“You come to the park every day, and you give your best effort,” Montoyo said. “You have to do that for your players. Some of them are going to be September call-ups. They’re all fighting for that chance. That’s really what they’ve got left to play for now. That and making sure they have a job next year.”
That’s what John Lindsey was playing for in August. He hadn’t had a job with a major-league team at the start of 2012 and had gotten to Toledo (via Laguna, Mexico) only in June. The Mud Hens weren’t in contention either, and Lindsey was about 99 percent certain he wasn’t going to be a September call-up to the Tigers. Most of the time when an older player gets a September call-up, it is to a non-contending team that wants to reward him with a month in the majors. The Tigers were fighting for their lives in the American League Central, and their late-season needs were more about relief pitchers and defense.
Lindsey couldn’t pitch, and he wasn’t especially good playing defense. He knew his season would end in Toledo. The larger question had become where he might be in 2013.
“I think the good thing about the last couple months is that I’ve proven I can still hit and I can still hit with some power,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt the work that I did last off-season, the weight I lost, have added time to my career. I would hope that someone will want to give me a job next year.”
Lindsey had become the Mud Hens’ everyday DH, hitting cleanup more often than not. He had responded with fifteen home runs and forty-seven RBIs once he had joined the team, in only sixty-five games. If you did the math on those numbers over a full Triple-A season that meant Lindsey would hit about thirty-three home runs and drive in 105 runs. Those were numbers that would get people’s attention.
Lindsey had something else going for him, even though he would turn thirty-six in the off-season.
“If you had a clubhouse full of John Lindseys, managing would be the easiest job in the world,” said Phil Nevin, Lindsey’s manager the second half of 2012. “He’s the first guy here every day. He does exactly what you ask him to, and he’s just the kind of example you want for younger players to be around.
“That can be an issue at Triple-A. Sometimes you have older guys moping around, constantly pissed off at their lot in life. John’s just the opposite.”
Of course there were reasons for that. Lindsey had spent twenty-two days in the major leagues … and a total of eighteen years in the minors. In spite of Tony La Russa’s theory that it took about ten days for a player to develop a “major-league attitude,” he wasn’t even close to having one. He had spent so much time on the other side—the vision problems that had slowed his development, the years in independent ball, and the half season in Mexico—that he was grateful to be in Toledo.
“I’ve probably enjoyed this season as much as any in my career,” he said. “Part of it is that when spring training began, I didn’t know if I’d be playing anywhere. I knew I wanted to try to play, but I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance—especially this close to the big leagues. If I can get a contract before spring training and go to camp with a chance to show people what I can still do …” His face twisted into a smile. “Of course no one knows better than I do how much easier that is said than done.”
Even so, Lindsey knew he was back to being just an accident away. That was a long way from Laguna.
34
Slice of Life
SYRACUSE
Zach Duke knew as well as anyone in baseball the truth of “being an accident away.”
He had been burning up the International League in 2005 as a twenty-two-year-old phenom when the phone call had come from Pittsburgh. Oliver Pérez, one of the Pirates’ starting pitchers, had broken his big toe kicking over a laundry cart in the clubhouse during a post-start fit of temper. The Pirates needed someone to take his place, and they wanted the young lefty, who had a 12-3 record with a 2.32 ERA at the end of June, to be that person.
“The funny thing about my career is how quickly the highs and the lows have come,” Duke said with a laugh. “I started out as a non-prospect [drafted in the twentieth round by the Pirates in 2001] and then became a hot prospect and then, suddenly, someone they were kind of building their future around.”
He shook his head. “And then a crash to earth.”
There weren’t very many players still stuck in Triple-A in August 2012 who were not counting the days until the end of the season. Duke was a rare exception. He was happy to be on the roster of the Syracuse Chiefs and, more important, happy to feel as if he could pitch successfully again.
“When you get released, it really doesn’t matter how they phrase it or what they tell you,” he said. “The bottom line is you’ve been fired. You aren’t good enough to do your job. That’s a terrible feeling. Going home to your partner and saying, ‘I’ve been fired, I’m out of work,’ is about as low as you can get professionally.”
Duke had gone through that experience in March 2012, when the Houston Astros had released him. “The worst part of it was they were absolutely right to do what they did,” he said. “I deserved it.”
His release, on March 27, came less than three years after he had been a National League All-Star. It came two years after the Pirates had paid him $4.3 million to be an important part of their rotation.
“It was a quick climb and a long fall,” he said. “I’ll say this much: I’ve learned a lot about baseball and about myself during the fall.”
Duke had grown up in Waco, Texas, and was considered a prospect in part because he was left-handed and in part because he had almost uncanny control for a teenager. But he wasn’t a flamethrower. He was more like Tom Glavine (one of his boyhood heroes), someone who could spot his pitches with remarkable consistency. That was good enough to get him drafted but not enough to make anyone think he was destined to be an All-Star.
“It really changed when I was in Single-A ball in Hickory [North Carolina] in ’03,” he said. “I found a routine that worked for me. I wasn’t technically perfect by any means; in fact I probably threw across my body too much. But I could stand on the mound and know exactly—I mean exactly—where just about every pitch I threw was going to go. I felt like I could do it in my sleep.”
He wasn’t sleepwalking when he pitched to a 1.46 ERA in two minor-league towns in 2004. That earned him a spot in Indianapolis in 2005, a quick rise for any pitcher but remarkable for someone whose fastball rarely touched ninety.
Two important things happened in Indianapolis: he continued to pitch lights out, making the call when Pérez threw his tantrum the easiest decision the Pirates could possibly make. And he met a Butler University journalism/theater major named Kristin Gross.
“She was the on-field MC for all the various promotions,” Duke said. “I asked her out three times. She said no three times. Finally, she said yes and stood me up. I asked her what the deal was, and she said no way did she want to date a baseball player. I finally said, ‘Look, have dinner with me one time, and if we don’t have fun, I promise I’ll leave you alone.’ ”
She said yes … and she didn’t date a baseball player for that long, because she ended up marrying him. By then he was a star.
Duke pitched in Pérez’s place on July 2 and struck out nine Milwaukee Brewers but left with the game tied and ended up with a no-decision. His next five starts were not no-decisions, they were all wins—making him the second Pirates pitcher ever to start his career with a 5-0 record. His ERA for the month of July was 0.87 and included a 3–0 shutout of the Cubs when his opponent was Greg Maddux.
“It was dizzying,” Duke said. “Remember, I was two years removed from pitching in low Class A, and now I’m an important part of the Pirates’ rotation. At that point, it all seemed very easy.”
He finished that season 8-2 with an ERA of 1.81. The Pirates were a bad team—they had just completed their thirteenth straight season with a losing record. Duke and Ian Snell, another young pitcher, became their poster boys for 2006. It was a lot to handle—especial
ly on a team that still didn’t have enough players to compete seriously.
Duke didn’t pitch poorly the next few seasons, even though he had losing records. But he wasn’t as dominating as he had been as a rookie.
“Part of it was just the normal hitters-adjusting-to-a-new-pitcher thing that happens. But somewhere along the line I lost that routine I had. I was trying to copy it, copy myself basically, but I wasn’t doing it. When I struggled, like most people do, I tried to change things, and that wasn’t the right thing to do. It wasn’t as if I pitched really horribly; I just didn’t pitch as well as I had when I first came up.”
In 2009, Duke’s salary in his first year of arbitration soared to $2.2 million. Even though his final record that season was 11-16 (with another bad team), he was a workhorse—pitching 213 innings. He also made the All-Star team as the Pirates’ lone (required) representative.
“I still remember looking around that clubhouse saying, ‘What am I doing in here with these guys?’ ” he said, laughing. “I took a lot of pictures and a lot of videos just so I could prove later on that I’d actually been there.”
A year later his salary almost doubled to $4.3 million, but he didn’t pitch as well. His ERA by season’s end was 5.72, and rather than continue to pay him big money without knowing what they were getting, the Pirates traded him to Arizona during the off-season.
It was there that the injury bug began to bite him: he had broken a bone in his foot the previous season, and he rushed through his rehab to be ready for spring training in 2011 with a new team.
“I thought they were right on the verge of doing something good,” he said. “I’d been with a losing team for a long time, and I was excited about potentially being with a winner. I wanted a taste of winning. The break was between the fourth and fifth metatarsals, and I probably came back too fast … I had trouble pushing off on the foot.
“It’s not as if I throw all that hard to begin with,” he said. “Then I got hit with a line drive during spring training, and that set me back too. I had no endurance. My velocity dropped, and my ERA went up. Bad combination. I went from starting to being the second lefty out of the bullpen. I hadn’t pitched in relief my entire pro career. I wasn’t awful. But I wasn’t very good either.”
He signed a two-way minor-league/major-league contract with the Astros for 2012, thinking he might have a chance to claim a spot in their rotation. But from the moment he reported to camp, nothing went right.
“They were looking for something to make me the pitcher I had been,” he said. “Every day it seemed like a different coach was telling me to try something different. Move here, move there. Try this delivery. I really wanted to say, ‘Hey, lay off.’ But I wasn’t in a position to do that.
“When they released me, based on my performance, I had no argument with it.”
He and Kristin sat down after he got home. Maybe, Zach said, it was time to move on to the next thing. She had a better idea: Why don’t you contact Tony Beasley?
Beasley had been Duke’s manager in both Hickory at Single-A and Altoona in Double-A and had been the Pirates’ third-base coach in 2008 and 2009. Now he was managing the Washington Nationals’ Triple-A team in Syracuse. Duke sent him a text.
Within a couple of hours, the team had been in touch with his agent to offer him a minor-league contract to go play for Syracuse.
“Somebody wanted me … that was the best part of it,” Duke said. “People hadn’t exactly been lining up in the winter before I signed with the Astros, so I wondered if someone would want me after I got released. That’s the great thing about sports: it only takes one person to believe in you.”
There was a bonus to signing with the Nationals: their minor-league roving pitching instructor was Spin Williams—who had been with the Pirates when Duke was there. “Spin had seen me when I was at my best,” Duke said. “I decided I needed one set of eyes on me and that maybe I should try to go back to doing exactly what I was doing when I was at my best with the Pirates.”
Duke got in touch with Kevin Roach, the Pirates’ video coordinator, and asked if he could find some video of him dating to 2005. Roach sent it to Williams, and Duke reported to the Nationals’ extended minor-league camp in Viera, Florida.
“Spin looked at the video and so did I,” Duke said. “Then we started working in front of a mirror, literally trying to replicate what I’d been doing. Everyone pitches differently. What works for one guy doesn’t work for another. You can’t teach someone perfect technique, because there’s a human factor involved. No two guys are built the same or pitch the same.
“I went back to pitching the way I pitched best. I had to find out where to stand on the rubber again and realize it was okay to throw a little bit across my body. It came back fairly quickly once I started back down the road.”
After a few weeks, Duke was ready to report to Syracuse. He continued to work with Chiefs pitching coach Greg Booker, and Williams stopped in occasionally to check on him. The self-confidence came back.
“I needed to reconfirm in my brain that this was the best way for me to pitch,” he said. “I needed to trust what I was doing again. I’d lost trust in myself.”
He smiled. “I feel like I’ve restarted my career. I’d gotten beaten down. I wondered if this was what I should be doing. Now I feel like it is.” He paused. “Of course if it wasn’t what I should be doing, I’d have no idea what else I could do. This is what I do.”
By mid-August there was no doubt that the Chiefs’ two best pitchers were John Lannan and Zach Duke. They were close in age—Duke twenty-nine, Lannan about to turn twenty-eight—but Lannan was being paid $5 million in 2012 and had successfully started—and won—games in the majors twice that summer. Duke was guaranteed $100,000 on the minor-league side of his contract and hadn’t been in the majors all year.
Lannan knew he was going to be called up September 1—especially since the Nationals would need an extra starter when Stephen Strasburg was shut down.
Duke could only hope.
“The key, though, is that I have hope,” he said. “That’s a long way from where I was in March.”
35
Lollo
A BAD CALL
Mark Lollo had also come a long way since March. But he wasn’t convinced he had gone in the right direction.
As the International League season wound down, Lollo had gotten both good news and bad news: The good news was that he would be the crew chief for both a first-round playoff series and the Governors’ Cup finals. That was a nice honor and a pretty strong indication of what International League president Randy Mobley thought of his work.
The bad news was he hadn’t been called back to the majors. By September, all the big-league umps had taken their vacations, and only an injury might get an umpire a call-up game. If that happened, Lollo knew it would be one of the guys clearly ahead of him on the list who, by now, had considerably more major-league experience than he did.
On August 29, Lollo was in Gwinnett. Hurricane Isaac had been pounding the Southeast and the Gulf Coast, and Lollo was on the phone with Mobley discussing contingency plans if the doubleheader that had been scheduled in Gwinnett that day (to make up for a rainout the night before) could not be played.
Once they had made their plans, Mobley asked Lollo how he was doing. He was, naturally, aware of the fact that Lollo had gotten called up for only two games because he had to rework umpiring schedules whenever someone went up.
Lollo admitted he was a little bit nervous. It was still only his second year, but he wondered if his going in the wrong direction was coincidence or if it meant something. That was when Mobley offered help.
“You want me to see what I can find out?” Mobley said.
Lollo thought about it for a moment. “Sure, that would be fine,” he finally answered. “I’d appreciate it.”
Two days later he had gotten the surprise phone call from Cris Jones, his supervisor. Lollo knew that Jones had watched him work five times durin
g the season, and he told him he had comments based on those games. Nervously, Lollo told Jones he was eager to hear them.
“Not now,” Jones told him. “We [the umpiring supervisors] have meetings over the weekend, and I’ll talk to you about it more thoroughly next week.”
Lollo pressed Jones. “I’d like to know what you think now,” he said.
Jones sighed and said okay.
“To be honest with you, Mark, you’re at the bottom of the [call-up] list,” he said.
Lollo had known he wasn’t in the top ten based on assignments and had suspected he might not even be in the third group of five.
“So I’m in the bottom tier,” he said.
“No,” Jones said. “You are the bottom. You’re rated last. Eighteen out of eighteen. Based on the observations we’ve done this year, you are not where we want you to be.”
That stung. Lollo didn’t think it was right or fair. “I felt like I’d had a very good season,” he said. “Now I’m being told that, based on five games, I’m on the bottom rung.”
There was more.
The supervisors had concerns about his weight and what it might mean in the future. There was also the issue of time off: Two years earlier in the Arizona Fall League, Lollo had missed two days after the death of an uncle with whom he had been close. He had also missed two weeks in the fall of 2011 while his second child was being born.
“There are concerns about your commitment,” Jones said. “The amount of time you’ve missed throws up a red flag.”
“Commitment?” Lollo said, starting to get angry. “Because I missed some Fall League games to see my child born? Because I missed two days to go to my uncle’s funeral, you question my commitment?”
“I thought it was more than two days,” Jones said. “Maybe our records are wrong.”
Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Page 32