Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (40 page)

Maine had started slowly but had pitched better as the season wore on. “I am getting better,” he said. “I think I know what it takes to pitch in the majors, and, being honest, I’m probably not there yet.” He smiled. “Not that I’d tell them that if they called me up.”

His ERA at the All-Star break was over 7.00. By mid-August the ERA was under 5.00, and he was giving up less than a hit per inning—usually a good sign for a pitcher. “I’d like to put myself in a position where I can be someplace next spring with a legitimate
chance to make someone’s rotation,” he said. “I don’t think that’s out of the question at this point.

“If nothing else, I’m proof of how fast things can change. In ’06, I’m pitching game six of the NLCS. Five years later, I’m playing coed softball. And now, a year after that, I honestly believe I can pitch in the big leagues again.”

He was sitting on an equipment chest outside the visiting clubhouse in Lehigh Valley. There simply wasn’t enough room inside to sit and talk comfortably, so he had walked outside and found the equipment chest to sit on.

He stood up and looked at his cell phone for the time. “I’ve got to go,” he said apologetically. “I’ve got the bucket today.”

Each day during batting practice one starting pitcher who is not throwing a bullpen session is assigned to gather up the baseballs that have ended up in the infield and outfield and return them to the mound for the batting practice pitcher to reuse. And so John Maine, who had stood on the mound at Shea Stadium in October 2006 with fifty thousand fans hanging on every pitch as he tried to get the Mets to within one game of the World Series, headed down the tunnel at Coca-Cola Field in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to find the bucket.

The next night he pitched seven shutout innings, allowing three hits, striking out five, and walking one. He had not pitched in the major leagues since 2010. He walked off the mound that night believing he would pitch there again.

Chris Schwinden’s hopes were not all that different from John Maine’s. He hadn’t pitched in any coed softball leagues, but he had spent the month of June wandering the minor leagues for (almost) forty days and forty nights.

And then, finally, he had returned to Buffalo. Which is where he found happiness once again—although not without some scar tissue picked up along the way. The jokes about all his SkyMiles were fine—even welcome after his thirty-five-day odyssey through four organizations.

But he couldn’t help but doubt himself at least a little bit after being waived out of four organizations—even if one had taken him back. “I had a lot of downtime each time I was waived,” he said. “What happened to me made it kind of tough to like this business. And it was certainly a reminder that this is a business, if I didn’t know it already.

“I mean, to some extent, it’s almost as if teams
do
see you as agate—just a name being moved around a board somewhere. I wondered a few times whether this was what I was supposed to be doing. Then I’d say to myself, ‘Well, teams keep picking you up, so you can’t be all
that
bad.’

“The negative can overpower you. I actually wondered on a few occasions, ‘Who did I piss off? Why has this been happening? Was it somehow planned?’ There were so many different scenarios it was hard to grasp. All I knew was I felt awful.”

Being back in Buffalo was like being given a new lease on life—even if Schwinden was somewhat sobered by the previous five weeks. It also caused him to rethink who he was as a pitcher.

“You can’t spend your life with one foot in Triple-A and one foot in the big leagues,” he said. “That’s where I think I had gotten to. I was good enough to be called up when an extra arm was needed, but I wasn’t
really
good enough to pitch in the majors. I needed to get better. What I was producing just wasn’t good enough.”

He went to work with Bisons pitching coach Mark Brewer to see if he could develop another pitch—other than his fastball—to get batters out with on a consistent basis. They spent a lot of time working on his changeup, specifically changing his release point.

“I started to release it just a tad later than I had been,” he said. “I think it’s given the pitch some later movement than it used to have, made it a little tougher on the batters. All of a sudden, once I got comfortable with it, I’ve been able to strike batters out with it. That means I can mix my pitches up more and things have really clicked for me.”

Once he settled back into the rotation, Schwinden began to pitch well on a regular basis—so well that some thought he might get another call to New York before the end of the season.

“I doubt it,” he said, sitting in the dugout one afternoon. “I’m
pitching better, but they’ve got some young guys throwing very well who I know they want to take a look at this season. I get that. The key for me now is to keep pitching well and be in a position where I can go to spring training next year and show them I’ve got something I didn’t have in the past. That’s what I’m going to need to be a major-league pitcher.”

He smiled. “It’s nice to be back to the point where I can think that way. In June, I wasn’t sure I could still be a minor-league pitcher.

“I’m still not old for baseball [he would turn twenty-six in September], but I’m not young either. I know the Mets have younger guys than me who they are counting on for the future. I just have to keep working to get better if I want to be in their plans.

“The minor leagues are a weird place to be. The guys in your clubhouse are your best friends. You come to depend on them. But the other pitchers, even though you work together and you support one another every day, are your competition. You had better be gunning for them … because they’re going to be gunning for you. Not in your face, but you better be aware of it anyway.”

He sighed. “This is a hard life, it’s simple as that. But there’s a reason people tell you that if you don’t like it, the only thing to do is get better. It’s the truth.”

Every minor-league baseball season is filled with promotions, ranging from monkeys riding collie dogs to George Jetson Night to firefighters rappelling into the outfield carrying that night’s game ball. Not to mention Whack an Intern.

But the most unusual pregame or in-game ceremony of the 2012 season had to be the one that took place in Allentown on June 15.

That was the night the IronPigs honored the starting center fielder—for the Durham Bulls.

“I told him he had to be the only player in minor-league history who was honored while playing on the road,” Durham manager Charlie Montoyo said. “Usually, that kind of thing only happens to guys who are going to the Hall of Fame.”

Rich Thompson isn’t going to the Hall of Fame—unless they create one for guys who never give up. He first got to the major leagues in 2004, making the Kansas City Royals out of spring training as a defensive replacement and pinch runner. He was up for three weeks before being sent back to the minors, and he got one at-bat while in the majors. He grounded into a double play.

“It was a cold day in Cleveland, and I figured the first pitch was probably going to be as good as any I would see,” he said. “I actually hit the ball pretty hard, but I hit it in the direction of Omar Vizquel,
which wasn’t a very good idea.” Given that Vizquel won eleven Gold Gloves playing shortstop, that analysis was no doubt accurate.

Eight years later, that was still Thompson’s only major-league at-bat. That was one more at-bat than Moonlight Graham had gotten during his major-league career that had been made famous by the movie
Field of Dreams
.

Graham wasn’t the only major leaguer to play one game without an at-bat. Since 1901, there have been thirty-seven players like him—although he was the only one ever played by Burt Lancaster in a movie. Thompson was one of 176 non-pitchers to have exactly one plate appearance but was the only player in the group whose one time at the plate had resulted in a double play.

“Not exactly the legacy you’d want,” he said with a smile. “But I would rather have ended my career with that one at-bat than without ever having been there.”

That was what Thompson told himself and anyone who asked as he wandered from one baseball organization to another in search of a home. Like every kid who dreamed of playing baseball for a living, he never envisioned eleven different minor-league stops and fourteen seasons riding buses from one small town to another and then one midsize town to another.

“When I played Little League, I just figured all of us would be in the major leagues someday,” he said, laughing at the memory. “Then, when I tried out for my JV team as a freshman in high school, I got cut. That was a clue, I guess. Two of my friends also got cut, and one of their dads called and got us on another team so we could keep playing.”

It was speed that got Thompson into big-time baseball, and it is speed, even now at the age of thirty-four, that has kept him in the game. He went to baseball camps at both Princeton and James Madison, and it was his time in the sixty-yard dash more than anything that caught the attention of the coaches. He chose JMU because it had a better baseball program. “If I’d been going to college for academics, I’d have gone to Princeton,” he said. “But I wasn’t.”

He majored in finance at JMU and was a very good college
player. It was while playing in the Cape Cod League in the summer of 1999 that he attracted the attention of pro scouts. A year later, the Toronto Blue Jays drafted him in the sixth round, and he began the climb through the minors that most players make in order to get to the majors.

He reached Triple-A for the second time in 2003 and was traded at mid-season from the Jays to the Pirates, which meant he was sent from Syracuse to Nashville. That winter the San Diego Padres selected him in the Rule 5 Draft and then traded him to Kansas City. A player taken in the Rule 5 Draft is, in effect, being given a major-league tryout. If he is not on the big-league roster of his new team during the next season, he must be sent back to the organization from which he was drafted.

The Royals wanted Thompson for a very specific reason: they had two players on their roster, Juan Gonzalez and Matt Stairs, who couldn’t run at all and were liabilities defensively.

Thompson’s job was to pinch-run for one late in a close game or, if both were in the lineup, meaning one had to play the field, take over defensively in the later innings if the Royals had a lead.

That’s what he did during the first month of the 2004 season, getting his one at-bat in a game in which the Royals were leading Cleveland, 15–5. The Indians had completely thrown in the towel on the game, and backup catcher Tim Laker was pitching, playing the role that Craig Albernaz was sometimes asked to play by Charlie Montoyo in Durham. That was the at-bat that led to Thompson’s hitting into a double play. So, when the Royals sent Thompson back to the Pirates—and on to Nashville—at the end of the month, he still hadn’t faced a true major-league pitcher in a major-league game.

Thompson wandered the next four years. His problem was simple: he didn’t hit with power, and his batting average, always solid at the minor-league level, was never quite good enough to allow him to be a big-league leadoff hitter on a regular basis.

At six feet two and a lean 185 pounds, Thompson rarely hit home runs—he had hit thirty-four in 5,217 minor-league at-bats through the end of the 2012 season—so he almost had to be a .300 hitter to
be taken seriously by major-league scouts. His minor-league career batting average of .281 was respectable but not brilliant.

“There really is a very small margin of error between the majors and minors,” he said. “It’s the old Crash Davis speech about one extra hit a week. There’s something to that. But it’s also about opportunity. A lot of times I’ve been in organizations where someone was penciled in ahead of me because of a contract or because they were a prospect. I get it. That’s the way it is. You just have to hope at some point you get another chance.”

Thompson went from Pittsburgh to Arizona and Boston without ever getting another sniff at the majors. When the Red Sox released him in April 2008, he wondered if he might be finished. He was twenty-nine, and, like it or not, he had become a career minor leaguer. By then, he was taking online classes to become a CPA, so the notion of baseball being over saddened him but didn’t panic him.