Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (14 page)

For almost everyone else, life is pretty miserable.

Perhaps no one was more miserable that April than the thirty-six-year-old former World Series hero Scott Podsednik, who by his own admission wasn’t doing a very good job of dealing with being back in Triple-A. There’s an old baseball saying that instructs those playing the game to “try easier.” If you grip the bat too tightly, swing it too hard, or try to throw the ball too hard, you are almost guaranteed to fail.

Podsednik knew that. His strength as a player, for as long as he could remember, had been his ability to understand what he could and could not do well. He had never tried to be a power hitter or a pull hitter or anything other than someone who knew how to get on base, play good defense, and be a smart baseball player. He had always understood that his legs—his speed—had gotten him to the major leagues, although it had never been an easy journey.

He was the classic all-around athlete as a kid growing up in West, Texas, a town of about twenty-five hundred people that is fifteen miles outside Waco. His dad, Duane, worked at a glass plant in Waco, and his mom, Amy, was a hospital administrator. Both their children, Scott and Shana—three years younger than Scott—were athletes as kids, and both were track stars in high school.

Scott was also a baseball star, alternating, as most good young players do, between pitching and playing a position, usually shortstop or the outfield. When he was a junior in high school, his dad learned
that the Kansas City Royals were holding a tryout camp in Waco and suggested that he and Scott take a drive over, if only to see how Scott stacked up against players who aspired to play at a higher level.

“The big discussion driving over was whether I should sign up as a pitcher or as a position player,” Podsednik remembered. “We finally decided I should put down position player because that was the best way to show off my speed.” He smiled. “I could run like a deer.”

In fact, he clocked the fastest time of anyone in the camp in the sixty-yard dash, and a year later the Texas Rangers made him their third-round pick in the 1994 amateur draft. That left him with another decision: sign with the Rangers or accept the scholarship he had been offered to the University of Texas, the college he had grown up dreaming about attending. In the end, he decided that turning pro was a quicker way to get to the major leagues and, if baseball didn’t pan out, his bonus money would pay for him to go to college.

“I wonder now if I missed out on something not going to college for three or four years,” he said. “I know it would have been fun. When you’re eighteen years old and you sign on to be a pro, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You just can’t imagine what life in the low minor leagues is like. The next eight and a half years weren’t a lot of fun. In fact, they were very hard.”

What made those eight and a half years hard, as much as anything, was the fact that Podsednik couldn’t stay healthy for any extended period of time. He had three knee injuries, a broken wrist, a sports hernia operation, and various hamstring pulls that kept him off the field.

“I knew nothing about taking care of my body,” he said. “And I was someone who had to do that. I wasn’t a home run hitter. I counted on my speed. If anything went wrong, it affected me. I didn’t even know how to hydrate properly. In the Gulf Coast League they play every day at one o’clock, and it’s about a hundred degrees. Didn’t even occur to me that I might be cramping because I wasn’t drinking enough fluids.

“It took me a while just to figure out what I needed to do to
try
to
be a successful baseball player. There’s more to it than just getting up to the plate and getting on base.”

In the minor leagues—especially the low minors—team trainers have about half a dozen jobs. They are travel agents, clubhouse managers, and, occasionally, Boy Scout pack leaders for players just breaking in. They are less likely to be alert to whether a player is doing the extra little things—like hydrating—that are a given in the majors, where the clubhouses are overrun at times with medical personnel.

Podsednik bounced around the Rangers’ farm system for six years before signing with the Seattle Mariners after the 2000 season as a minor-league free agent. By then he was twenty-four and still hadn’t been in the majors for one minute. He finally got a chance—briefly—in July 2001, when a slew of injuries got him a call-up to Seattle. In his first at-bat he came up with the bases loaded and tripled. Nothing to it. Except he was back in the minors a few weeks later. He was called up for a short time again the following year but was waived by the Mariners at the end of that season. He would be twenty-seven before the 2003 season started and had a total of twenty-six at-bats in nineteen games of major-league experience.

And then he got the break he needed. The Milwaukee Brewers decided it was worth the $20,000 waiver fee to acquire him. Podsednik made the team as a backup outfielder but played so well early in the season that manager Ned Yost put him into the lineup full-time in early May. Finally healthy, he blossomed. He hit .314, stole forty-three bases, scored a hundred runs, and finished second in the Rookie of the Year balloting behind Dontrelle Willis. A year later he led the National League with seventy stolen bases, but his batting average dropped to .244.

“I hit a few home runs early and forgot what it was that had made me successful the year before,” he said. “I was still effective when I got on base, but I wasn’t getting on base as much as I did the year before. I ended up with twelve home runs—most in my career. But that wasn’t my game.”

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.