Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (43 page)

There are many things not to like about minor-league life—especially for those who have been in the big leagues. Most of the differences are apparent: salary, mode of travel, hotels, per diem, clubhouses, even the quality of the postgame meal—same food, as many players point out, different taste.

Which leads players to the one thing they would all wish to change first and foremost: noise.

They miss the noise, the sounds, the electricity of a major-league park. “It’s not anybody’s fault,” said Buddy Carlyle, sitting in the dugout on a hot, humid afternoon in Gwinnett. “It just can’t be the same. Even if you have a sellout and there’s eight or nine thousand people, that’s not close to the same as forty thousand. And if you’re playing in a half-full minor-league stadium, there are nights when you swear you can hear the crickets.”

This was a problem for Carlyle and the rest of his teammates in Gwinnett. Coolray Field (named for a heating and air-conditioning company) was a sparkling three-year-old stadium with pretty backdrops outside the outfield fences and all the modern amenities. The Braves had moved their Triple-A team there in 2009 after being unable to get a deal done with the city of Richmond to renovate the Diamond, the creaky (though charming) park where the Richmond
Braves had played since 1985 after moving to Richmond nineteen years earlier.

The move to Gwinnett made sense in many ways. After all, having your Triple-A team 34 miles from your home ballpark certainly made things easier than having it 535 miles away. What’s more, Gwinnett County was willing to pay for the construction
and
the maintenance of a brand-new 10,475-seat stadium that was three miles from the I-85 corridor.

There was just one problem: if a baseball fan is thirty-four miles—or less—from a major-league park, he isn’t likely to make a regular habit of going to a minor-league park. The most successful minor-league teams are almost always those that aren’t too close to a major-league stadium.

“It isn’t as if fans
won’t
come here, they do,” said Dave Brundage, who had managed the team in Richmond for two years and then made the move to Gwinnett. “But instead of coming here ten or fifteen times a year, they might come here four or five and go to Turner [Field] a half-dozen times. It’s tough to compete with a team when everyone knows your best players are going to play for them and not for you.”

Even the first season the G-Braves, as they were called (they’d been the R-Braves in Richmond), had trouble drawing fans. They averaged 5,965 per game, which ranked them twelfth in the fourteen-team league. By 2012, with the novelty of a Triple-A club having worn off, the average had dropped to 4,680 a game. Only the Charlotte Knights—whose stadium was almost twenty miles from downtown on a heavily traveled road—drew fewer fans in 2012 than the G-Braves.

Which is why August, a difficult month in any minor-league town, was especially tough in Gwinnett. The weather was uncomfortable most nights, the team was struggling, and the crickets could frequently be heard long before the seventh-inning stretch.

The Braves were in last place in the IL South, the weather (of course) was hot, hotter, and hottest, and there were nights when it felt as if there were more crickets in the ballpark than fans. This was one of those nights—early August, the first day of school in the county—and
a crowd of 1,881 that looked more like 881 would be in the ballpark, even though it was a pretty summer night.

“It’s this time of year when playing baseball is a job,” said Carlyle as he looked around the empty park prior to that night’s game. “I’ve been doing this for seventeen years now. I’ve played in Japan and Korea, I’ve played in the majors and in the minors. I’ve thought my career was over and gotten another chance. I think I appreciate how lucky I am to play the game—or, more specifically, to still be playing the game.

“But you get home at four o’clock in the morning and then you’re back at the ballpark mid-afternoon, and you know the place is going to be empty when the game starts, and it does get to be a grind. Then again, every job has tough days.”

He smiled. “I guess when you’ve flown those major-league charters, sitting in the middle seat when you fly and getting a small salad and a cookie is a little bit more difficult than if you haven’t flown them.”

Carlyle had flown or ridden in just about every kind of plane or bus imaginable since the day he decided to bypass college as an eighteen-year-old kid in Bellevue, Nebraska, and sign with the Reds for a $270,000 bonus as a second-round draft pick.

“That money felt like $270
billion
at the time,” he said, laughing. “I figured, this is it, I’m set for life, I never have to earn another dollar beyond this. I also never counted on what it was going to feel like at that age going from living at home with my parents to playing in Princeton, West Virginia, two weeks after I signed. That’s the thing about the decision you make coming out of high school to sign: life on a college campus is considerably different than life in the low minor leagues.”

Carlyle had made it to the majors in 1999 at the age of twenty-one, called up to the San Diego Padres (the Reds had traded him there the previous year) for seven starts. That was when the odyssey began. The Padres traded him to Japan, which didn’t bother him then, because he was young and he and his wife, Jessica, had no kids and thought the travel would be fun. Then it was back to pitch in the
minors for the Royals and the Yankees before he made it back to the Dodgers briefly in 2005. He pitched ten games in relief before an appendectomy shut him down.

More travel followed. He signed with the Marlins, who sold him to a team in Korea. Since he wasn’t yet arbitration eligible, having not yet spent three years in the majors, off he went. That winter, Roger McDowell, who had been his pitching coach in Las Vegas when he had been with the Dodgers, had taken the job as the Braves’ pitching coach, and he recommended that they sign Carlyle. It was that year—2007—that his life settled down a little and he began to have some success at the major-league level.

He pitched well in Richmond to start the season and was called up to the Braves in May. He ended up getting twenty big-league starts and won the second game of his major-league career—the first had come in San Diego in 1999—in June. He went on to finish 8-7 with a high (5.21) ERA. A year later the Braves made him a reliever, and he had his best year, pitching to a 3.59 ERA. Finally, it seemed, at the age of thirty, he was an established major-league pitcher.

“Pitching for Bobby [Cox] was the best experience I’ve ever had as a baseball player,” he said. “It was like being managed by your grandfather. He made you feel as if he cared about you that much every day. And he always knew the right thing to say.

“One night I’m out there and just getting crushed. Everything is a line drive. Bobby comes out to get me, and as I hand him the ball, he says, ‘The umps just didn’t give you anything tonight.’ I knew the umps had nothing to do with me getting lit up, but it made me feel better. Those two years were a lot of fun. I felt as if I belonged.”

And then life intervened. The next spring, after starting the season with the Braves, Carlyle began to feel weak and started having dizzy spells. His weight dropped very suddenly—twenty pounds in a little more than a week. He went in for tests and was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes—just as Sam Fuld had been diagnosed at the age of ten. Being diagnosed at thirty-one when you are the father of two small children was a little bit different.

“To call it a life-changing event is a vast understatement,” he said,
smiling. “To begin with, I felt awful for a good long while. Then, when you get into a regimen with insulin shots and monitoring your [sugar] levels all the time, it becomes part of your day. But you’re aware of it all the time. It isn’t like you go a day or two or even a few hours and then think, ‘Oh, I better check my level.’

Carlyle actually managed to come back and pitch in the majors before the end of the 2009 season, a true feel-good story. Of course major-league baseball teams don’t care much about feel-good stories; they care about winning. Carlyle wasn’t offered a contract for 2010 and landed back in Japan for another year. This time, with two young children (seven and four years old), it wasn’t as easy as the first time around.

“It had become a job,” he said. “That was the first time I remember thinking to myself, ‘Life is short, but this season is very long.’ ”

He came home and bought a house in Atlanta. He had made $425,000 pitching for the Braves in 2009 and almost as much in Japan. Jessica had a job as an English teacher and a basketball coach at a local high school, so it made sense. He signed with the Yankees, made it up briefly, but was released in August. He decided to take one more shot—or so he thought—when the Braves offered him a minor-league contract for 2012.

“I’m thirty-four, and I still believe I can pitch in the majors again or I wouldn’t be here,” he said. “The good news is I can make the commute from here to Atlanta most of the time and not be away from my kids except when we’re on the road. Sometimes, though, I just accept the fact that I can’t make it back. We got home at four o’clock this morning; we have a game tonight, so I went and slept at [fellow pitcher] Peter Moylan’s house. A couple of times I’ve just slept in the clubhouse because it was easier.”

He sighed. “That’s when I feel old. That’s when I wonder what happened to the teenage kid with all those hopes back in West Virginia in the summer of 1996.

“The thing about baseball is, in the end, there are no excuses. It’s great when your manager says the umps didn’t give you anything, but you know better and so does he. The numbers don’t lie in this game.
They might lie when a bloop becomes a hit or a line drive becomes an out, but over the long haul they don’t lie.

“I’ve been around long enough to know you have to be careful who you talk to down here. Negativity can get contagious very quickly, especially when the team is struggling and it’s a million degrees out and there’s no one in the stands. It can happen in a second.

“The Braves gave me a second life as a baseball player when they signed me in ’07. I’m proud that I’ve fought through the diabetes to be here. I know it’s not a pipe dream to think I could be in Atlanta pitching the ninth inning tomorrow. You keep grinding, taking the ball, and getting outs, anything can happen.

“I used to be a guy who whenever someone else went up I’d beat my head against the ‘why-not-me’ wall. I’m long past that. I’ve packed enough cars going in both directions to not worry about it anymore.”

He smiled again. “You know what I’ve learned through all the years and all the moves? The stroller never fits in the car when you’ve packed everything else. I’ve left a lot of strollers behind in a lot of different places.”

J. C. Boscan had been luckier than Carlyle. He hadn’t had to leave nearly as many strollers behind. He was two years younger than Carlyle but was in his sixteenth season in baseball since he had signed his first contract with the Braves as a sixteen-year-old coming out of Venezuela.

“I still remember the day I flew to Florida after I had signed,” he said. “My mother cried at the airport. I think she was proud of me, but she was also worried about her little boy.”

Her little boy wasn’t that little. Boscan—Jean Carlos—was six feet two and a solid 190 pounds by the time he was fourteen. He was already being scouted at that point because international players can be signed by major-league teams at sixteen. “I was big and strong,” he said. “I could throw and I could hit. The scouts were there all the time. If I could have signed at fourteen, I would have.”

He was sixteen when the Braves offered him $210,000 to sign.
He used the money to buy a car for himself and a farm for his parents. He went to play rookie ball in the summer of 1997 for the Braves’ Gulf Coast League rookie-ball team in Orlando. Unlike Charlie Montoyo, who learned to speak English watching baseball and
Bewitched
on TV, Boscan learned from his teammates.

“Never been much of a watcher of baseball,” he said. “I just like to play. There weren’t that many Latin players in the game back then, and a lot of my teammates were older [as in eighteen or nineteen] and they took care of me. They made sure I learned to speak English correctly.”

Boscan speaks English now as if he grew up in Minnesota, not Maracaibo. There is barely the hint of an accent. Learning English, as it turned out, was a lot easier than learning how to hit breaking pitches with any consistency as he moved up the minor-league ladder.

“I had a good year in 2004,” he said. “I was only twenty-four, so I hadn’t been discouraged. I was in Triple-A, and at the end of the season they sent me to the Instructional League and said, ‘Keep playing because you’re going to get called up.’ Only I didn’t get called up.

“The next year, things began to go backward. I was a free agent at the end of the year, and I thought I needed to go someplace else where they didn’t just see me as an organization guy. I signed in Milwaukee, and it was a disaster. I played badly—couldn’t hit at all. Ended up back in Double-A.”