22
Slice of Life
COLUMBUS
There is one player currently employed by a Major League Baseball team—in this case the Cleveland Indians—who has a degree in economics from Harvard. That would be Frank Joseph Herrmann, Harvard class of 2006, Columbus Clippers bullpen 2012.
“If I had a dollar for every time I hear, ‘Hey, you should know the answer to that question, you went to Harvard,’ I could probably retire,” Herrmann said one night with a smile. “When you’re the only one of anything, especially in a clubhouse, people are bound to notice.”
Herrmann doesn’t mind being the only Harvard grad around. He made it to the big leagues for the first time, in Cleveland, in 2010. That made him the fifteenth Harvard man to pitch in the majors, but the first since Jeff Musselman had pitched for the Mets in 1990.
“When I was coming out of high school, I thought I had a chance to play in the majors someday,” he said. “But when the chance came to go to Harvard, there was no way I could say no. I mean, how do you pass up a chance like that?”
Actually, athletes who have pro ambitions often pass up that chance. In 1995, Frank Sullivan, the basketball coach at Harvard, thought he was about to pull off a recruiting coup when Wally Szczerbiak told him he was going to come to Harvard that fall. Szczerbiak was from Long Island and had somehow slipped under the radar of the big-time college programs. Late that spring, Miami of Ohio, hardly a powerhouse but still a more highly regarded basketball school than Harvard, offered Szczerbiak a scholarship. He accepted and went on to be the No. 6 pick in the NBA draft and play ten years in the NBA.
“I still think about what might have been if Wally had come,” Sullivan has often said. “Then again, the decision worked out pretty well for him.”
Herrmann was also recruited by some of the big-name jock schools. He was a three-sport athlete in high school, perhaps as good a prospect in football as he was in baseball, and a thousand-point scorer in basketball. But he had made up his mind to apply early decision to Harvard after baseball coach Joe Walsh invited him to campus for a visit. Once he got in, there wasn’t any doubt about where he was going to go to college.
“I don’t think my parents would have ever forgiven me if I didn’t go,” he said. “Maybe in the next life, but not in this one.”
Herrmann pitched and played the outfield as a freshman. That summer he played for a team owned by former Montreal Expos and Boston Red Sox general manager Dan Duquette in the New England Collegiate Baseball League.
“I think Dan saw something he liked in me,” Herrmann said. “I remember he told me that I had some qualities that could help a major-league team. That was a nice boost for my confidence because I knew that he knew what a big-league ballplayer looked like.”
As a sophomore Herrmann became a full-time pitcher. By the time he was a junior, he was attracting some attention from major-league clubs but had no intention of entering the draft or even thinking about turning pro until after he had graduated. In fact, he had an internship on Wall Street that summer, which made sense for someone majoring in economics. He didn’t especially like the job, and when he got a call from a friend who said he could spend the last six weeks of the summer in Hawaii playing in a new collegiate summer league, he quit and decided to go pitch.
While he was there, Don Lyle, the Cleveland Indians’ Northern California scout, saw him pitch and recommended to the Indians that they try to sign him. “He said I had life in my arm and they liked my potential,” Herrmann said. “They offered me $30,000 and one semester’s tuition.”
At that point, Herrmann was two semesters from graduation. Hearing what was going on, Duquette called Indians general manager Mark Shapiro and asked him to excuse Herrmann from pitching in the fall for two years so he could get his Harvard degree. When Shapiro agreed, Herrmann decided to sign. Even with that proviso, his parents weren’t thrilled.
“It was a leap of faith—in myself, I guess—on my part,” he said. “I figured I’d be getting a year’s head start and I could still get my degree. My parents were adamantly against the idea, but they said it was my decision to make.”
In fact, when he and his parents went to a minor-league game that summer in Vermont, Frank Herrmann turned to his son as they left the ballpark and said, “You’re giving up Harvard for this?”
He was. He kept his word to go back to school and even wrote a column for the Harvard Crimson while he was back on campus about his experiences pitching in the minor leagues. His rise through the minors was steady, and after he had pitched to an ERA of 0.31 at Columbus during the first two months of the 2010 season, he got the call to join the Indians in Cleveland. He made his debut in early June, facing four batters and getting them all out.
Nothing to it.
Except that facing big-league hitters wasn’t the same as facing Triple-A hitters, and Herrmann figured out why pretty quickly. “What you find out is that there are no easy outs in the major leagues. The worst hitter in a lineup is usually a guy who has hit Triple-A pitching very well or he wouldn’t be there. And the best hitters in a lineup are guys who crush Triple-A pitching. In Triple-A there are times—not all the time, but some of the time—when you can get through an inning without throwing very many good pitches. That’s never true in the majors. Never.”
Herrmann knew when he arrived at spring training in Arizona in 2012 that he would be fighting for one of the last bullpen spots on the Indians’ roster. He didn’t get off to a good start when he gave up four runs to the Reds in an inning of work the first week in March. He pitched better after that, but the die seemed cast. On April 2, three days before the Indians opened the season, he was sent back to Columbus.
“Disappointing to say the least,” he said. “It’s definitely tougher coming back down because you know what you’ve lost—tangibly and intangibly. The first time I made it up to Triple-A, I was making $2,000 a month, and that was completely okay by me. I’ve had two years in the majors now. Even at the minimum [$482,000 in 2012] that’s a far cry from what you make down here. You get spoiled, used to the idea of being able to do things and buy things without worrying about money because you have money.
“It isn’t as if I’m broke. My wife [Johanna] has a very good job [in corporate communications for Coca-Cola] and we’ve done well while I was in the majors. But it is different.
“We just got back from a twelve-day road trip to Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. The last couple of days of that trip I was dragging. Those days this was a job. I think 80 percent of the time this is fun. I like doing my work, I like getting a chance to pitch, and I still believe I’m good enough to be back in the majors.”
He smiled. “Of course as the days dwindle and the trade deadline gets close, you see that window closing. The thing you have to understand is that for every guy at every level of the minors, the stakes every day are very high. But I think they might be highest at Triple-A because you know how close you are. If you’ve been up, you know you have it in you to get back. And yet you look around and know there are twenty-four guys on your team thinking the same thing and twenty-five guys in the other dugout also thinking the same thing.
“The day I look around and say, ‘What am I doing here?’ is the day I walk away. I’ve never had that thought. I know I want a second career out of baseball, and having a Harvard degree helps me think there’s a soft landing for me out there when I’m done. A lot of guys don’t have that. For them, it’s baseball or bust.”
He looked out at the rain pelting down on Huntington Park in downtown Columbus. Two nights earlier, the Clippers and the Mud Hens had been rained out, and they had played a doubleheader the night before.
“Last thing we need is to have to play two again tomorrow,” he said, shaking his head. “The only thing worse would be to sit around for three hours and then have to play two anyway. Down here, they don’t like to call off games. They want the gate.”
The way rainouts are handled in Triple-A is very different fro
m in the majors. When a game is rained out in the majors, it is rescheduled either for an off day or as part of a day-night (separate admissions) doubleheader. A rainout still costs a team money because the walk-up crowd for a rescheduled game is almost always very small, but season-ticket holders have to pay for the game whether they show up or not.
In the minors, because there are so few days off during the season, it is almost impossible to schedule a makeup game on an off day. What’s more, since teams travel by bus or on commercial airplanes, it is much more difficult to get to and from a city for one day to play a makeup game the way major-league teams—which fly charter—often do.
There is also a rule that allows for only one separate-admission doubleheader in each city each season. That is also due to the lack of off days: the thinking is you get games in as soon as you possibly can. The only break the minor leaguers catch is that the games in a one-admission doubleheader are reduced to seven innings.
Herrmann wasn’t really thinking about any of that as he watched it rain. Manager Mike Sarbaugh had moved him into the role of closer recently, and he had pitched well three straight times since taking over the ninth inning for the Clippers.
“I like it,” he said. “I like the challenge. I like the idea that no one’s behind me, that the game is mine to try to finish. And, if it gets someone’s attention, whether it’s the Indians or someone else, all the better.”
Herrmann did get the Indians’ attention. On August 7 he was called back up to Cleveland to try to help a struggling bullpen. Seventeen days later, he was back in Columbus. Nine days after that, he made it back to Cleveland for the rest of the season.
Escalator up, escalator down. Even with a Harvard degree, nothing in baseball is guaranteed.
Herrmann’s manager, Mike Sarbaugh, had never had to worry much about the escalator when he was a player. “Once I got to Double-A, I began to notice there were a lot of guys who had more talent than I did,” he said. “The problem was I had gotten hooked on the game by then.”
If Ryne Sandberg in Lehigh Valley ran the International League’s tightest clubhouse, Sarbaugh probably ran the loosest. A few feet from the door of his office, in the open area where players often sat to eat before and after games, there was a Ping-Pong table. At almost any hour of the day, there was a game going on because the team ran a never-ending Ping-Pong tournament during the season. Players came and went, and the Ping-Pong tournament continued, much like Nathan Detroit’s longest-running floating craps game in the musical Guys and Dolls.
This was proof, if nothing else, that there was more than one way to run a successful minor-league team. Sandberg, the Hall of Famer, had been a winner wherever he managed and was generally considered the most likely of the fourteen International League managers to run a big-league club someday soon.
Just behind him on that list was Columbus’s Sarbaugh, whose career had peaked in 1994, his final season as a player, when he made it to Triple-A Charlotte for four games and five at-bats. He had gotten one hit and retired the following spring when he was offered a coaching job at Class A Kinston in the Carolina League by the Indians.
“Baseball got me into college [Lamar University] because I was a decent high school shortstop,” he said. “I was figuring I’d go to a DIII school and play baseball and soccer, but a college friend of my dad’s, Ron Rizzi, who was a Pirates scout, knew Jim Gilligan, the coach at Lamar, and recommended me. I signed there without ever having seen the school.
“Even so, I never figured I would stay in the game after I graduated. Both my parents were teachers, and I figured I’d be a teacher and a high school coach. That’s why I majored in kinesiology. It was something I figured I’d use as a teacher and as a coach. The only sport I really dreamed about playing professionally was basketball. I thought I’d play in the NBA. By high school I knew that wasn’t going to happen.”
Sarbaugh was crushed when no one drafted him coming out of college. By then he was hoping at least to get a shot to play professionally. “I went home and was trying to decide what to do next,” he said. “Get a job? Go to grad school? Sulk?”
While he was weighing his options, he got a phone call from Walter Yauss, a Brewers scout who had seen him play in college. The Brewers were short an infielder on their Helena, Montana, rookie-league team. Yauss asked Sarbaugh if he would be interested in signing with the Brewers and going to Helena.
“I jumped at it,” Sarbaugh said, laughing at the memory. “My bonus was a plane ticket to Helena. My salary was $850 a month.”
Sarbaugh worked his way up to Double-A over the next few years but understood he had hit his ceiling when he got there. That’s why when he was offered the coaching job he took it.
“I knew I was on shaky ground as a player,” he said. “I was twenty-eight and, at best, a Double-A talent. It’s funny because when I signed with the Brewers out of college, I figured I’d do it a year and then go teach. When I took the coaching job, I figured I’d do it a year and then go teach. Now I’m twenty-three years out of college and I’m still here.”
But he does teach. He met Nicole Paul on a blind date not long after he had become a coach, and they were married in 1998. They settled in Shillington, Pennsylvania—not far from where Mike grew up in Lancaster. Every off-season since, Mike has gone home to teach. He has a full-time job at a middle school and also subs at the high school level.
“It just seemed like a natural thing for me to do,” he said. “A teacher’s lounge isn’t unlike a baseball clubhouse. There’s a lot going on in there, and you have to hope that personalities will mesh well.”
Sarbaugh got his first chance to manage in 2004, in the rookie-level New York–Penn League running the Mahoning Valley Scrappers. They won the league title. Two years later, promoted to single-A Kinston—where he had previously been on championship teams as a player and as a coach—he won the Carolina League title as a manager. In 2009, the Indians moved him up to Columbus, and the Clippers had won both the Governors’ Cup and the Triple-A national championship game in 2010 and 2011.
It wasn’t so much the winning that had put Sarbaugh into conversations as a future major-league manager as the way he handled his players. Even though he had turned forty-five before the start of the 2012 season, he looked as if he could still be playing. His players liked the fact that he was always straight up with them but didn’t feel the need to micromanage them.
“The hardest part, day in and day out, is knowing you’ve got twenty-five guys in the room who all think they should be in the majors,” he said. “They should feel that way—whether it’s true or not. When a guy gets sent down or doesn’t make the team out of spring training, I always sit down and say to him, ‘What do you think you need to work on to get up there?’ I let him tell me. Usually, they know exactly what it is. And then I say, ‘Okay, let’s see if we can work on that and get you up there.’ Are they all going up? Of course not. But my job is to help them make the best of things, regardless of what direction they’re heading in.”
At that moment the Clippers were headed in the right direction. After struggling for much of the season, they had won eight straight games and, at 57-50, had become a factor in the wild card race. Indianapolis still led the West Division by nine games at 66-41, but the Clips were only two games back of Pawtucket for the wild card spot.
“Winning is a lot more fun than losing—that’s obvious,” Sarbaugh said. “But it still isn’t the primary job. Managing games comes second. Managing people comes first.”
Sarbaugh sat back in his chair just as the phone rang. The rain, he was told, should slacken enough to allow the game to start on time.
“That will make everyone very happy,” Sarbaugh said. “The less these guys sit around and think about things right now, the better.”
The trading deadline was five days away. Which meant that August 1—the day Triple-A managers dread most—wasn’t far behind.
23
From Montoyo to Longoria
HOT
SUMMER NIGHTS IN DURHAM
Charlie Montoyo sat in a chair next to the desk in his office, having given up his usual pregame spot behind his desk to his nine-year-old son, Tyson, who was engrossed in a computer game his father had no chance of understanding.
For Montoyo, the best part of June and July is that his family flies east to join him in Durham. On a typical day, when the team is in town, Tyson goes to the ballpark a few hours before game time with his dad. Samantha and four-year-old Alexander usually come later.
Most Triple-A managers join the major-league club in September once their season is over, helping out around the ballpark since there are extra players to work with when the rosters expand. It is considered a perk—a chance to enjoy big-league life for a few weeks after a season of long bus rides and motels.
Montoyo is an exception. As soon as his season ends, he flies back to Arizona to rejoin his family—which has to head home in mid-August so the boys can start school. In spite of his heart issues, Alexander is now going to school. Montoyo doesn’t want to be away from his boys for one minute longer than he needs to be, and the Rays understand.
The 2012 season had been—from a baseball perspective—Montoyo’s most difficult. The Bulls had opened the season at home and gone 5-2 before going on one of those Bataan Death March road trips that International League teams face a couple of times every season. They had gone from Gwinnett to Charlotte to Pawtucket and then to Norfolk. That meant a six-hour bus trip to Gwinnett, a relatively easy three and a half hours to Charlotte, a 4:00 a.m. wake-up to fly to Pawtucket, and then eleven more hours on a bus to get to Norfolk to play the next night. They had lost thirteen of fourteen on that trip and then tacked on three more losses when they finally got home, meaning they had lost thirteen in a row and sixteen of seventeen. That left the Bulls at 6-18, and in a hole from which they would never completely climb out.
A couple of times in early July they had gotten to within four games of .500 before sliding back—often on nights when Montoyo had to hold pitchers out of games or use backup catcher Craig Albernaz to mop up games on the mound. The Rays had placed nine important players on the disabled list at one time or another during the season, which meant they were constantly pillaging Montoyo’s roster for replacement players. That, plus their never-ending search for bullpen help, meant that Montoyo found himself looking at a different group of players on an almost nightly basis. By the end of July the team had been involved in 112 transactions—players going up to the majors or coming back to Triple-A; others going down to Double-A or coming up to Triple-A; a few being released; a few more going on or off the DL. There had also been a fifty-game suspension for drug use involving Tim Beckham, who had been the No. 1 pick in the entire draft in 2008 but was now struggling to get his life together while playing in Durham.
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Page 22