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

by John Feinstein

  The Brewers traded him to the White Sox during the off-season, and he found his game again in 2005. He hit .290 and made the All-Star team. The White Sox, managed by the combustible Ozzie Guillén, had one of those dream seasons when everything comes together, and eighty-eight years after the franchise had last won the World Series—a longer drought than the infamous one broken a year earlier by the Red Sox—they found themselves facing the Houston Astros, a team that had never won a Series in forty-four years of existence.

  The White Sox won game one at home, and game two went to the bottom of the ninth, tied at 6–6. With one out, Podsednik came to the plate against Astros closer Brad Lidge.

  “Needless to say, I wasn’t thinking about hitting a home run,” he said, a smile lighting up his face as if he were remembering something that had just happened. “I wanted to get on base, try to drive the ball if I could, and get in scoring position. But a single would have been fine too because I would have had a chance to steal second.”

  Down 2-1 in the count, not wanting to put himself in danger of walking someone with Podsednik’s speed, Lidge threw a belt-high fastball. Podsednik drove it—and it just kept going, rising above the right-field fence and into the seats as pandemonium engulfed the ballpark.

  “What I remember most is my teammates waiting for me at home plate and thinking, ‘Did that just happen, did that just really happen?’ How many times as a kid do you dream of hitting a home run to win a World Series game? It doesn’t happen very often to guys who hit [a lot of] home runs, so what were the chances of it happening to someone like me?” Not great, especially given that Podsednik was only the fourteenth player in World Series history to hit a game-ending home run.

  That hit broke the Astros’ spirit. The White Sox went to Houston and completed the sweep.

  “There’s a video of me running in from the outfield after the last out toward absolute mayhem in the infield,” he said. “I have this look of pure joy on my face. I look like I’m a little kid again. The feeling was just amazing.”

  Then the injuries began to crop up again. As an arbitration-eligible player he made more than $2 million in both 2006 and 2007, but the White Sox released him at the end of 2007 after he played in only sixty-two games. They weren’t going to go back to arbitration again with a thirty-one-year-old outfielder who was having trouble staying on the field. The World Series walk-off was a distant memory.

  And so his odyssey began. He spent a year in Colorado as a part-time player and re-signed with the Rockies for 2009, only to be released in spring training. He had just turned thirty-three, and he didn’t have a job. He went home and hoped the phone would ring. It did: the White Sox wanted him back.

  “I went from sitting on my couch on opening day wondering if I would play again to my best year since ’05,” he said. “That year proved to me that if I could stay healthy, I could still be a factor for someone.”

  He hit .304 in 132 games. He became a free agent at season’s end and signed with the Royals, who turned around and traded him to the Dodgers at mid-season. He hurt his foot soon after arriving in Los Angeles, was released at the end of that season, and signed with the Blue Jays for 2011. They sent him to Triple-A Las Vegas—briefly—and then released him in May. Eleven days later he signed with the Phillies and went to Lehigh Valley until another injury—plantar fasciitis in the same left foot that had troubled him in the past—ended his season after just thirty-four games.

  All of this left him with a decision to make as 2012 dawned. He was married by then, and he and his wife, Lisa, had two boys, who were three and one. The Phillies had offered him a minor-league contract with an invitation to come to big-league camp and try to make the team.

  “I was about to turn thirty-six in March,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be away from my kids. But I also didn’t want my career to end with me being hurt. I still believed I had it in me to be a productive major leaguer again. I decided to work as hard as I possibly could and see what happened in the spring.”

  What happened was that Podsednik hit .309 in thirty-one spring training games—and thought he was going to make the team. But the business of baseball intervened, which was how he found himself in Charlie Manuel’s office on that late March day hearing the “You’re still good enough to play in the major leagues but …” speech.

  “It came down to Juan Pierre or me for the last outfield spot,” Podsednik said. “The bottom line was the bottom line. Juan had a contract with a March 30 opt-out, meaning if they sent him down, he could leave right away and sign with another team. I had an opt-out too, but not until June 1. That meant they could send me down and have me available for at least two months in case someone got hurt.”

  Which meant it was Lehigh Valley or go home. Podsednik’s first instinct was to go home—which he did. It was Lisa who talked him into going back ten days later, pointing out that there were twenty-nine other teams that might pick him up and that, worst-case scenario, he could opt out of his Phillies contract on June 1.

  “As nice as the home clubhouse at Coca-Cola Field is, it was culture shock for me walking back in there,” Podsednik said. “I’d been there the year before, but that felt different, like a stopover. I didn’t think I deserved to be there based on the way I’d played in the spring.

  “The whole thing hit me hard. We get so spoiled in the big leagues. When you’ve been there for a while, it’s very hard to get up for games in the minors. We’re human. I just wasn’t in a good place. Fortunately, Ryne [Sandberg] understood. He told me to try not to be one of those guys who was described as being ‘bitterly back down in Triple-A.’ I didn’t want to be one of those guys. But it wasn’t easy.”

  By early May, Podsednik was hitting only .197. He began to wonder if it wasn’t getting to be time to go home. In his mind, June 1 remained the deadline. Maybe it was having a deadline, self-imposed or not, that kept him from playing well. Then, on May 11, Sandberg called him into his office. “You’ve been traded to Boston,” he said. “They want you to go to Pawtucket, at least for now.”

  Podsednik knew the Red Sox had lost several outfielders to injury. All of a sudden he saw a light at the end of the minor-league tunnel. “I thought this might be a chance,” he said. “I didn’t think they’d pick me up if they didn’t have something in mind.”

  Eleven days later, after reporting to Pawtucket, Podsednik found out what they had in mind. PawSox manager Arnie Beyeler called him in and told him he was to meet the Red Sox in Baltimore. A few days after he joined the Red Sox, Daniel Nava—who had been leading off for Boston—went down with an injury. Podsednik got to the ballpark the next afternoon, checked the lineup, and there he was: leading off and playing center field.

  He was back. One more time.

  8

  Slice of Life

  WALLY BACKMAN: SECOND CHANCES

  The toughest place to be in the International League in the month of April is Buffalo. Syracuse, Rochester, and Pawtucket aren’t exactly balmy, but there is nothing quite like Buffalo. That’s why in 2012 the Buffalo Bisons—the Mets’ Triple-A team—frequently offered two-for-one deals to their fans early in the season: come to one game, get tickets to another.

  Snow on opening day in Buffalo isn’t uncommon. In 2012, the temperature was a relatively mild forty-three degrees when the Bisons took the field to play the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The Yankees were baseball’s version of the Flying Dutchman in 2012—a team, like the hero of the Wagnerian opera, without a home. Only true love could free the sea captain from his curse to sail the seas forever. For the Yankees’ Triple-A farm team, it would be a little simpler: once the Yankees finished renovating the ballpark in Scranton, the team would have a home in 2013. That wasn’t going to help those on the team in 2012, though: about half of their home schedule would be played in Rochester; the rest of their “home” games would be played in the opponent’s ballpark with the Yankees batting last.

  Yankees general manager Brian Cashman had hoped t
o put the team in Newark for the season. The independent league Newark Bears played in a thirteen-year-old sixty-two-hundred-seat stadium that would have fit the Yankees’ needs just fine. It would have had the added benefit of being only a few miles from Yankee Stadium when players went up or were sent down.

  That, however, was the rub. Because the ballpark was less than seventy-five miles from Citi Field—the Mets’ home ballpark—the Mets invoked their territorial rights and refused to allow the Yankees to put the team there. The number of fans who might have passed on buying a ticket to a Mets game to go see Scranton/Wilkes-Barre play in Newark could probably be counted on both hands. But the Mets, who had serious attendance issues and even more serious financial woes, weren’t taking any chances.

  “I’m not angry,” Cashman insisted during spring training. Then he smiled. “But payback can be a bitch.”

  Cashman’s Triple-A players would never have the chance for payback. Like the legendary Flying Dutchman, they were doomed to wander the International League throughout 2012.

  Unfettered by the weather—or perhaps encouraged by the fact that there was no snow—10,495 showed up to celebrate opening day for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Coca-Cola Field. The ballpark, opened in 1988, seats 18,025, making it one of the largest minor-league stadiums ever built. It is not to be confused with Coca-Cola Park in Allentown, which was built twenty years later. Seven of the fourteen ballparks in the International League had corporate names. Naming rights have become a major source of revenue for sports franchises at every level of play. Some I-League teams hung on to their stadium names because of tradition; others did so because no one had made them an offer.

  The Bisons opened their home season with a 12–3 victory. It was the home debut for Wally Backman as the team’s manager. Backman had managed seven minor-league teams in eleven years, after having been a major-league manager for exactly five days in November 2004, when the Arizona Diamondbacks had fired him before he ever put on a uniform.

  “I’ve climbed all the way up the mountain, gone all the way back to the bottom, and now I’m trying to climb back up again,” he said, sitting in his office one afternoon, an ever-present pack of cigarettes on his desk. Once it seemed that every manager at every level of baseball smoked. Now managers like Jim Leyland of the Detroit Tigers (who spent years sneaking into the runway next to the dugout to smoke) and Backman are exceptions, not the rule.

  Backman was in the third year of his return to the Mets’ organization. He had been brought back into the fold by team COO Jeff Wilpon, in part because he’d had success as a minor-league manager but also because he was a link to long-ago past glory in New York.

  Backman had hit .320 in 1986 as the team’s spark-plug second baseman, leading off against right-handed pitching as part of a very successful platoon with Tim Teufel—who was also back with the Mets, as a coach at the major-league level. In all, Backman had played fourteen big-league seasons after being the Mets’ No. 1 pick in the 1977 amateur draft.

  He had gotten into managing in 2002 and had immediate success with the Birmingham Barons, the White Sox’ Double-A team. At the end of the 2004 season, after managing that year in the Diamondbacks’ system, he was named manager of the Diamondbacks. It seemed to make perfect sense: smart, tough, spark-plug players often make good managers. Backman reminded people a little bit of Earl Weaver—except that he’d had a much better playing career than the Orioles’ Hall of Fame manager.

  But Backman never got a chance to prove how good he could be at the big-league level. On the day he was introduced by the Diamondbacks, a New York Times story revealed that Backman had dealt with legal and financial issues that the Diamondbacks apparently were not aware of when they offered him the job.

  He had filed for bankruptcy and had been arrested twice: once for DWI and once for an altercation inside his home that involved his wife and another woman. He had served one day in jail after a judge suspended the rest of a one-year sentence. Initially, the Diamondbacks stood by their hire. But five days later they announced Backman had been fired and said they had failed to do a proper background check on him and he hadn’t made them aware of his past.

  Backman bounced from the top of the mountain to the bottom in a matter of days.

  “I made mistakes and I had to learn from them,” he said, eight years removed from the non-stint in Arizona. “It was hell to go through. I paid a major price, but I always believed I was tough enough and good enough to come back from it.”

  He had to go all the way down to independent league ball for three seasons, managing the South Georgia Peanuts in the South Coast League for a year and then the Joliet JackHammers of the Northern League for a year and a half. He hit rock bottom—or rockiest bottom if there is such a thing—when he was fired midway through his second season by the JackHammers, who, for all intents and purposes, were out of money and about to go bankrupt.

  “I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do next,” he said. “Part of me just wanted to go home [to Oregon] and stay there with my family. They were the ones who were still standing next to me when the Arizona thing happened.”

  He smiled and lit a cigarette, leaned back in his chair, put his feet on his desk, and shook his head. “I spent a lot of time standing in the middle of Times Square with traffic coming at me in both directions and no one with me except my parents, my wife, and my kids standing by me. It wasn’t a good feeling.”

  In the fall of 2009, Backman was scheduled to make an appearance in New York. Many of the 1986 Mets still make a decent-to-good living off their roles on that team. While Dwight Gooden, Keith Hernandez, Darryl Strawberry, and Gary Carter were the stars, Backman is remembered just about as fondly as any of them.

  En route to the airport, Backman, almost on a whim, decided to call Jeff Wilpon, who had succeeded his father, Fred Wilpon, in running the Mets’ day-to-day operations. Even before his plane took off, he got a call back. When Backman told Wilpon he was on his way to New York, Wilpon said, “Why don’t we try to get together and talk while you’re here?”

  Jeff Wilpon had been just out of college and already working for his dad when the Mets won the World Series in 1986 and had warm memories of Backman. What’s more, with the Mets struggling, bringing people back into the organization who brought back memories of that time seemed like a good idea.

  Backman ended up being offered the job as manager of the Brooklyn Cyclones—the Mets’ short-season class A team. Technically, the job was near the bottom of the organization’s totem pole, but the Cyclones are very important to the Wilpons because of Fred Wilpon’s emotional attachment to the Dodgers.

  “Managing the Cyclones is a little different than managing your typical [low-A] rookie-league team,” Backman said. “For one thing, most of the Mets’ best young prospects get sent there, so they’re keeping a close eye. What’s more, the team is kind of the Wilpons’ baby, and since it’s right there in New York, they expect a lot—in terms of development and wins.”

  The Cyclones went 51-24 under Backman. The Mets were impressed enough that he was one of the finalists for the managing job at the big-league level after Jerry Manuel was fired at the end of that 2010 season. Terry Collins ended up getting the job, but Backman was promoted to Double-A Binghamton. A year later, when his former platoon mate Teufel was promoted from the managing job in Buffalo to the Mets’ coaching staff, Backman was moved up to Triple-A—one step from the big leagues—again.

  “My second trip back up the mountain,” he said, smiling. “I think I’m as capable as a lot of guys managing in the big leagues. But I like what I’m doing here.”

  He put out the cigarette and stood up. At fifty-two, Backman is rounder and grayer than he was as a player, his hairline beating a retreat in the wrong direction. But the gleam in his eyes hasn’t changed.

  There are a lot of jokes made about the weather in Buffalo. Backman didn’t mind the cold at all. He was a long way from the low point he had hit back in 2004.

  “
It’s baseball,” he said. “It’s what I do. It’s what I love.”

  He picked up a bat and walked out the door. It was time for batting practice.

  9

  Slice of Life

  ALL ROADS LEAD TO NORFOLK

  Once upon a time, putting together a baseball schedule for an entire season was a long process that involved hundreds—if not thousands—of pieces of crumpled paper and hours and hours of painstaking work.

  Nowadays, computers have made life much easier for schedule makers.

  Except in the International League. There, the schedule is still done by hand, and it is done by one person—the same person who has put together the schedule since 1969.

  Dave Rosenfield has run the baseball team in Norfolk since 1963. He ran it when it was a Chicago White Sox affiliate and a Philadelphia Phillies affiliate in the Carolina League; he ran it when it became the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Mets; and he runs it now as the Baltimore Orioles’ Triple-A affiliate—although he did finally turn day-to-day general managing duties over to Joe Gregory in 2011.

  Gregory was thirty-two when he got the job, which made him exactly fifty years younger than the eighty-two-year-old Rosenfield, who still holds the title of executive vice president and is in his office every day. Gregory and manager Ron Johnson still run most decisions by Rosenfield, and he is a constant presence in every corner of Harbor Park, which has been the Tides’ home since 1993.

  Rosenfield also puts together the entire league’s schedule every year, as he has done since the Tides came into the league forty-five years ago. Each season he has to figure out how to schedule 144 games for fourteen teams, making sure they can get where they need to go in time for each game, while having only eight off days during the entire season.