Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (18 page)

There’s no such calm in Triple-A. No one wants to get comfortable in a Triple-A clubhouse. The air inside a Triple-A clubhouse feels different because there are different people breathing it every day. Players come and go on an almost daily basis: some get called up to the big leagues; some get traded; others get sent down to Double-A; and every once in a while players are released.

“You almost never get too close to anyone when you’re in Triple-A, for two reasons,” said pitcher Pat Misch, who began the 2012 season pitching in Lehigh Valley. “First, you don’t want to get
too comfortable at this level. Second, that guy you’re having dinner with on Monday could easily be gone on Tuesday.”

There’s another reason: Triple-A teammates are also competing with one another. When a starting pitcher goes out and pitches well, that’s good for the team. But it might not be all that good for the other starters, because he may have leapfrogged ahead of them in the organization’s pecking order.

“It doesn’t sound very nice to say, but it’s true,” said Scott Elarton. “You never root against your teammates. But the fact is, in Triple-A, they’re also your competition. Everyone has one eye on what’s going on with the big-league club—in fact, you have one eye on all thirty big-league clubs because any one of them could be scouting you when one of their guys gets hurt or isn’t doing well.

“Am I happy when someone I know and like and share space with in a clubhouse gets called up? Or traded to someone that gets him to the majors? Of course I am. Do I wish it was me? Of course I do.”

Elarton had done exactly what Charlie Manuel had told him to do after being sent down to Lehigh Valley. He had maintained a positive attitude, and he had pitched well at the start of the season. Many—if not most—International League hitters had never faced him before, and with his gangly, all-arms-and-legs delivery coming out of a six-foot-seven-inch frame, he was not easy for hitters to figure out the first time around the league.

He started the season 4-0, pitching to an ERA of 2.39 during his first seven outings. He beat the Louisville Bats on May 11, pitching six innings and giving up no runs and one hit in a 4–1 win. The losing pitcher that night was Brett Tomko, who pitched well—three runs in seven innings—but dropped to 0-4 in spite of a solid ERA of 3.55.

The Phillies’ pitching staff had been in flux all season because of injuries. Cliff Lee had gone on the DL in April. Elarton had thought he might have a shot to get called up then. Instead, the Phillies had called up Joe Savery, who had been their No. 1 pick in the 2007 draft and also had the benefit of being a lefty. Once Lee was healthy, Savery came back to Lehigh Valley. On May 16, Vance Worley, the Phillies’ No. 5 starter, went on the DL. Again, Savery got the call: he was
younger (twenty-seven), and the Phillies had a lot more invested in him. When Roy Halladay went on the DL at the end of May, the Phillies decided to stick with the pitchers they had on the roster and called up a catcher to take his spot.

Through it all, Elarton didn’t complain.

“They’re giving me a chance to pitch here,” he said. “I’d like to get the call, we all would, but if I don’t, I’m enjoying what I’m doing right now. The best thing about this season is that I’ve stayed healthy. It’s been a long, long time since I could say that about any season.”

Elarton was one of those athletes who had ridden his talent for a long time—right into the major leagues in fact. He had grown up in Lamar, a tiny town in southeastern Colorado, and had been a star in both the classroom and as an athlete all through high school. He played football, basketball, and baseball and starred in all three. The son of two schoolteachers, he was the valedictorian of his graduating class in the spring of 1994.

As a senior, he committed to go to Stanford to play baseball, which by then had clearly become his best sport. Then came the baseball draft in June: the Houston Astros used their first pick, the twenty-fifth in the draft, to take Elarton—even though he had told people he was planning to go to college.

After the draft, the Elartons did some research. It turned out that no pitcher taken in the first round who had opted to go to college had improved his draft status by doing so. The Astros offered a $750,000 bonus plus another $100,000 for college down the road. Elarton took it and headed for the buses and the back roads of the minor leagues.

He arrived in the minors when steroids had become a true “thing” in baseball. It wasn’t just stars who were using PEDs but minor leaguers, guys who believed if they could get an extra edge, it would make the difference between playing in the majors and playing in the minors.

In those days, even though Commissioner Fay Vincent had banned steroids in 1991, there was no testing. Which was a little bit like posting a speed limit on a highway and not hiring any policemen to patrol.

Elarton saw players around him who were clearly taking steroids. He could see their bodies change, particularly from one season to the next. He was never truly tempted.

“You have to remember that most guys started to use during the off-season,” he said. “They’d go home and think, ‘If I can recover more quickly when I work out, maybe the extra work will get me to the majors.’ It was all very hush-hush. It wasn’t something you sat around in the clubhouse and talked about. No one ever said, ‘Do you think so-and-so is using?’ You just
knew
. I never held it against anyone. It was one of those things where you knew they were just trying to keep their jobs, extend their careers. I guess I didn’t begrudge anybody that.

“It’s all very different now because of testing,” he said. “There’s a lot more risk in doing it, and even though there are still going to be guys who think it’s worth the risk, you just don’t see it now the way you did when I was coming up through the minors, or even my first couple of years in the majors.

“I lived in a very rural area. It’s not as if I was going to gyms in the off-season and seeing a lot of bodybuilders who had access to the stuff or knew where to get it—which is what I think happened with a lot of guys. I just never really thought about doing it.”

As it turned out, at least early in his career, he never really needed the extra help. His ability was enough.

By 1998 he had reached the major leagues. A year later he had his first shoulder surgery. In 2000, after starting the season on a minor-league rehab assignment, he went 17-7 for an Astros team that finished 72-90.

But his shoulder began to ache again the following season, and he tried to pitch through it. The Astros traded him to Colorado. His shoulder continued to hurt, and he continued to try to pitch through it. By the end of the season his ERA was 7.06, and he needed major reconstructive surgery on the shoulder. He missed the entire 2002 season.

“Looking back on everything now, with the perspective of time, I know that a lot of what happened to me was the result of immaturity,”
he said. “I don’t think I became a grown-up until I was just about done [playing] the first time.

“I lived the major-league lifestyle. I enjoyed it. I was young and I had money and I had fun.

“I made some bad decisions. When my shoulder started to hurt, it never really occurred to me that anything could be seriously wrong—even after my first surgery. I had always been sore after I pitched, even when I was a kid. So now I was a little more sore. I was pitching to big-league hitters, being a little more sore was to be expected.

“My way was to fight through things. Then, when I had surgery, I always tried to come back too fast. Well, it feels better, I’m ready to pitch. Except I wasn’t ready to pitch. I’d come back, and people would blow me away. I was terrible because I never let myself get completely healthy.”

The Rockies released him midway through 2004 after his ERA had ballooned to 9.80. The Indians picked him up, and he pitched better, most notably in 2005, when he had his best season since 2000—and his healthiest—going 11-9 with a 4.61 ERA. But the shoulder began acting up again after he signed with the Royals in 2006, and he was released again, midway through 2007. The Indians gave him another shot briefly in 2008. It was after his release there in July that he decided it was time to go home.

“I had two young kids,” he said. “Everything hurt. I was pitching badly, and I didn’t want to go back to the minor leagues again. I had money [his solid 2005 with the Indians had gotten him a two-year $8 million deal from the Royals]. The White Sox tempted me back briefly in 2010, but I was awful, so I decided that was it.”

Even before he walked away from Cleveland in 2008, he knew he needed to stop drinking. As his injuries and frustrations had mounted, he had started to drink more.

“At some point in my life I had probably dabbled in a little bit of everything,” he said. “You name it, I tried it. But mostly I drank. It wasn’t as if I was drinking every single night or drinking all day long; it was never like that. But when I did drink, I drank too much. It could get ugly in a hurry.

“When I came up, a lot of guys were living the hard and fast life. I fell right into it. It got to a point where I knew I had to do something about it before it killed me. I don’t think I was ever a bad husband or a bad dad, but I knew it wasn’t going to end well if I didn’t do something. I didn’t feel good physically, and I didn’t feel very good about myself either. I just decided it was time to get some help. So I did.”

He went away to a thirty-day program but knew he still had work to do when he got back. He didn’t think he could handle sobriety and baseball and the frustrations baseball had been bringing to his life all at once. He was sober when the White Sox talked him into his brief comeback. “By then, drinking wasn’t the issue,” he said, smiling. “My pitching was the issue.”

He had pitched in Charlotte for eight weeks in 2010 to an ERA of 8.24. His shoulder hurt even more than it had before he left the Indians two years earlier, and he knew he would need to have surgery again. He was happy to be back in Lamar, until that day in August when he had driven over to Denver with Jake to see his old buddies who were with the Phillies.

Elarton had now rented an apartment in Allentown that was big enough that Laurie and the two children could spend the summer with him. Even with them in Lehigh Valley, the long road trips were tough on him.

“I’m usually okay for about the first six days,” he said. “By the seventh day I start to get very cranky. I’m just at a point in my life where I don’t like being away from my family at all.”

Jake, who was now eight, had vaguely known that his dad was a baseball player and that he knew baseball players. But he had been four the last time Elarton had been a full-time player, and his more vivid memories of his father on a baseball field dated to the August afternoon in Denver when they had stood behind the barrier and watched the “real” players take batting practice.

“For Jake to see me in uniform, and actually pitching and occasionally getting people out, makes this whole thing worth it,” Elarton said. “At the very least I know now that he’ll remember me as a baseball player. It won’t just be some vague, shadowy memory of me playing
baseball from when he was very little. He understands the game now; he’s really a fan. He thinks being able to come down on the field to be with me is cool.

“I’d love for him to see me in a major-league uniform in a major-league park, but, to be honest, this has been great because down here things are less formal and he gets to be a lot closer to it than in the majors.”

He smiled. “Of course I wouldn’t mind having to deal with the access issue in the majors if the time came for that.”

As May turned to June, Elarton began to lose some of the magic touch he’d seemed to have in Florida and early in the season. A couple of bad outings ballooned his ERA a bit—it was still under 4.00 going into July, which is generally considered good in Triple-A—but he knew he wasn’t pitching nearly as well as he had been.

“I’m making mental mistakes out there,” he said one night. “I’m not making good pitches when I most need to, and I’m not getting out of innings the way I was early in the season. It’s frustrating. I think I’ll come out of it, but I hope it’s soon.

“Last I checked, I’m not getting any younger.”

ON THE ROAD IN PINSTRIPES

When the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees gathered just prior to their season opener on April 5, their manager, Dave Miley, had spoken to them about the year that was to come, pointing out that they could use the 144-game road trip as an excuse if they wanted to—but not with him.

“None of us signed up for this,” he told the team. “But we’re here. We can lie down or we can show people that we’re competitors and turn some heads that way. It’s up to you.”

Whether those words got everyone’s attention or not, the team played solid baseball right from the start.

“In a funny way I think it’s helped bring us together,” Miley said after the team had settled into a pennant race with Lehigh Valley and Pawtucket in the North Division. “Adversity can do that. I mean we all have two choices: accept it for what it is and try to succeed or whine about it and not succeed. I don’t think anyone in New York is going to say, ‘Oh, these guys have it too tough, we’ll bring them up even if they’re not playing well.’ The guys understand that.