Chapter 11

I could say that I was as happy as a clam to be at the AAA Miskatonic Valley farm club in Massachusetts, but that would be a slight fib. The only guys who don’t mind spending time in AAA are guys on rehab assignments, who 99% already know for sure that they’ll be called back up to the big club when the rehab is done. For me, it was just another trip back up that same progression ladder ... and this time I was determined that I wasn’t going to slide back down again.

Face it – absolutely no kid ever grows up fantasizing in their bedroom late at night that they’re pitching in AAA. Myself included! Managers know this, that NONE of the players want to be there, and that the longer they’re there the more they’ll sulk, but that’s also a part of the development progress. The team wants to develop players and create a winning attitude – winning games is entirely incidental. Almost no AAA manager or coach is going to get either fired or their contract extended by their win-loss record alone. The Director of Minor League Operations at the parent club will want to know just one thing ... did they develop ‘prospects’ that season that can mature (eventually) into major leaguers?

Being in the minors isn’t about wins/losses whatsoever – it’s 100% about developing players to be ready, especially their attitudes!

If my own estimates of evaluating other player’s talent level was even half accurate, it was going to be lean year here in the Miskatonic Valley with not much here that could help out our abysmal parent club this season. We certainly seemed to be extra deep in organizational players, guys who were just around to help fill out a roster, so that the three or four actual prospects on this team had someone to play with. Another quarter of the roster was filled by what we called AAAA players, veteran minor leaguers that were really too good for AAA but had already failed in multiple prior call-ups to the big club. Guys just not quite good enough for MLB, but nice to have waiting around in case someone more significant gets hurt. Most had the physical tools but not the mental parts between the ears – that shows how really hard it is to really ‘make it all the way’ and then stay there. These were all guys my age or even older who were already at the apex of their careers where getting or returning to majors was highly unlikely, except for a brief stint to replace a player on the disabled list at the home club ... which everyone prayed for (silently) daily, or hoping for a surprise trade elsewhere.

“I’d be in the majors now ... if I hadn’t gotten hurt”. I’d heard that bitch from nearly half of my fellow pitchers, who like me had once been hurt, or even had more than one arm, elbow, or shoulder surgery, and all of them hoping they’ll wake up tomorrow and become 20 years old all over again, and could throw once more with no pain ... and regain that lost five mph on their fastballs. I seemed to have found a cure for that ... but I certainly couldn’t recommend it to anyone else!

No one is comfortable even while sitting around bored in an AAA clubhouse. There are too many people, and a heavy atmosphere of too much nervous fear/sweat/change/uncertainty. Players seemed to come and go on a weekly basis – promoted or demoted, traded or released, so none of the guys tried to make any close friendships. The guy you drink a beer with on Friday might be gone by game time Saturday. You never root against your teammates, but in every real sense they’re your primary competition for any call-up to the Big Show. Myself, being the latest newcomer, was practically invisible to the rest of my teammates ... especially the other pitchers. I was yet more new competition that they didn’t need or want in their lives.

Every AAA clubhouse has the home team’s MLB package on the cable or satellite TV network shown in the clubhouse and everyone had a morbid focus on it during game time, watching with an appraising weather eye for even a trace of the most minor injuries happening at the Big Club, or even just another bad outing or a lingering bad hitting streak hinting that some player might be due for a demotion back to the minors. If, as often happened, our minor league game was being played at the same time, our clubhouse manager would record their game for us to watch after our game was over with, and again (on a loop) the next afternoon. At times the atmosphere reeked of bitterness, especially after watching our Big Club lose another game badly (as was usual), that ‘we’ were all better than those lame-ass chumps up there and that some of us ought to have their jobs! Especially, those guys that had been there, played in majors before, and believe that they deserved to still be there. Those guys would visibly gripe, daily, about why they’re not in the majors, and they’d sit around in our clubhouse and obsess at why someone else would get called up ... and when will be their chance?

The guys that annoyed me the most, right from the start, were the bonus babies who’d been high draft picks and signed nice fat contracts, or other guys who were still on the blessed 40 man roster and already working here while on a major league contract. To a man, they were all utterly fucking ‘entitled’ and felt that they have a right to be back there, today!

The famous manager Tony LaRussa once had an appropriate quote – “It take ten days to create a MLB attitude” and the guys that don’t learn to lose it, after being demoted back to the minors, usually will have a ‘fuck-all’ chance at ever returning to the Big Show ever again. The coaches and the skipper would constantly warn those guys to get their heads out of their asses, but it never seemed to accomplish anything.

I’d tell them, “You’re making over a million dollars for this season and I’m making about $100 a day, so grow the fuck up because I don’t care about your problems! This has been my life’s goal, all I ever wanted to be. Every day, I’m trying to make another small step forward, and be thankful that I have this chance. Go make your own fucking luck!”

Me ... I have my own job to do and I like doing it. I also believe that getting that chance often is a ‘right place-right time’ fate related thing, beyond anyone’s active control ... if you’re doing your job well enough to even be considered when the need for your skills comes along - you’ll make your own luck sooner or later. Just keep buggering on!

There were two other starting pitchers on this roster that I soon paid particularly close attention to as my primary competition here. My main rival was a veteran named Max whose career was currently in the doldrums, stuck here seemingly forever at a career plateau with something like AAAA player status. He was a semi-famous former stud Ace pitcher once, drafted high right out of high school, and threw his first MLB pitch before he’d turned twenty. Back in those days, he used to smoke a 95 mph heater and had 80 wins in the majors already by the time he was 25, before the engine fell out, bounced a few times, and then rolled way the fuck downhill into the swamp and sunk. One look at the stats on the back of his early baseball cards told the story to me plainly – 280+ innings pitched each of his first three seasons! That’s too many pitches thrown in too many innings when his arm was too immature and with fundamentally poor throwing mechanics to handle the stresses. In the six years since, he’d managed just another five wins (with twelve losses) during short call-ups to the big club and his career had been an up and down roller coaster ever since. We were his fourth new organization in the last four years and very likely his last and final stop before admitting defeat and certain retirement.

I’d played with a few other guys like this, where coaches and managers would ignore pitch or inning counts, and use up the young kids, hard ... until sometimes their arms fell off. He was one of those unlucky guys, and now he couldn’t bring the heat anymore, and like me he could now barely throw into the 80’s. Now he was learning to finesse, to pitch rather than to just throw, and the results so far were mixed. I had decent respect for Archie, our AAA pitching coach, but teaching an older guy this age how to pitch all over again from scratch was really a better task for old Greg, back at AA. It would be a project, to completely tear apart all of the old arm mechanics from his power days into a simpler, easier delivery that could be sustainable without incurring further injuries. Really, this was another total reclamation project for Randy, back in Arizona ... and I told him and Archie as much.

By the All-Star break, management agreed with me and Max got the choice of either an outright release or being optioned to a ‘rehab assignment’ in Arizona. He chose wisely ... and returned to our organization about a year later as a nominally competent fellow finessing junk-balling nibbler, capable of eventually holding down a backend of the rotation starter position at the big club for four solid, but unspectacular seasons. Sometimes the old dog can learn a few new tricks and we got to become pretty good friends later on, enough so that I later became the best man at his wedding.

My other closest rival for a near-immediate call-up to the Show was another former bonus baby who’d also been making the up and down circuits on the league escalator. His career had gotten off to the worst possible start I could even imagine – he’d been drafted at about the middle-end of the very first round of the draft ... and the dumb kid held out for too much of a signing bonus, wanting a top ten draft level bonus, until past the signing deadline. Undeterred, the kid filed for the draft again the following season, and then became outraged when he was only drafted in the fifth round of that year, and was then offered a signing bonus of less than half what he’d already declined the previous year. The blithering idiot held out from signing again (who the fuck was his moron of an agent?) and this next time went completely undrafted by any team at all ... since most organizations knew by now that the kid was a head-case not worth the trouble of dealing with. Now, he’d been signed as a street free agent for pocket money and he was making about the same minimum minor league salary as me ... fuck all. The kid had talent ... but the ‘my shit doesn’t stick’ and ‘I belong in MLB’ attitude grated on everyone, and management wasn’t inclined to do him any particular favors. No one liked the guy and popular opinion was that if he ever did make it to the show, he wouldn’t last there long and then he’d have to take that escalator ride back down here again ... and everyone was sure that he’d go completely postal and burn his last bridge with the organization here.

Our AAA skipper Walters was already pretty sure that his talent wasn’t worth the accompanying baggage, but the kid was still young enough to maybe learn a little common sense. I doubted it ... not even Randy could fix what was between that idiots ears. So, conventional wisdom was that the kid was going to get the very next call-up for a pitcher and then likely fail hard ... and keep on failing downwards thereafter until someone could beat some sense into him.

That’s about that situation went down, just as expected. Playing professional baseball is all about making constant adjustments and MLB hitters feasted upon him once they learned his pitch trends and weaknesses and the kid wouldn’t or couldn’t adapt. They trotted him out to the mound every five games for two long months, well after the experiment was determined a complete failure, and finally his ass got sent back down here fast, where the kid (as predicted) completely lost his shit ... and took another fast ride down to AA ball again in punishment to ‘fix his attitude’!

Eventually, when the next guy they called up very quickly didn’t work out either, they decided to try me next, in replacement ... so thank God that club management didn’t decide to make me try to mentor the kid when he reported back here to AAA with more gripes at the world than the Battleship Arizona. I didn’t want that job – dealing with idiot Fuck Face Wade last year was more than hard enough on my nerves then!

At the end of the season he received the same exact choice of options that Max had been offered ... and he elected to be outright released. He chose poorly. Eventually, one or two other teams picked him up off of the street and (usually) dropped him just about as quickly. The word was that the kid was uncoachable and he soon ran out of ‘last chances’ for a professional baseball career here. I later heard a rumor that he’d gone to either Japan or Korea to play semi-pro level ball there, but he never threw another minor league farm club pitch ever again.

I mentioned sometime earlier that it is never good news to be called into the skipper’s office, but for every hard and fast rule there always seems to be an exception, and this was one of them. Heck, it was still an hour before batting practice kicked off and most of the team wasn’t even in the clubhouse yet.

“Space, we’re in something of a bind, “Walters asked me with something of a serious look on his face, “so can you start tonight? I know you last started four nights ago in Providence, but it was a pretty easy outing for you, only about 75 pitches thrown total, Archie says, so could you give at least that sort effort again tonight, on short rest?”

“Sure, not a problem at all, the arm feels great ... go ahead and pencil me in!” I nodded. Yep, the arm did feel great – as it always did now, even immediately after a start. Short rest was a problem for other guys and not me, nowadays. Want me to start both games of a double-header? Absolutely!

“Fine ... well, you’d better get your locker packed quick and get your ass moving in high gear because you’ve got two plane flights to catch and the game in Philly starts at 7:30 pm tonight! You’ve been called up Space ... so get your ass to where the big club is and prove to them that you belong there! Car is already waiting out in front to take you to the local muni-airport for the charter flight to Boston, where a front office guy will be waiting to put you on the connecting national flight. In Philly, a team rep will be waiting to take you straight to the stadium. MLB service time is effective as of today, so start enjoying the paychecks and don’t let your ass come crawling back here with your tail between your legs!”

Nope ... that wasn’t going to happen!

Pay; now that was an entirely new issue I’d never even had to consider before now. On a standard minor league contract here at AAA, I made about $100 a day, and was pretty grateful to be earning it. That sounds like a comfortable amount, but it’s only effective for the six months or so of the season. Like teaching, that partial salary has to stretch for the entire calendar year. Now promoted to the Big Club, a minor league call-up like me immediately begins to earn the league minimum, which by the terms of the Player’s Agreement with MLB, is then prorated on a daily basis over 180 days, or about $500k for a season and roughly about $2770 day. Wow ... now that’s the kind of money you needed these days to support both a wife and a hot girlfriend, and maybe some children eventually too!