa called the “major-league attitude” with them to the ballpark each day because it won’t go over well with the manager.

  As his players made their way onto the field for pregame stretching one afternoon in Allentown, someone asked Sandberg how he dealt with a player who was late for stretching. Sandberg looked as if he had been asked if he had ever considered trying to fly to the moon.

  “That would never happen,” he said quietly, but with steel in his voice. “My players know better.”

  Clearly, Sandberg could care less what the back of his bubble gum card says. Managing—at any level—is a lot more serious than that. In 2012, there was a sign over the door that leads from the tunnel to the IronPigs’ dugout on the third-base side of Coca-Cola Park. It said: “Play like an asshole today.”

  It is something just about everyone in Triple-A aspires to do.

  6

  Slice of Life

  SENT DOWN … CALLED UP …

  When the 2011 baseball season ended, Washington Nationals pitcher John Lannan was excited. He was also a bit apprehensive.

  “I felt like I had lived through a lot of bad times with our team,” he said. “I thought we were on the verge of something good happening. I also knew they were planning to do a lot in the off-season. I guess I didn’t understand quite how much.”

  Lannan had turned twenty-seven the day before the Nationals’ season finale. He had pitched to a record of 10-13, hardly anything to write home about, but his ERA had been 3.70 in thirty-three starts—the best numbers of his career. He was durable, he was left-handed, and he had battled back after a slump in 2010 that had resulted in being sent briefly down to Double-A—after beginning the season as Washington’s opening-day starter for the second year in a row.

  “Being sent down was a little bit of a shock to my system,” he said. “But I was pitching poorly, and I needed to work on my mechanics and try to get myself straightened out. I knew what they were trying to do, so it didn’t bother me very much. I didn’t like being there, but I understood the reasoning behind it.”

  Lannan had made it to the majors quickly after being drafted out of Siena College by the Nationals in 2005. Because the team had so little pitching, a lot of young pitchers were rushed to the majors to see what they had. Lannan was twenty-two when he got the call in the summer of 2007. He had started the season with the Nationals’ Class A team in Potomac but had moved quickly up the ladder through Double-A and Triple-A. When his ERA through six starts at Triple-A was 1.66 he found himself in Washington.

  “It happened very fast that year,” he said. “But to me it was, ‘Okay, this is the way it’s supposed to be.’ I had a lot of confidence in myself. It wasn’t as if I started the year thinking I’d be in the majors by July, but I did believe I was going to be in the majors in the near future.”

  What was hard to believe was where he found himself in his third major-league start. He had gotten a win in his second outing, and his turn came up again on August 6 in San Francisco. As luck would have it, Barry Bonds was sitting on 755 home runs—meaning he was tied with Hank Aaron for the all-time lead in home runs. Lannan didn’t really care if Bonds had taken steroids in order to catch Aaron; all he knew was he didn’t want to give up No. 756 and become a footnote in baseball history.

  Four times Bonds came to the plate that night. Once, Lannan walked him. The other three times he got him out: on a foul to third base; a double-play ground ball; and a strikeout on a 3-2 pitch in the seventh inning.

  “The last at-bat is pretty vivid in my mind,” he said, smiling. “The place was packed, and here I was a couple of weeks out of the minors. Everyone was standing and it was a 1–1 game. When I got him, I walked off the mound wondering if the whole thing was a dream. I mean, seriously, a year earlier I’d been pitching for the Savannah Sand Gnats, and now I was striking Barry Bonds out when he was trying to break the all-time home run record. Are you kidding?”

  Lannan became a regular in the Nats’ rotation for the next four years except for the brief stint in Harrisburg in 2010. He had been arbitration eligible for the first time in 2011, meaning his salary had taken a huge jump from the $458,000 he had made in 2010 to $2.75 million in 2011. He was arbitration eligible again for the 2012 season. The previous year, he had accepted the Nats’ salary offer without going to arbitration. When the team offered $5 million, Lannan and his agent countered by asking for $5.7 million. When the team refused, that meant Lannan’s case would be heard by an arbitrator who would pick one salary or the other. There was no compromise.

  Very few baseball negotiations ever actually get to an arbitration hearing because neither side wants to leave themselves in the hands of an arbitrator. More often than not, team and player will meet somewhere in the middle. There’s another reason not to go to arbitration: the hearings can get ugly.

  “The team’s job is to explain to the arbitrator why the player is asking for too much money,” Lannan said. “That means they have to say a lot of things about you that you might not want to hear. I don’t think I took it personally. I know that some guys do, and that can hurt your relationship with the team.”

  Lannan had been pleased when the Nationals made a major off-season trade to acquire another left-handed starter, Gio González, from the Oakland Athletics. That appeared to leave them with a rotation of the rising superstar Stephen Strasburg; Jordan Zimmermann, another young talent; González; Lannan; and another young lefty, Ross Detwiler.

  “When we got Gio, I was fired up,” he said. “I thought it meant we were going to have a deep rotation—young, but deep.” In fact, at twenty-seven, Lannan was the oldest of those five.

  Then, on February 2, everything changed.

  First, Lannan heard that the Nats had signed Edwin Jackson, a talented, though erratic, right-hander, to an $11 million free-agent contract. Later that day, he lost his arbitration hearing.

  “When they signed Jackson, I had a feeling my days with the team were numbered,” he said. “I knew [manager] Davey [Johnson] loved Detwiler and they hadn’t signed Jackson for that kind of money to not start. I did the math and realized I was in trouble. Even so, I went to spring training telling myself to just do my job and the rest would take care of itself. I knew I was still a good pitcher.”

  It was a completely different sort of camp for Lannan. Twice in the past he had known earl
y that he was the opening-day starter. The spring rotation had been built around making sure he would be ready to take the ball when the season began. Even a year earlier, when the Nationals had brought in veteran Liván Hernández and named him to start the opener, Lannan’s only doubt was whether he would start game two or game three.

  Now he wasn’t sure where he would start the season, much less when he would start.

  Often, he pitched exhibition games out of the bullpen, following one of the four locked-in starters—Strasburg, Zimmermann, Gonzáles, and Jackson—into games. He pitched well, though, and ten days before the team broke camp to head north, Johnson told him that he would be the team’s fifth starter. Relieved, he called his wife, and they made plans to go apartment hunting in Washington. They had always rented in-season in the past but this time had waited to look for a place until Lannan was told he was going north.

  They found a place they liked in the Foggy Bottom area of downtown Washington, about ten minutes from Nationals Park, and signed a lease just before the Nationals played their annual exhibition game in D.C. Many teams will play one game in their home park to give the stadium a run-through before opening day. On April 3, the Nats played the Boston Red Sox on a cold, sunny afternoon.

  “I was sitting in the dugout taking it easy when [shortstop] Ian Desmond came in during the third inning and said he needed a pair of sunglasses,” Lannan said. “I went up the tunnel to get him some, and I heard Davey [Johnson] coming up behind me as I got to the clubhouse.

  “He said, ‘Hey, come into my office for a minute.’ I’m not sure why he said it, but he also said, ‘Don’t worry, you aren’t getting traded.’ So I had no idea what it was about.

  “I got in there and he started talking about making tough decisions and how well Ross had been pitching. After a couple of minutes it suddenly hit me that he was sending me down. I was completely stunned. I’m not even sure I heard anything he said the last couple of minutes. When he stopped, I looked at him and said, ‘You’re sending me down? Seriously? You’re sending me down?’ I couldn’t believe it. I’m sure I vented for a little while. I was angry. Finally, I went back in the clubhouse and asked to see [general manager Mike] Rizzo.

  “I vented some more. I don’t think I said or did anything unprofessional, but I was really upset. It just caught me completely off guard. One minute I’m getting Ian a pair of sunglasses; the next minute I’m packing for Syracuse.”

  Lannan’s demotion was one of the most stunning anywhere in baseball that spring. Most players know what a call to the manager’s office means. “When the manager wants to talk to you in the spring, it’s never to tell you how well you’ve been playing,” said Pete Orr, who spent most of his first seven years on the Triple-A/majors escalator. “At best, he’s going to tell you that you’re going to be playing less than you’ve been playing. At worst, he’s going to tell you that you’re being sent down.”

  The first time Orr made a team out of spring training was in 2005, when he was with the Braves. Just before the team went north, Chipper Jones sat down with him in the clubhouse one day to tell him not to be discouraged if he got sent down.

  “It was the ‘You’re going down but you’ll be back’ speech,” Orr remembered with a laugh. “It was Chipper’s way of being a leader, letting a guy who’d had a good spring not feel too bad about going back down.”

  A few days later, Orr sat in the Braves’ spring clubhouse in Orlando and saw players being called into manager Bobby Cox’s office. Heart pounding, he waited for someone to come by his locker and say the dreaded words: “Skipper wants to see you.”

  “Nothing happened,” Orr said. “Zach Miner [one of the team’s pitchers] came out after they told him he was going down and said I’d made the club. He said his agent had heard we were trading [infielder] Nick Green to Tampa and that’s why I was going north. I still didn’t believe it.

  “Then we broke camp and went to Atlanta. I still hadn’t been told I’d made the club, and I wasn’t sure. I bought a suit just in case I did make the team so I’d be ready to travel. The day of our exhibition game up there I walked by Bobby [Cox] and he said to me, ‘Hey, Petey, how’s it going?’

  “I think I said something like, ‘Great, Skipper, thanks.’

  “He got a few feet past me, and then he stopped, turned around, and said, ‘Hey, Petey, you know you made the club, right?’ I guess it occurred to him that no one had told me. I said, ‘I did?’

  “He said, ‘Yup, way to go,’ and kept walking. Just like that I was in the big leagues.”

  One man walks up a tunnel to get sunglasses and ends up in Syracuse. Another passes his manager in a hallway and finds out he’s a big leaguer.

  “It’s a business,” Orr said. “We all know that. Some days it’s a great business to be in. Other days aren’t as great.”

  One person who wasn’t surprised when the call came to go see the manager in the spring of 2012 was Bryce Harper.

  Even if he wasn’t happy about it.

  Harper was baseball’s most recent phenom. The Washington Nationals had chosen him with the No. 1 pick in the 2010 draft, although he wasn’t yet eighteen. He had split the 2011 season between Class A Hagerstown and Double-A Harrisburg, and it was clear he was close to being ready for the majors—at least as a player.

  The question was his maturity. Harper had been ejected from a game while in junior college for drawing a line in the batter’s box to show an umpire where a pitch that had been called a strike had—in his opinion—not crossed the plate. He wore enough eye-black to be mistaken for someone playing an old-time movie Indian, and he drew a lot of attention when he blew a kiss to a pitcher in Hagerstown as he rounded the bases after hitting a home run.

  He was cocky or, more accurately, cocksure, and he tended to draw attention to himself—especially as a No. 1 draft pick—in ways that didn’t always make the Nationals happy.

  The funny thing about it all was Harper came off as anything but cocky in person. He was quiet, self-deprecating, and almost matter-of-fact about the incidents he’d been involved in. He didn’t deny them or defend them. They had just happened. He was religious, a Mormon who didn’t drink and didn’t use profanity, but he wasn’t one of those athletes who talked about his faith. It was just part of his life.

  When he was invited to the Nationals’ big-league camp in the spring of 2012, he knew he wasn’t going to make the team even if he hit .500. Part of it was that he was still only nineteen and the Nationals didn’t want to rush him. Part of it was business: If the Nationals kept him in the minors until mid-season, he wouldn’t become arbitration eligible until after the 2015 season. If he came up sooner, it would be a year earlier. The Nats had done the same thing with pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg in 2010, keeping him at Triple-A Syracuse until mid-June to push his first arbitration-eligible season back a year.

  The difference between Strasburg and Harper was that there was no doubt that Strasburg, who had gone to college for three years and was twenty-one in the spring of 2010, was ready to pitch in the big leagues when spring training ended. Harper was a question mark in March, although no one doubted he would be up by mid-season.

  Manager Davey Johnson actually believed Harper was ready for the majors. Mike Rizzo, the general manager, wanted to go more slowly. That’s the way it usually is: managers, who are judged year to year, want the most talented players on the team right away. GMs, who are given a longer rope and take a longer view, tend to be more patient.

  “I think I was a lot calmer in the spring than I had been the year before,” Harper said. “I wanted to try to make it impossible for them to send me down, but I was okay with it happening when it did. Davey told me they wanted me to play some games down there in center field because they might need me to do that when I came back up. My attitude was, ‘Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it.’

  “If I needed 250 at-bats down there, so be it. If it was 25, that was fine too.”

  The Nationals weren’t go
ing to just send Harper down to Syracuse and hope everything turned out well there. Triple-A clubhouses are filled with veterans, many in their thirties, many making $12,000 a month and hanging on for dear life. A team didn’t just let a nineteen-year-old who had signed for $17.9 million wander in there unprotected. Syracuse manager Tony Beasley assigned two veterans, Jason Michaels and Mark Teahen, both of whom had major-league experience, to “mentor” Harper—which meant keeping an eye on him.

  “It wasn’t like the kid needed to be watched or anything; he isn’t that kind of kid,” Beasley said. “But he was still learning. Michaels and Teahen are both guys who know the right way to do things and who would be a positive influence on him.”

  That didn’t mean Harper didn’t struggle to find himself in Syracuse. With the Washington Post running a daily “Harper watch” that reported on how he was doing game to game, he struggled at the plate and didn’t appear comfortable at the Triple-A level. John Lannan, who by this point had been sent down and had arrived in Syracuse not long after Harper and was dealing with his own issues, felt as if he knew exactly what was wrong with Harper.

  “He’s built for the big stage,” Lannan said. “That’s just who he is. He wasn’t going to do well playing in front of twenty people in forty-degree weather in April in Syracuse or in the snow in Buffalo. I understood what he was feeling because I was feeling some of it myself.

  “You get used to the feel of a major-league park—the big crowds, the atmosphere, the noise. Early in the season, especially up north, you feel like you can hear people when they sneeze in the stands. I know Bryce hadn’t been in the majors, but that’s what he was born to do. He wasn’t meant to be in Triple-A. He’s got too much star quality for that.”

  Rizzo came to Syracuse to check on Harper’s progress and, even though the numbers weren’t great, liked what he was seeing. And so, when two of the Nationals’ better offensive players, Ryan Zimmerman and Michael Morse, went on the disabled list, Rizzo decided Harper was the best option available to bring up. On April 27, the agate around the country said very simply, “Washington Nationals recalled outfielder Bryce Harper.”