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

third surgery two years later and faced a fourth—one that doctors hoped would be the last—in April 2013.
    “All my life, I’ve been a competitor,” Montoyo said softly, smiling.“I’ve loved to play and compete for as long as I remember. I’m like everyone else in that I’ve never liked losing. But since Alexander was born, it feels a little different.”
    He took off the Bulls cap he was wearing and looked inside it. “Whenever I feel myself starting to get frustrated or angry about something during a game, or before or after a game, I take my cap off and look inside it.”
    He held it out. Inside was a photograph of Tyson and Alexander, both with big smiles on their faces. “I look at this and I know that losing a game isn’t that important. Given a choice, I’d much rather win than lose. But it isn’t important the way it used to be for me.”
    The 2012 season would turn out to be the most difficult Montoyo had experienced as a manager. But when June came around and school was out in Arizona, he could look into the stands at Durham Bulls Athletic Park on most nights and find Samantha, Tyson, and Alexander sitting there watching the game.
    Which meant that he didn’t need to look inside his cap to know what was truly important in his life.

3
Lindsey, Schwinden, and Lollo
    THE MAYOR, THE TRAVELER, AND THE UMP
    At the moment that Scott Podsednik arrived in Allentown, John Lindsey would have been thrilled to swap places with him. Lindsey was essentially the same age as Podsednik (he was ten months younger) and had been drafted out of high school by the Colorado Rockies in the thirteenth round in 1995, a year after Podsednik.
    Lindsey’s dreams were like those of anyone who is ever drafted by a major-league team. “I figured I’d be in the majors in about two years,” he said, smiling. “I remember my dad telling me back then that everyone else was thinking the same thing but I was like, ‘Yeah, I know, but I’m right.’ ”
    He was off by fourteen years. On September 8, 2010—more than
sixteen
years after his draft day—Lindsey made it to the majors. In doing so, he set a record for the longest minor-league apprenticeship that eventually led to the big leagues in baseball history.
    “Not a record I was trying to set,” he said with a laugh. “By the time it happened, I had pretty much given up. It was the second-to-last day of the season and I was packing up so I’d be ready to go home right after we played the next day, when I got called into the manager’s office.”
    The Albuquerque Isotopes were in Round Rock, Texas, finishing their season when manager Tim Wallach called Lindsey in to tell him he was going to the Dodgers. Lindsey still remembers Wallach’swords. “He said, ‘John, I’m honored to be the one to tell you that you’re going to the major leagues. I know you’ve waited a long time.’ ”
    Lindsey was so stunned by Wallach’s words that his first thought wasn’t,
“Oh my God!”
but rather, “I have to call my wife.”
    Christa Lindsey was making the six-hundred-mile drive from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to Round Rock to pick her husband up the next day. She was already en route. “I had to get her turned around,” he said. “At first she didn’t answer. Finally, I got her. It was one of those funny phone calls. ‘Honey, I’m sorry you’ve driven three hundred miles for nothing, but here’s why …’ ”
    Lindsey is a quiet and thoughtful man, very religious and extremely considerate of others’ feelings. Which may explain why he didn’t tell any of his teammates what had happened when he walked out of Wallach’s office that day. “I just thought it wouldn’t look very good if I was jumping up and down and screaming, ‘I’m going to the majors,’ when the rest of them were all going home the next day,” he said. “I guess I must have had some kind of smile on my face, though, because Iván DeJesús, who lockered right next to me, noticed.
    “He