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

Brewers. He spent most of the next ten years in the minor leagues, making it to the majors in 1993 with the Montreal Expos. He got to bat five times that September and went two for five.
    “Forget Ted Williams,” he likes to say. “I’m baseball’s last .400 hitter.”
    When he retired in 1996, he got a job in the Rays’ minor-league system thanks to a former teammate, Tom Foley, who had just been hired by the team to put together a minor-league staff for 1997. The major-league team wouldn’t begin play until a year later, but they were building the organization from scratch. He’d been with the Rays ever since, reaching Durham in 2007. He had won five straight division titles and one International League championship. In 2009, he had been voted Manager of the Year for the entire minor-league system at all levels.
    “Which just means we’ve had a lot of good young players coming up through the system,” he said. “If I’ve done something well, I hope it’s that I’ve helped get them ready for the major leagues. That’s what they pay me to do.”
    Like almost everyone in Triple-A, Montoyo had thought about the day he might manage in the major leagues. He believed he was good enough to make the jump, but it wasn’t what drove him and it certainly didn’t consume him, as it did many of his peers.
    “Anyone who has managed at the Triple-A level, anyone who has worked at that level, has moments when he thinks, ‘I wonder how I would do up in the big leagues.’ Human nature. It isn’t really about the money that much”—he paused and smiled—“although you’re certainly aware of it. What it’s really about is believing you’re good enough to do it, to compete against the best at what you do.
    “Players feel it when they’re playing, and when you’ve managed awhile, you feel the same way.
    “But at this point in my life, what’s most important to me is that I have a job. I have the first two-year contract of my life—which is nice. I have a 401(k) and I have insurance. I can take care of my family.It isn’t that I love baseball any less now than I did when I was a kid. When I retired”—another smile—“I should say,
got
retired, I knew I wanted to stay in the game. I got the chance to do that, and I’m making a living doing it. That’s what I focus on.”
    Montoyo, who makes about $80,000 a year working for the Rays, has good reason to focus on being able to take care of his family. He met his wife, Samantha, when he was playing in Charleston, and they have two boys: Tyson, who turned nine during the 2012 season, and Alexander, who turned five in October 2012, shortly after the season ended.
    Montoyo vividly remembers his second son’s birth.
    Alexander Montoyo was born on October 17, 2007. The doctors told his parents right away that he had been born with a heart defect called Ebstein’s anomaly. It is extremely rare, a defect that forms in the womb and affects the flow of blood from the right ventricle in the lower part of the heart to the right atrium in the upper part of the heart.
    “In a way, we were very lucky,” Montoyo said. “The doctors told me that ten years earlier there probably would have been nothing they could do for him. Now it’s treatable.”
    Treatable—but terrifying. Within hours of his birth, Alexander had been taken by helicopter to a hospital in Phoenix. He had to have open-heart surgery a month later and a second surgery when he was four months old. Doctors told the Montoyos he might need a transplant—very dicey surgery, to put it mildly, for one so young.
    Alexander fought through it all after being taken to UCLA hospital, where there were specialists who worked on children with the anomaly. Montoyo spent the 2008 season commuting to both Los Angeles and Phoenix—where he and his family live during the off-season—frequently leaving his team when it had a day off to fly round-trip out west so he could spend a few hours with his son.
    Alexander had a