“If they do, it won’t be until the last possible moment,” Johnson said. “I wish they’d do it right now so we could get on the road to Gwinnett.”
Skinner made a face. “Nine hours from here, right?”
“We can make it in a little less if we’re lucky,” Johnson said. “The good news is we’ve got a great bus. Makes life a lot easier.”
He offered Skinner a seat. Managers at the major-league level rarely socialize with one another beyond the occasional conversation around the batting cage. On the minor-league level it is more relaxed. It may have to do with a feeling of shared suffering.
Skinner wanted to be certain that Johnson understood he hadn’t been trying to embarrass Johnson’s team the night before in spite of the final score. Johnson waved him off. “I get it,” he said. “I know you aren’t taking extra bases or stealing on me with that kind of lead.”
Johnson shook his head. “It’s tough, though, down here sometimes. The other night I cost one of my guys a run on his ERA when we had a big lead. Guy gets to first on a bleeder, might even have been an error, but they called it a hit. We’re up 13–1, I think, so I’m not holding the guy at first base and he takes off—steals second. Next guy hits a roller through the middle for a hit, and they get a run. I know what happened, but the big club doesn’t. I felt badly about it.”
In the minors, players and managers do worry about every individual statistic because it not only can make a difference in how the team views someone but can help or hurt a player in negotiating a contract.
A few weeks earlier, the Durham Bulls had been hosting the Rochester Red Wings in about as routine a July game as can be played at the Triple-A level. In the sixth inning, Henry Wrigley, who had started the season in Double-A Montgomery before being promoted to Durham in May, singled. Wrigley, who was about to turn twenty-six, was at Triple-A for the first time and had been making the most of his chance, hitting .343 since his call-up.
He took a long lead off first base, and pitcher Brendan Wise threw over. Wrigley took off for second, and first baseman Chris Parmelee made a bad throw that couldn’t be handled by shortstop Pedro Florimón. The ball went off his glove, and Wrigley slid in safely.
Brent Belvin, the official scorer, looked at the play live and then on a replay and decided that Wrigley would have been out if Parmelee’s throw had been accurate. So he gave Parmelee an error and charged Wrigley with a caught stealing. Both players would have been much happier if he had credited Wrigley with a stolen base, but Belvin didn’t think that was the right thing to do.
The next evening, Wrigley sat in the Bulls’ dugout complaining—half kidding, half serious—about the ruling. “I thought I was there before the throw,” he said to a group of listeners including, most importantly, Bulls PR director Zach Weber. “That extra bag [steal] could make a difference when I’m negotiating my contract next year. It could be worth a couple of thousand dollars.”
He was smiling when he said it, and everyone listening laughed at the exaggeration. But Weber had been around enough players to know it wasn’t just a casual joke. “If you want, I can ask Brent to take another look at it,” he said to Wrigley.
“Yeah, that would be good,” Wrigley said. “Because if I’m there and you have to assume a perfect throw and tag, I should get the bag.”
“That’s right, you should,” Durham radio play-by-play man Patrick Kinas said. “It’s worth checking.”
Belvin did look at the replay again later that evening. He saw the same thing he saw the night before: the throw arriving well ahead of Wrigley but off-line. He told Weber he couldn’t change the ruling. The easiest thing for an official scorer to do is to rule in favor of the player—especially someone on the home team whom he may have to deal with in the future. The good ones aren’t influenced by that.
Wrigley’s caught stealing stood. So did Parmelee’s error. The error apparently didn’t bother the Twins. They called Parmelee up to the majors the next day. Wrigley finished the season with one caught stealing and zero stolen bases. Apparently, he was right—he could have used the extra bag.
About an hour after Joel Skinner left Ron Johnson’s office, the rain in Norfolk began to slacken. By game time a crowd of 3,801—about half of what the Tides would normally draw on a Sunday evening—had found its way into the ballpark, and the rain had stopped. In all, it wasn’t an uncomfortable evening. The game-time temperature was a balmy seventy-six degrees with a comfortable breeze.
The Tides beat the Knights 5–4 in a game played in a brisk two hours and thirty-two minutes. By 9:30, they were on their bus en route to Gwinnett, meaning they would be at their hotel by about 6:30 in the morning.
The Tides were now two games over .500 and still in contention for a wild card berth in the IL playoffs. All that said, Johnson—and Skinner—would have been just as happy if the game had been banged. Skinner had a long way to travel before he slept; Johnson had much longer to travel. After what he had lived through, nine hours on a “great bus” was fine with him.
27
Maine and Schwinden
COMEBACKS
There are no favorites in Triple-A baseball. No one sits around in March picking the teams that will win the International League North, South, and West Division titles. It isn’t just that winning is not the top priority in the minor leagues; it’s that there’s no way of projecting what a roster is going to look like in August. In all likelihood, if a team plays well in April and May, some of its key players won’t be with the team by June. And, if the major-league team has injuries, a Triple-A team’s best players are going to be in the big leagues, and no one is going to bat an eye worrying about how that will affect the Triple-A club’s chances of winning.
“If you think about it, you don’t want your team to be stable,” said Wally Backman, the manager in 2012 of the Buffalo Bisons. “I want to see my guys moving up—preferably not because of injury or poor performance; but it’s a fact of baseball life that those things happen.”
Backman’s roster certainly wasn’t stable. By mid-August he’d had twenty-two players called up to the New York Mets at some point during the season. In Norfolk, Ron Johnson occasionally had trouble recognizing all his pitchers because they were shuttling back and forth to Baltimore so often. Durham’s roster seemed to change daily too, as the Rays searched for more hitting and healthy bodies with their disabled list overflowing with important players.
If there was one team in the league that would have been voted Least Likely to Succeed at the start of the season it was the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees.
This was unusual because the Yankees had traditionally signed a lot of veterans for their Triple-A team, even though they were often higher priced, for two reasons: those with more experience were most likely to be ready for the major leagues if needed, and George Steinbrenner, when he was still “The Boss,” had always wanted his minor-league teams to have good records, regardless of cost—even if no one working for him thought it was important. In fact, Steinbrenner often threw tantrums over poor spring training performances.
Hal Steinbrenner had succeeded his father as the man in charge of the Yankees even before George’s death in July 2010, and Hal was far more interested in the financial bottom line than the baseball bottom line. His father had already ceded most of the final baseball decisions to Brian Cashman by then, and Hal Steinbrenner continued to leave those decisions to Cashman. Like most baseball people, Cashman saw the minor leagues as a place to develop players for the major-league team. If, along the way, you won some games, that was fine too.
Which is why Cashman hadn’t objected to the notion of leaving the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre team homeless in 2012 while the stadium in Scranton was being renovated. Once his plan to have the team play home games in Newark fell through, he knew he was asking manager Dave Miley to do the impossible by keeping the team competitive while constantly on the road—and also meeting the many demands of the major-league team.
“I know it’s been
tough on the players,” Miley said, staring at his phone one evening as if he knew it was going to ring at any moment. “But in a way it’s made us closer than most Triple-A teams because we’re always on the road. That’s where teams tend to pull closer together—on the road.”
When the league reached its All-Star break—which was the same week as the major-league break—the Indianapolis Indians were 56-34 and had an eleven-game lead over Columbus in the West. Charlotte was 50-42 and led Norfolk by three games in the South. In the North—which had six teams as opposed to the other divisions, which had four teams apiece—Lehigh Valley was 52-39 with Pawtucket at 51-41 and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre right behind at 49-43.
“If Dave Miley’s not the Manager of the Year, there ought to be an investigation,” Pawtucket manager Arnie Beyeler said. “Being competitive is remarkable. Being in contention is unbelievable.”
Miley did have a number of veterans on the team, including Jack Cust, who had hit 25 or more home runs for three straight major-league seasons from 2007 to 2009; Russell Branyan, who had hit 194 home runs in the big-leagues; Chris Dickerson, who had spent a good deal of time with the Yankees; and Kosuke Fukudome, who had come to the Cubs as a heralded star and had been a regular in both Chicago and Cleveland before finding his way to the Yankees’ system.
The starting pitcher for the Yankees (who would change their name to RailRiders prior to the 2013 season) in the team’s last game before the All-Star break was John Maine.
Maine was, if nothing else, a familiar name to New York baseball fans—specifically New York Mets fans. Only a few years earlier, he had appeared to be a cornerstone of the Mets’ staff, only to disappear after a series of shoulder injuries and a couple of run-ins with the team’s management.
Maine was not, by any stretch, the prototype personality seen in most baseball clubhouses. Even though he had been a high school star while growing up in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he had no interest in turning pro after graduating. To him baseball was a means to pay for college, and he was delighted to get a scholarship to UNC Charlotte, where he majored in biomechanical engineering.
But he was too talented a pitcher for scouts not to notice. By his junior year he knew he was going to be drafted, and since he had completed all his course work and needed only to finish labs to get his degree, he decided to give baseball a shot when the Baltimore Orioles drafted him in the sixth round of the 2002 draft.
“I was twenty-one,” he said. “I told myself I’d give it four years at the most. If I wasn’t in the major leagues by the time I was twenty-five, I’d be done.”
He beat his deadline by two years, making it to the Orioles when he was twenty-three. But his career didn’t really take off until two years later after he had been traded by the Orioles to the Mets as a throw-in part of a deal in which the Orioles traded a once-solid reliever (Jorge Julio) for a once-solid starter (Kris Benson). The deal ended up being a steal for the Mets—because of Maine, the throw-in.
Benson, who had been the No. 1 pick in the entire draft in 1996, pitched one year in Baltimore after the trade, won eleven games with an ERA of 4.82, and then didn’t pitch for the next two years. He won two more games after that, before retiring after a series of injuries.
The key to the trade, or so the Mets thought, was Julio, who had been the Orioles’ closer at one point and had been a dominating relief pitcher at different points in his career. Maine, who had started eight games for the Orioles in 2005, was added to the deal only after word had leaked that the Mets were going to trade Benson straight up for Julio. That didn’t sound like enough for Benson, so the Mets convinced the Orioles to send Maine along too. He was ticketed for Norfolk (then the Mets’ Triple-A team) at the start of the season, a pitcher who might step in if someone in the rotation got hurt.
That was how he first got to the majors that year: Brian Bannister got hurt and couldn’t take a start in early May, and Maine was called up to take his place. He didn’t pitch very well, and he hurt the middle finger on his pitching hand in the process, which landed him on the disabled list. He went back to Norfolk after that, only to be called up again in early July because the Mets, even in the midst of their best season in years, were constantly looking for a fifth starter.
Maine pitched well enough in his return on July 3 to stick with the team. Orlando Hernández, one of the Mets’ three aging starters (the team had Tom Glavine, Pedro Martinez, and Hernández on the roster that season), was slated to start a game on July 29, but it looked as if it might be delayed by rain, so the Mets decided to give him the night off and start Maine.
Maine responded with a four-hit shutout against the Houston Astros, and he went on to pitch twenty-six straight scoreless innings. When both Hernández and Martinez were hurt just prior to the start of the playoffs, Maine ended up starting game one of the division series against the Dodgers. He gave up one run in four and one-third innings of a game the Mets won, and he also pitched games two and six of the League Championship Series against the Cardinals—beating Chris Carpenter in game six to extend the series to seven games.
“It all happened very fast,” Maine said. “I mean, halfway through the season I was pitching in Triple-A, and then I’m starting against the Cy Young Award winner [Carpenter] in game six of the LCS. I went from the guy who watched everyone else in the clubhouse get interviewed to being one of the guys everyone was interviewing.”
Maine was able to handle it. He was honest and unspoiled, someone who hadn’t been in the spotlight enough to resent it or to fall back on clichés. When the 2007 season began, he was the Mets’ No. 3 starter, and he went 4-0 in the month of April with a 1.35 ERA. That won him the National League Pitcher of the Month award. He became a fixture in a corner of the Mets’ Shea Stadium clubhouse playing chess with relief pitcher Aaron Heilman, outfielder Damion Easley, or—most often—outfielder Shawn Green.
Chess-playing baseball players are slightly less unusual than an overweight jockey, but there aren’t many of them. The 2007 Mets had four chess players in their clubhouse, which may have accounted—at least in part—for their approach to the pennant race, which, when the team ended up a game out of first place, was labeled by critics as too cerebral and lacking in emotion.
Maine certainly couldn’t be blamed for the team’s late-season collapse. On the second-to-last day of the season he pitched seven and two-thirds innings of one-hit ball against the Marlins (the only hit was a roller to third in the eighth inning) and kept the Mets tied for first place with the Phillies. It was Glavine, the future Hall of Famer, who got knocked out in the first inning the next afternoon, sealing the Mets’ fate.
Maine finished the season 15-10 with an ERA of 3.91. Since he was a year short of arbitration, the Mets signed him for only $450,000 for 2008. Maine was 10-8 in early August that year when he was put on the DL with a strained rotator cuff. It turned out he had a bone spur in his pitching shoulder, which doctors removed after the season was over. At the time the injury appeared to be just a blip, and the Mets signed him for $2.6 million the next year rather than go to arbitration.
The injury wasn’t just a blip, though. It was the start of a trend. The doctors had to do the surgery twice because the spur was so big they didn’t get all of it the first time. Even then, Maine never felt right the next season. He missed most of the second half of 2009 because of “arm fatigue,” the euphemism the Mets came up with to describe his on-again, off-again appearances on the mound.
“My velocity was down about ten miles an hour,” he said. “It hurt. I’d get a [cortisone] shot and pitch, it would wear off, I’d sit awhile, get another shot, and try to pitch again. I was miserable.”
Maine had pitched too well for the Mets simply to give up on him. Hoping he would be healthy again in 2010, they gave him another one-year contract, this one for $3.3 million. But Maine wasn’t the pitcher he had been in 2006 and 2007 or during the first four months of the 2008 season. By mid-May his ERA was over six runs a game, and as he warmed up for a start in
Washington on May 20, pitching coach Dan Warthen was convinced something was wrong with him. He asked Maine if he was okay, and Maine said he felt fine.
When Maine walked to the mound to pitch in the bottom of the first inning, he looked out to the left-field bullpen and saw long reliever Raúl Valdés warming up. “That really unnerved me,” he said. “I mean, if they didn’t think I could throw, scratch me. I thought I could pitch when I warmed up and told Dan that. I pitched to one batter [a five-pitch walk] and I look up and here comes Dan signaling to the bullpen. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the ups and downs I’ve had in baseball, that night might have been the most disappointing.”
Maine came out after pitching to that one batter. After the game Warthen said that Maine wasn’t always up-front about how his arm felt, and went so far as to say he was dishonest about how his arm felt at times. Most teams value someone who tries to play through pain. The Mets, who have a history of insisting that players are “day-to-day,” only to see them go on the disabled list for long stints, apparently didn’t want Maine to try to take the ball if he was less than 100 percent.
A month later, Maine underwent surgery on his shoulder again. His Mets career was over. He signed with the Colorado Rockies during the off-season and was sent to Colorado Springs at the start of the season.
“I was awful,” he said. “I went to spring training thinking I had a chance to get a job [with the Rockies], and really, being honest, I wasn’t good enough for Triple-A. I remember when it hit me. I had two outs one night and I gave up hits to the No. 7 and 8 hitters in the lineup. They probably should have come out and gotten me then, but they let me pitch to the No. 9 hitter. He hit a three-run home run.
“Then they came and got me. I was so angry at myself and so frustrated I just decided that was it, I was done.
“The year before, when I was trying to rehab in St. Lucie [where the Mets’ minor-league complex is located] after the surgery, it kind of hit me that the game was going along just fine without me. I began to wonder if it wasn’t time to think about finding a way to get along without the game. I was getting close to thirty, and I’d initially said I wouldn’t pitch in the minors beyond twenty-five. Well, I’m way past twenty-five … and there I am back in the minors and getting shelled. It was time to go home and decide what to do next.”
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Page 27