Chapter 2: Early Birds

Life in the Orioles' spring training camp was a big improvement over my experience in the last couple of years. With Tampa, I never got the impression that anyone expected me to be anything but their last-resort relief backup, stored away down in Durham.

With Baltimore, I got treated almost like a veteran. Several of the regulars took the time to come by and introduce themselves, and tried to make me feel at home. A couple of them said something about how the club "really needed a good left-handed reliever." This put me under a little self-induced extra pressure, but it made me feel good, all the same.

Always nice to be needed. And whatever the Oriole brass might think, I really was a good left-handed reliever.

I got an inning in, during one of the intrasquad games before our regular spring training schedule began. I gave up a single, but got out the side without allowing the runner to advance. So far, so good.

We'd played three spring training games before I got another shot. Warren gave me the ball in the seventh inning against my old club, the Minnesota Twins, in their spring park in Ft. Myers. I got shelled. Oh, man, talk about bad timing! My first chance with the new club in a real game, and it's a turkey-shoot. And I'm the principal turkey.

I expected to get the word that night that it was Ottawa or the highway for me. But the word didn't come.

Two days later, I pitched two innings against the Red Sox and didn't give them so much as a bunt single. Now, that was more like it!

I went another four games without being called upon, but I knew that wasn't too unusual in the spring. Paul Warren and his coaches had a lot of guys to look at. I tried to stay calm and just let things happen.

Next day, in a home game in Lakeland, Warren called on me in the fourth inning, with one out and the bases loaded in a game against the Dodgers. We had a 4-2 lead at the time and the idea was, get out of the inning without allowing too much damage. If I let one in, I knew that wouldn't be considered a disaster. If I let in two or more, I might be history.

Well, I got their cleanup guy to hit into a double play and the inning was over, right there. He was a lefty, and the only batter I faced that inning. The next guy scheduled up was a left-handed hitter, also, so I stayed in for one hitter in the fifth before Warren came and got me.

Hmmm. Looks like I've gone from being a starter, to a middle reliever, and now to a just-get-out-the-lefty specialist. Well, it was no way for me to make it into the Hall of Fame, but if it would get me to Camden Yards, so be it! I was ready to be the club's get-out-the-lefty specialist all the way to the World Series.

The Orioles made their cuts -- two rounds of them -- during March and several guys that I thought had performed pretty damned well for them were sent down to Ottawa or Bowie anyway. Most of the time, the players had known it was going to happen, no matter how well they performed, so they weren't too surprised at the demotion. They'd been "invited" to the big league camp for a look-see, and they'd be kept in mind as the long season wore on and regulars were injured, or just stopped producing, so that changes had to be made.

It was kind of a brutal system, when you got right down to it. Almost the ultimate meritocracy. Not as bad as in the old days, when a perfectly good player might spend five or six years in the minors, working for peanuts, just because the club that had signed him had an even-better player at his position in the majors.

All that had drastically changed with the player-friendly rules that had come into existence over the past thirty years or so. Free agency meant that players eventually earned a reasonable chance to sell their services for their real value. And, boy, when folks had found out how high that "real value" was, everybody -- players and management alike -- had been shocked!

Big salaries and free agency also frequently led to individual star players getting long-term contracts at guaranteed wages, so teams had to think twice -- three times -- before letting a player go whose paycheck would go on -- and on -- long after the player was off on a golf course somewhere.

So these young guys who were being sent down knew that the chances were pretty good that sometime -- as early as May or June, maybe -- they'd get The Call and, next day, would be back in the big leagues, drawing down that fat league minimum salary. It kept them going -- that carrot, there, strung out on a long pole, just out of reach.

That same carrot had kept me going for almost a decade, now. That, and the fact that I loved throwing a baseball more than any other job opportunity I perceived as available to me. I mean, a seat on the U. S. Supreme Court might be better, but having to go to law school first would be a major drag!

When we broke camp for Baltimore to open the season against the Cleveland Indians on April 3, I was on the 25-man roster. For me, it was a huge first. I'd been in major league spring training camps before. I'd even played, however briefly, in the majors before. But this was the first time a club had taken me north with them to start a season in the bigs.

I'd be 33 years old before the season ended. But I felt like I was 23. Maybe younger! And I was going to be making a cool $375,000 a year -- the league minimum under the new contract. Suddenly, all those dusty minor league bus rides didn't seem quite so bad.