Rookie Crash Course: Minor League Edition
9 minute read
The contents of a ballplayer’s bag look similar across locker rooms, for the most part. Hitters tote a few bats, some grips of choice, their “gamer” glove and maybe a spare. Some diva pitchers carry their gloves in separate cases to maintain the integrity of its shape, while others before the “sticky substance crackdown” slid pine tar, sunscreen, rosin, or Spider Tack inconspicuously into side pockets. All players have their belts, cleats, hats, and jerseys for a road trip. Everything is covered in different amounts of dirt and sweat, which becomes part of the bottom of the bag throughout the season.
Some players pack bits of specialty equipment, too. They’re almost always pitchers. One teammate of mine carried a mini-trampoline and weighted balls for a post-game shoulder strengthening exercise. Another lugged around a literal shotput. And me? Since I was seventeen, I’ve clung to a six-foot long shoulder tube, used for warm up exercises, like a child to his “blankie.” I know my role before I step foot in a new locker room; I’m a lock to be labeled the weird kid clutching a phallic looking piece of obscure exercise equipment.
Turning professional wasn’t going to sway my allegiance to the tube, so I arrived at Boyce Cox field in Bristol Tennessee with my equipment bag in one hand and the tube in the other. With undulations nearing mogul levels in the outfield, a short fence in right to accommodate the bottom of a miniature bluff and stone bleachers, the stadium at Boyce Cox field was a far cry from the auspicious start to pro ball I’d hoped for. The sun radiated off the outfield grass and I felt the bottoms of my feet baking.
…I’m a lock to be labeled the weird kid clutching a phallic looking piece of obscure exercise equipment
Two robust men, too old to be wearing baseball pants – and far too old to be in rookie ball – chatted next to each other in the outfield. The tube and I forged ahead. “Hi, where’s the clubhouse?” I asked, cutting softly into their conversation.
They stopped talking; I held my breath. The larger one of them, my soon-to-be-pitching coach nicknamed “Hanny,” silently reached for the tube. I reluctantly gave it up, and like an enormous child enraptured with the wonders of a novel toy, he set it in motion with a series of twirls and swings. “Am I doing it right?” he asked me.
“Uh, sure.”
“Locker rooms right there,” he said, gesturing to the door down the right field line, propped open with a cinder block. Having been sufficiently vetted, he handed the tube back to me and continued his conversation.
Much like Boyce Cox’s exterior, it’s innards refused to even entertain the notion of being cozy. The floors were slippery cement, a sure disaster lurking for cleats in a hurry, while fissures and cracks ran like giant veins beneath my feet. Each locker partnered with a rickety, no-backed stool, whose height betrayed its probable former use supporting elementary school children. The shower heads batted .500 in their daily efforts to stream water, and a rusting, dilapidated exercise bike sat in the corner, the mere sight of it inducing me with fears of contracting tetanus.
I pretended to busy myself organizing my locker, turning around to absorb the names of my teammates as they trickled into the locker room. It was hopeless, each new one rung out the one before.
I quickly came to learn that new draft pick’s arrival was anything but a cause for celebration. We came in fresh and excited, a sentiment foreign to the rest of the clubhouse’s understanding of Bristol’s place as the organizational sewer. Until we’d been appropriately humbled in pro ball, there was always going to be an undercurrent of antipathy from the older players. Nothing personal to it, they’d simply prefer the Pirates say “Nah, we’re good” to the commissioner on draft day instead of selecting us. That, of course, never happened.
Acclimating to a professional locker room as a new draft pick takes time. Those first few days I was unsure where the proper spot to sit was for me in the bullpen, and what in the world I was supposed to do with myself in the 3 hours spanning the end of batting practice and the beginning of the game. Most of the veteran players got a kick out of watching the newcomers converse with each other, fretting about practical matters. What time was stretch? Were we allowed to step out of the clubhouse to take phone calls? Can I order a beer at dinner during a road trip?
The simplest and most amusing prank to play was telling new players they were wearing the wrong hat during batting practice. It was comedy that bridged the language gap between American and Latin American players; watching the victim take off their hat (which was the right one for batting practice), scrunch their nose in confusion, look around at other’s hats, second guess themselves, and sometimes – if they’d been gaslighted just enough by the rest of the group – trudge on back to the locker room to become even more confused when they looked at the rest of their hats in the locker. You felt like an idiot when it happened to you, but it felt like a rite of passage when it happened to someone else.
The true rite of passage, however, was getting your first taste of game action. The new pitchers were all eased in; we sat on the sidelines for a week, throwing a few bullpens before our debuts.
Mine was in Princeton, West Virginia. It was a Wednesday. Worn speakers emitted garbled gospel tracks between innings and one lucky congregation achieved the distinction of “Church of the game.” There were far fewer than one hundred spectators and I harbored the faint suspicion that the attendance number was some sad, crooked, prime number. Forty-three, fifty-nine, maybe seventy-one.
When our starter’s smooth sailing hit turbulence, I redirected a nervous pacing energy to my dynamic warmup: high knees, butt kickers, short sprints. I retrieved the shoulder tube, wriggling it back and forth. I scanned the sparse crowd, absorbed the humming lights; their rays splattered the field, turning the already steep mountains that served as the stadium’s backdrop more severe with their contrasting darkness.
…You felt like an idiot when it happened to you, but it felt like a rite of passage when it happened to someone else.
Hanny stepped out from the dugout and cast a fishing line in the bullpen’s direction (the signal for me) and mimicked a light throwing motion.
“Fisch,” Evan Piechota, an aging relief pitcher who loosely operated like the ‘pens version of a team mom, said. “Start throwing lightly.”
My nerves radiated like ripples in a pond with each throw and the rest of the bullpen swiveled to watch me desperately unleash fastball after fastball. How hard was I throwing? I paused, stealing gulps of fresh mountain air, closed my eyes. As soon as I felt my heart’s pounding retreat to a steady thumping, Evan’s voice cut in.
“Get hot! Get hot!” he yelled. A few hundred feet away, Hanny leaned over the railing, repeatedly taking his hat on and off his head, baseball language’s query to assess a pitcher’s readiness.
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Evan said.
When I’m ready. Okay. Wait, how the fuck do I know when I’m ready?
I let one more fastball fly. “I’m ready.”
“Well good,” Piechota said. My new manager, “Miggy,” and the infielders were converging on the pitcher’s mound. “Because you’re in the game.”
I soaked in the staticky music, the shimmering lights, my beating heart. Miggy watched me jog to the mound and placed the ball in my hand with a knowing smirk. “Go get em, Pescado” he said, giving me a reassuring nod in the back before retreating to the dugout.
I fired a heat-seeking missile to my catcher’s mitt and it caught the outside corner for strike one. The runner on third chopped his feet noisily in an attempt to distract me. He was mildly successful; I shook off my catcher’s suggestion for a curveball, fearing an unblocked ball in the dirt would lead to a run. Concern briefly surfaced at the sight of my opponent’s bat intercepting my next fastball, but my fear dissipated as the ball gently sliced directly into my right fielder’s mitt.
Our hitters went down in quickly in order and two minutes later I jogged to the mound for my encore performance. Intent on lighting up the radar gun, I reared back with everything I had. My left foot landed at an awkward angle, I lurched to the side, and my blistering fastball sailed to a spot ten feet up the backstop. It hit the chain link fence with an incongruent clink and ushered in a chorus of boos and heckles from the crowd.
“Throw it over the plate!”
“You get paid to play? What a joke!”
“You’re gonna hurt someone!”
I pushed my cap low over my eyes, circled the mound, and finally steadying my breath. The next two hitters went down swinging on strikes, each well-placed fastball sending me higher and higher above the scene. Zeus. In the land of mortals. One out left, I thought to myself.
Some things are best left unanalyzed, especially on the baseball field. The realization that I’d entered “The Zone” actively ripped me from it and I promptly walked the next batter on four pitches. My vision wobbled and then contracted, my focus splintering and scattering across the infield grass. Upon toeing the rubber, the ball inexplicably squirted from my glove and hit the dirt. A balk. Another round of jeers rained down from the stand. I took my hat off, wiped my brow, and put it back on. Focus. I settled back in, striking out the next batter on four pitches. Hell yeah.
As a kid, I always loved watching player’s Major League debuts. Announcers eat it up. They regurgitate a story that never gets old of a player beating the narrowest of odds to achieve their childhood dream. They shower praise on the player who strikes out their first batter or dumps a single into right field for their first hit and unsuccessfully holds in a sheepish smile as the camera pans to them on first. The baseball to commemorate “the first” is rolled back to the dugout and placed in the hands of a bench coach for safekeeping.
Until I arrived in West Virginia, I never considered balls saved in the Minors. And while I’d watched several other members of my draft class receive “first” balls of their own – first strikeout, first hit – it still surprised me to hear my name singled out in Miggy’s post-game speech and handed the scuffed-up ball from my first professional strikeout.
The
announcement came to a reception of stifled applause, my achievement quickly
forgotten as others wrapped themselves in towels, slipped on shower shoes, and
began the all-too-familiar post-game routine.
In the dingy locker room of Princeton, West Virginia, I rubbed the seams of the ball, lifted it up to my face, inhaled deeply. Sometimes, it’s hard to realize you’ve adjusted to a new environment. You worry about it obsessively at first, gradually worry about it less, and then at some point fail to recognize that you’re no longer worrying or even thinking about it at all. Eventually, something jars you from the comfort you’ve unknowingly slipped into and forces you to reconcile where you were and where you are now.
The way I
jostled in line for the post-game spread, yelled out “everybody eat?” before
scooping seconds onto my plate, deftly swung my bag into the proper compartment
underneath the bus (I was reamed out for doing this “improperly” by our trainer
during a previous road trip), and took my seat on the bus with the rest of my
teammates, all seemed natural. I was one of them, finally.