Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball Read Free

as a first-base coach in 2010,only to find himself victimized by the post-collapse purge of 2011. He returned to Triple-A, in Norfolk, where he cheerfully tells those who complain about life at that level, “If you don’t like it here, do a better job.”
    Both Montoyo and Johnson know firsthand that traveling on Triple-A buses or staying in three-star motels is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone, which is why you aren’t likely to hear either one of them complain … ever.
    Umpires live the same life—except that they don’t have any home games. Like players and managers and coaches, they have beaten the odds by getting to Triple-A, but they are still not where they want to be. The big money and the luxurious life for them also exist only at the big-league level. Mark Lollo was generally considered the top umpire in the International League in 2012. He had worked major-league games and felt he was on the cusp of achieving that goal. But he still wasn’t there, and whether he would get there was not something he could control. Which made for a lot of tossing and turning at night.
    Each, in his own way, defines the struggle of people who are extremely good at what they do—but
not
as good as they want to be at given moments. Often, when Triple-A players do finally get to the majors—or back to the majors—it is so overwhelmingly meaningful that tears, not words, explain how they feel.
    And on some occasions, it takes only a few choice words to explain what it means to a player to climb that mountain. As Nate McLouth stood in left field at Camden Yards on a brisk October night, just months after being released by the Pittsburgh Pirates, tossing a ball with center fielder Adam Jones as the Orioles prepared to play the Yankees in game one of the 2012 American League Division Series, his thoughts were very simple.
    “This,” he thought, “is pretty cool.”

    It is stories like the one McLouth wrote in 2012 that keep baseball players grinding through those moments when they see their namesnot in lights but in agate. The grind is different for everyone, and it is almost always agonizing for one reason or another.
    Pitching for the Oakland Athletics, Brett Tomko won his hundredth game as a major leaguer in September 2009 and walked off the mound in Texas thinking he had blown out his shoulder and would never pitch again. Trying to throw a fastball past Chris Davis, he had felt something pop in his shoulder at the start of the ninth inning and had finished the game throwing strictly breaking pitches because he thought his arm might fall off if he tried to throw a fastball.
    Tomko was right about his shoulder—he had blown it out. Not wanting his last baseball memory to be walking off a mound with his arm hanging limp, he came back after the surgery and dropped all the way back to rookie-league ball briefly, and then to Class A, pitching in Stockton, California, against a bunch of kids who seemed to hit rockets off every pitch he threw. In six starts he pitched to an ERA of 7.52.
    “I couldn’t get anyone out,” he said. “It was embarrassing. There was almost no one watching, but a lot of those who were kept screaming at me, ‘Go home, old man. You’re done.’ ”
    Tomko knew their reaction to the pitcher they were seeing at that moment was understandable. But he still believed that locked inside somewhere was the pitcher who had not only won a hundred games in the major leagues but also pitched there for fourteen seasons, been given the ball as a starter 266 times, and struck out 1,209 batters in 1,816 major-league innings.
    “The doctors had told me it would take a while to feel healthy again,” he said. “Of course I’m like everyone else who has ever been any good: I thought once the pain was gone, I’d be who I was before the injury. It’s never that simple. I still thought I could make it back. But I also thought maybe I owed it to my wife and kids to just face the reality of it all