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

and go home.”
    His wife talked him into not coming home. Slowly, Brett Tomko began to become again the pitcher who had spent all those years getting big-league hitters out. He worked his way back up the minor-league ladder, reaching Triple-A Sacramento by the end of the season. And yet he still wasn’t back. The best offer he could get for 2011 wasa minor-league contract from the Texas Rangers. He took it, even though he knew he had no chance to make the team out of training camp; he hadn’t even been invited to major-league camp.
    “I can’t tell you how many times I was ready to hang it up,” he said. “We’d had twins four days after I hurt my shoulder in ’09, and I missed them every day I was away. But I couldn’t walk away.”
    On April 20, with the season barely under way, the Rangers called Tomko up, needing some middle-relief help. As luck would have it, his first appearance in the majors was on the same mound where he had hurt himself nineteen months earlier.
    “I came into the game and got through the inning, got the side one-two-three,” he said. “It felt like it was supposed to feel, like I was a major-league pitcher again.
    “After I got the third out, I started to walk to the dugout, and it hit me that I had made it all the way back—that I hadn’t let the day I got hurt be the end. I got two steps into the dugout and lost it—I mean completely lost it. I didn’t want everyone to see me crying like that, so I went straight into the runway where there’s a small bathroom, went inside, and locked the door.
    “It took me a while to get my act together. After a couple minutes [manager] Ron Washington came and knocked on the door. ‘Big guy, you okay in there?’ he said. ‘You all right?’
    “I told him I was fine. When I came out, he was smiling because he knew what had happened. He didn’t say another word. He didn’t have to. I knew he got it.”
    Tomko smiled at the memory. “Sometimes going full circle in life isn’t a good thing. In this case, it was as satisfying as anything I’ve ever done.”

    The most poignant stories in sports are never about the multimillionaires who make their games look easy but about the guys who love their games, even though they often fail while playing them.
    The exploits of LeBron James or Tiger Woods or Roger Federer or Miguel Cabrera may awe us, but they hardly produce a lump in thethroat. But when Adam Greenberg gets a second at-bat in the major leagues, seven years after being hit in the head during his first at-bat, we all stop and watch and smile and get a chill. When Jimmy Morris makes it to the major leagues at the age of thirty-five—after blowing out his arm and leaving baseball entirely to become a high school coach—and then pitches a total of fifteen innings over two years, it not only becomes a Disney movie; it becomes one that leaves us wiping tears away during the final scene.
    What made
The Rookie
special was that it was real—you couldn’t make it up. There isn’t a baseball player alive, especially among those who have had to fight to get to the major leagues, who hasn’t seen the movie at some point. Without fail, when Morris’s story comes up, they shake their heads in amazement because they all understand how remarkable it is that he pitched those fifteen innings in the majors.
    “Fifteen minutes in the majors means you’re a great baseball player,” said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland—who never got his fifteen minutes above the Triple-A level. “People just can’t understand how good you have to be to get there at all.”
    Those who have been there and come back, and those who have gotten only as far as Leyland got, know what it means to get that call, to get called in to the manager’s office and to hear those three simple words: “You’re going up.”
    “No one grows up playing baseball pretending that they’re pitching or hitting in Triple-A,” said Chris Schwinden, who in 2012 pitched for five