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

said to me, ‘What’s going on, why’d Skip call you in?’ I said, ‘Nothing, man, no big deal.’
    “And then he started screaming, ‘You’re going up! You’re going up! I know it, I can tell by the look on your face!’ ”
    When Lindsey confessed, a clubhouse celebration in the J. C. Boscan mode ensued. When a player has been around baseball for as many years as Boscan or Lindsey without making the majors, it is, at least in part, because he is looked to by younger teammates as a mentor. If not, teams wouldn’t keep him around. That’s why the joy is so genuine when one of them makes it.
    Lindsey managed to get to bat twelve times in Los Angeles before he broke a hand when he was hit by a pitch, ending his season. His first time up, he was almost shaking when he stepped into the batter’s box. Then he looked out to the mound and saw Wandy Rodríguez pitching for the Houston Astros.
    “I just told myself that I’d faced Wandy lots of times before in the minors—which I had—and this was no different,” he said. “I tried tomake myself think it was just another at-bat, no different than all the at-bats in the minors. Of course it wasn’t.”
    Lindsey got one hit—in his tenth at-bat—a sinking line drive to left field that fell just in front of the Astros’ Carlos Lee. The pitcher was Nelson Figueroa, whom he had also faced often in the minors. He is grateful to this day that the less-than-graceful Lee was the left fielder that night. “Someone with a little more speed gets to the ball,” he said. “Not Carlos. That was the hit I waited to get all my life.”
    When Lee tossed the ball back to the infield and play was stopped, the Astros’ Reed Johnson picked it up, looked at Lindsey, and made a motion as if he were going to throw it to a fan in the stands.
    “I panicked for a second,” Lindsey said. “He just smiled at me and rolled it into our dugout. He knew.”
    Players always know. The ball sits today in the room of John Lindsey III—Lindsey’s son, who was born a year before his dad reached the majors.
    In the spring of 2011, Lindsey was back in the minor leagues. Dodger injuries had gotten him to the majors in September. Good healing in the L.A. outfield sent him back to Triple-A in Albuquerque. At the end of that season no one offered him a contract—even a minor-league contract. He was about to turn thirty-four, and he wondered if it wasn’t time for him to finish college and move on with his life. He had been taking online classes at the University of Phoenix. It was his father, who had told him as a teenager that life in baseball might not be quite as easy as it looked, who told him he might not want to walk away just yet.
    “You don’t quit until there’s nothing left,” John Lindsey Sr. told his son. “I have a feeling you still have something left. Once you stop, it’s over; you aren’t starting again. Don’t stop until you have to stop.”
    Lindsey decided his father was right. He went on an intense diet, thinking he had gotten a step slow with the passing years. He ate only healthy foods, mostly vegetables and chicken, and at times fasted for several days. He lost thirty-five pounds, dropping from a slightly fleshy 260 to a rock-hard 225. Still, there was no major-league teamwilling to even bring him to spring training on a minor-league deal. It seemed as if his time had passed.
    But then his agent came to him with an offer to play in Laguna, Mexico. The Mexican League is roughly the equivalent of Triple-A baseball, although the pay isn’t as good. Lindsey decided to take a chance. Off he went to Laguna, where he was fortunate to share an apartment with a teammate who was bilingual.
    It wasn’t exactly Dodger Stadium. It wasn’t even Albuquerque. But it was baseball.

    Chris Schwinden was very happy to be where he was in the spring of 2012. Sort of. A year earlier, he had been facing a return to Double-A ball as a relief pitcher. He was twenty-five, and four years