Read Online Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball by John Feinstein - Free Book Online Page A

instinct was right. Red Sox shortstop Mike Avilés had closed on a ground ball just before it took a wicked hop and ricocheted off his wrist. He had come up in pain, grabbing the wrist right away, and trainer Rick Jameyson and manager Bobby Valentine had come out of the dugout to see how badly Avilés was hurt.
    “If he’s down, someone’s going up,” Beyeler said. “If someone goes up, other guys’ playing time and their place in the lineup is affected. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It isn’t as if any of those guys are sitting there waiting for someone to get hurt, but the minute they see Avilés come up holding the wrist, their first thought is, ‘Could I get the call?’ ”
    As it turned out, Avilés hadn’t broken any bones and was able to shake off the injury. Everyone returned to what they were doing.
    “You never know, though,” Beyeler said. “It could swell, or they could find something wrong with it after the game. They’re all thinking the same thing.
    “The good news in a situation like that is you get to call someone in and say, ‘Pack your bags, you’re going to the major leagues.’ Those moments are the best part of this job—by far.” He smiled. “Of course, once that guy leaves with a big grin on his face, you have to deal with the five who didn’t get called up.
That’s
the hardest part of the job.”
    Or, as Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter, who spent his playing career waiting for the call-up that never came and then managed in Triple-A for four years, puts it: “Managing at that level is the worst job there is in baseball. Why? Because
no one
wants to be there.”

    Baseball’s minor leagues have a long and storied history, at least in part because almost every great player in the game has played in them at some point in time.
    Years ago, baseball had so many minor leagues and minor-league teams it was almost impossible to track them all. Leagues were classified from Triple-A down through Class D. More often than not, the minor-league teams were completely independent from the major-league teams they did business with, their affiliations being informal as often as they were formal.
    Minor-league teams are still owned independently nowadays, but with the exception of a handful of teams that play in what are called—cleverly enough—independent leagues, they all have formal ties to major-league teams.
    The major-league teams control the baseball operations: they assign the manager and the coaches and provide the players to each team. The owners take care of everything non-baseball, from owning (or leasing) their stadium, to tickets sales and marketing, concessions, licensing, and parking.
    There are now six levels of minor-league baseball: rookie-league; short-season A (the teams begin play in June since most of the players are high school and college draftees); low-A; high-A; Double-A; and Triple-A.
    Players in Triple-A like to say that they are “one accident away” from the big leagues—an approach that might sound a bit ghoulish but is quite real.
    Echoing the words of Arnie Beyeler, John Lindsey put it bluntly one night: “It isn’t as if you sit around hoping for someone to get hurt, but you know that it’s a fact of life that people
do
get hurt. The phone is going to ring. The manager is going to call someone in to his office. You just hope when that happens it will be you. When you’re in Triple-A, you’re ‘this close,’ but you can also be a million miles away.”
    There are two leagues at the Triple-A level: the Pacific CoastLeague, which has sixteen teams, and the International League, which has fourteen teams. Although the tie-ins change frequently, each team has a working agreement with one of the thirty major-league teams. The minor-league ownership stays the same; those on the field switch uniforms.
    The oldest of the minor leagues is the International League, which has existed in one form or another since 1884. Once, the league truly was