Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball (52 page)

He would have to do so from the minor-league camp. His report date was the first week of March, and it was to the Mets’ minor-league camp in Port St. Lucie.

“To be honest, when I first opened the letter, I was pissed,” he said. “It was a letdown. My thought had been if I got to the major-league
camp—even if I didn’t go north with the team—I could leave some good impressions with them that would put me high on the list to be called up when the season started. That’s what happened in 2012—I was up before April was over.

“But I’m going to take the approach that I became a better pitcher last summer, especially with my changeup, and I have to keep working. I still haven’t got the sinker where I want it, so maybe if I can get that going, I’ll really be ready not just to make the majors but succeed in the majors. That’s the goal now—to succeed up there.”

Schwinden laughed. “After last year, I have to think this year is going to be calm and easy by comparison.”

With the Mets moving their Triple-A team from Buffalo to Las Vegas, life in the minors would be different. “I liked Buffalo, felt very comfortable there,” he said. “Never minded pitching in cold weather. The good thing about Vegas is that it’s a lot closer to home and I should finally get to pitch in Fresno in front of all my friends and family. I never did make it there last year.”

Schwinden, of course, had been scheduled to pitch in Fresno during his brief stint pitching in Las Vegas the previous June, but the Blue Jays had released him before that start. He had ended up making his next appearance in Columbus—as property of the Cleveland Indians.

Schwinden had two goals for 2013: make it back to the majors, and pitch well there and spend the entire season in one organization. Four organizations in thirty-five days was a little much.

T
OMKO

Lindsey and Schwinden might have been a little disappointed when they received their letters telling them where and when to report, but chances were good that Brett Tomko would gladly have traded places with either one of them.

After the national championship game in Durham, Tomko flew home to San Diego and sat down to talk to his wife, Julia, about their future. Being part of a championship team had been enjoyable, and to
some degree Tomko felt at peace with the idea that his career might be over.

For years, he had collected memorabilia from his baseball career. He had baseballs—thirty-eight of them—signed by every catcher he had ever thrown to in a major-league game. Some were from guys he had pitched to on more than one team. He had a signed bat from Rico Brogna—the first player ever to homer off him. And he had a signed bat from Mickey Morandini, the first player he had ever struck out.

“I’d always planned when my career was over to build a really nice case for the baseballs,” he said. “When I got home in September, I told Julia I thought it was time I start building the case. I enjoyed the experience—I like doing things like that, and I’m pretty good at it. But as I was doing it, I almost had the sense that I was building my own baseball coffin. It unnerved me a little. Made me wonder if I really was ready to hang it up.”

When the free-agency period began in November, Tomko started sending out e-mails and making some phone calls to people he knew in front offices. Most said the same thing: check back with us in the spring.

“I think they wanted to see who else they might be able to sign,” he said. “Obviously, a forty-year-old pitcher was more of a backburner, ‘We’ll call you if we need you’ sort of guy.”

There were nibbles as spring training drew closer. Colorado wanted to watch him throw at one point, and the Blue Jays did watch him throw. Still, as everyone was leaving for spring training, Tomko was at home, looking for work.

“This is the first time in nineteen years, other than when I was rehabbing from the shoulder surgery, I haven’t been leaving for spring training right now,” he said one afternoon in February. “It’s an odd feeling. Most of my springs have been in Arizona, and I’ve just loaded up the car and driven there by myself to get ready. Now I’m sitting at home.”

Home, but not necessarily home for good. Tomko was throwing regularly at a nearby high school and planned to face hitters in batting practice on a normal spring training schedule.

“I’m acting as if I’m in a camp,” he said. “I’m throwing side sessions as if I was getting my arm ready for exhibition season. I’m going to throw to live batters soon. That way if someone calls and says, ‘Are you in shape to come right into camp?’ my answer will be yes. Julia and I have talked, and she wants me to ride this through to the very end because she knows that’s what I want to do.

“I’m not completely crazy. Every time I called a team this winter I said the same thing: ‘Look, I want to play right now, but I know it won’t be for much longer. Whenever I’m done, I’d like to coach or manage. If you’re looking for a guy who has experienced
everything
from top to bottom in baseball, I’m you’re guy. There probably isn’t anything a player is going to come to me with that I haven’t seen.’

“ ‘Hey, Brett, how do you deal with being unbelievably hot, throwing like you’ve never thrown before?’ I can tell them I experienced a half season where I was as good as anyone in baseball. Then I can tell them that
same
season I was also the
worst
pitcher in baseball for a couple of months.

“I brought all that up just to get my line in the water down the road. Right now, though, I want to try to pitch one more time.”

The plan was to wait for a call as spring training moved along. If no one called, Tomko had talked to independent league teams in York, Pennsylvania, and Camden, New Jersey, about pitching for one of them.

“Other guys have done it,” he said. “I figure I have nothing to lose. It’s going to be over soon one way or the other … why not go as far as I possibly can? Who knows, I could be one of those great comeback stories. It
does
happen.”

And so, when April rolled around, he was off to York.

Stop No. 28.

L
OLLO

For Mark Lollo, there was no chance to beat the odds. Umpiring was a zero-sum game: you were in or you were out.

For most of October, he heard nothing official from Major League
Baseball. He wondered—briefly—if perhaps Cris Jones had reconsidered or someone had stepped in and spoken up on his behalf.

“I never let myself think it for very long,” he said. “I knew they had until November 1 to let me know one way or the other. I didn’t want to be disappointed when the formal call came.”

It finally came a couple of days before the deadline. Cris Jones and another supervisor called him together and thanked him for his years of service but told him he would not be renewed for 2013.

“I guess I’d have been shocked if it had been the other way around and they’d said I was coming back,” Lollo said. “What bothered me, though, was the corporate-speak. I thought after twelve years I deserved more than something that felt like I was being read an HR letter from some company. I know baseball’s a big business, but it still left me feeling pretty empty and sad.”

Lollo was already looking for work outside baseball even before the formal call came. But he found himself stewing about the call, because there was one question he wanted answered and nothing in what Jones had said had answered that question for him. Finally, about a week after the phone call, he sent Jones an e-mail.

There was no anger in it, just a question: “Cris, I need to know the answer to this question: Can I go to my grave knowing I did absolutely everything possible to become a major-league umpire?”

Jones replied: “If you want to give me a call, I’d be happy to discuss.”

“It occurred to me right then and there I didn’t want to talk to him about it. I just knew whatever the answer was, I wasn’t going to get what I needed—even if he said I’d done everything, I wasn’t going to feel like I’d gotten a completely straight answer.

“So I decided to call Larry Young. He had been the supervisor who first brought me up to the majors in 2011, and I thought he’d tell me the truth—no matter what the truth happened to be. He called me right back, and I told him I had one question I needed answered. When I asked him, his answer was very direct: ‘Don’t even think about it ever again. You did everything you could. Timing is everything in life. You just didn’t get lucky with timing.’

“That was the closure I needed. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt and that I’m not still grieving over it to some extent. But I felt as if I had some closure after that.”

Lollo began to interview extensively after the call. He was offered a job as a money manager after going through a lengthy interview process but decided at the last possible second he didn’t want it. Everywhere he interviewed he did well.

“Five interviews, five offers,” he said. “But I was holding back. I just wasn’t ready.”

Finally, in February, he was offered a job by a company called Uni-First, a uniform supply company. The office was forty-seven miles from his home in a suburb of Columbus, but the company told him he would be able to work from home a couple of days a week. Lollo accepted.

“I still haven’t decided if I want to try to officiate again someplace,” he said. “I’ve thought about applying to do Big Ten baseball or even to do high school football. I think I might enjoy that.

“The whole thing’s a process for me. Right now, all my friends are leaving for spring training. A year ago I was in major-league spring training thinking I wasn’t that far from being a big-league umpire. Now I’m driving to an office every day.

“It’s better for my family; I know that. But I can’t honestly say I’m completely over it.”

There’s an old saying: great athletes die twice.

Umpires too.

E
LARTON

It took Scott Elarton a solid month to stop feeling sore, once he had made the two-day drive from Allentown to Lamar in early September. The hamstring that had caused him to miss a start in August still hurt, but beyond that he just felt, well, thirty-six.

“It had been a while since I’d gone through an entire baseball season, much less an entire season healthy,” he said. “My last full season of pitching was 2007. Five years is a long break even if you’re young—which, in baseball years, I’m not. So it took me a while. But
gradually I began to feel better, and there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to try to pitch again. I’d enjoyed myself too much to just walk away.”

The question, like with Tomko, was whether he could find someone who would give him the chance. He spoke with Phillies general manager Rubén Amaro, who had been responsible for the chance he’d gotten in 2012, and Amaro was honest with him: “He said, ‘Right now we haven’t got anything for you,’ ” Elarton said. “They have some younger pitchers they feel are getting close, and a thirty-seven-year-old didn’t exactly fit into that plan. He told me that could change as they got closer to spring, but I knew I’d better start looking around.”

Elarton picked ten teams who he thought might be looking for insurance in the form of an experienced starting pitcher. If he knew someone with a team, he sent him an e-mail. Otherwise he just sent a note to the farm director. He figured that was the logical starting point.

Like Tomko, Elarton wrote his own notes and e-mails rather than relying on an agent to do it. If there was a deal to be made, then he would involve an agent. “At some point in your career, you can’t ask your agent to do that kind of digging for you,” he said. “Plus, I think it’s harder to say no directly to a player than to his agent.” He paused. “Of course it’s not
that
hard.

“I got nine noes,” he continued. “Just polite responses saying they weren’t looking to sign anyone—as in me—at that time.”

The tenth response came from Brad Steil, newly named as the Minnesota Twins’ farm director. He said that he and general manager Terry Ryan would have interest in signing Elarton to a minor-league contract.

“I jumped at it,” Elarton said. “It was a chance to pitch. I still believe I wasn’t that far away from being major-league ready the first couple of months of last season, and with that year under my belt and another good off-season I can get back to the majors. I don’t think I’d go back if they told me Triple-A was the ceiling. I need that competitive carrot, the belief I can pull something off people don’t think I can pull off. I mean, think about it, how often do guys go five years between trips to the big leagues?”

The Twins’ offer gave him hope, a chance at least to pull off the unlikely. His family was 100 percent for it. “As soon as I told them there was a team that wanted to sign me, everyone’s reaction was, ‘When do we leave for spring training?’ ” he said, laughing. “They were ready to jump in the car that day and go.”

Elarton wasn’t at all surprised when his reporting letter arrived telling him he was expected in the minor-league camp in Fort Myers, Florida, on March 7. Even the thought of an overcrowded minor-league spring training clubhouse didn’t bother him.

“Last year it was a shock to my system because I’d been in the major-league camp for a month,” he said. “I’d gotten spoiled living in the lap of that kind of luxury, so it was tough walking in there. This year, I’ll be there from day one, so I don’t think it will bother me.

“In fact I’m looking forward to it.”

And so it was that on March 1, the Elarton family loaded up the car to make the cross-country trip to Florida. They had several days before Scott had to report, so they took their time, stopping often during the 1,794-mile journey. Their ultimate destination wasn’t so much Fort Myers as it was Baseball World.

“I know I’m going to walk into the clubhouse and there will be a locker with my name on it and a uniform,” Elarton said just before heading south and east once again. “I’m still a baseball player. Honestly, I can’t think of anything much better than that.”

In a very real sense, he spoke for everyone in the game: major leaguer, minor leaguer, independent leaguer. Player, manager, coach, scout, umpire, broadcaster, writer, or fan.

They all have one thing in common: they love the game.