Chapter 1: Alex Osborn

OK, so maybe I should have given up this game a long time ago.

It's kind of embarrassing, being the World's Oldest Rookie Pitcher. I'm 32-year-old black American lefthander. OK, my mom's white and my dad is black, but we all know that in this country, any discernable amount of black ancestry makes you black, period.

And I've been up to the big leagues before this -- but never for more than a couple of weeks, and -- needless to say -- never with any notable success.

I signed with the Dodgers out of the University of Southern California nine years ago, and, like every other young prospect with a successful college career, I figured I'd serve my two years -- maybe three, tops -- in the minors and then graduate to the big time.

The big time. Yeah, right -- if the big time was Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Triple-A. Albuquerque was a nice town, actually, but nobody is going to mistake it for anything but what it is. Albuquerque is a town with "Triple-A" written all over it.

If it were back east, it would be Double-A.

I was a left handed pitcher, and for awhile, the Dodger bosses were telling me it would only be a matter of time before I'd make it to The Show. Maybe my fast ball wasn't anything special, but I had a nice variety of pitches, decent control, and what the coaches called "good temperament."

Watching yourself grow old in the minors isn't real good for your temperament, I can tell you.

Late in my third year as a pro, the Dodgers called me up to the big club in September when the rosters were expanded for the final month of the season. I had been a starter in the minors, but I only did middle relief for the Dodgers, and not a whole lot of that. I got into five games, won none, lost one. I got a couple of "holds" -- that's a kind of half-assed statistic that means you appeared in a game and didn't screw things up unduly during your brief tenure on the mound.

The following February, they invited me to Vero Beach to Spring Training with the big club, but while I was there they traded me to the Minnesota Twins, in the American League.

The Twins sent me straight to their minor league camp and I started the season at their Triple-A affiliate in Rochester, New York.

Both the trade and the sudden reversion to minor-league status sent me into a funk. Whether it was outright clinical depression or just a severe case of feeling sorry for myself, I'm not sure, but I almost lost my career (such as it was) right then and there. Anyway, I didn't do anything notable enough at Rochester to earn a trip back to the majors, and I spent the whole season there. I was, at that point, 28 years old and getting a little long in the tooth for a guy who'd still barely gotten a smell in the bigs.

I met and married a girl from Rochester that year, and when I got called up by the Twins early in year five, she came with me to Minneapolis-St. Paul. We were on top of the world, thinking we'd made the big time at last.

We were looking into buying a house in the St. Paul suburbs when the Twins sent me down again -- back to Rochester -- after only three weeks. Did I perform that badly? Not really. Actually, I hadn't gotten much of a chance to screw up. Roster changes are made, sometimes, for reasons that bear little relationship to how an individual athlete is performing.

I kept thinking I'd be called back up -- and I was; but it was in September again, when all it meant was they wanted to take another end-of-season look at me, when nothing much was at stake anymore on the field of play.

But, well before that September, my one-year-old marriage was already effectively over. If I ever again made an escape from Rochester, it would be all by my lonesome.

Well, at least we hadn't made any babies, so the split was clean.

OK, so I got released by the Twins after that season, and I gave some serious thought, with my 31st birthday just past, to tanking the baseball career and finding honest work somewhere. I had a college education, f'chrissake. I could be something besides an over-aged minor league baseball player.

But, damn it, I still thought I could pitch, if I could just get a break! I hooked on with Tampa Bay -- kind of the bottom of the barrel, career-wise, but I wasn't feeling proud. Maybe I could get a fairer shot with a last-place club.