4 Apr
Hey, everybody. We finally got off our butts and got our own domain so we can post naked pictures and cigarette ads if we want to.
We don’t want to, but we could.
Anyway, we now live at BusLeaguesBaseball.com, and we love it. Come on over for the beginning of the 2010 season!
27 Mar
When our little cabal of writers gets on gmail and starts talking about what each of us will contribute each week, lots of ideas get thrown out. When the idea of interviewing Elizabeth Martin came up, there was serious concern that none of us was smart enough to hold our own during a Q&A. I’ve never let the possibility of sounding stupid come between me and a good interview before, so I happily took the assignment.
Good choice. Liz Martin is the Assistant GM and Legal Counsel for the Visalia Rawhide, the A+ California League affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks. During our phone interview, she was engaging and funny, and used small words to explain why she chose to use her DePaul law degree in baseball instead of some swanky glass skyscraper. Clearly, she knew what caliber of website she was dealing with.
Tell me a little about how you ended up working for the Visalia Rawhide.
I actually interned with the team in 2006 when they were the Oaks. It was one of my first internships while I was in law school. I got to be pretty good friends with the owner and stayed in touch with him while I was in school, and he offered me the position when I graduated.
You traveled from Chicago to California for the internship?
I did. I spent every summer that I was in law school away from Chicago, which is the wrong time to leave town. So the first summer I was in St. Petersburg, second summer I came here and third summer I went to Berkley and worked for the Raiders. Then I came back here permanently.
So, while you were in law school, you were targeting a job in sports?
Well, when I first went to law school, I wanted to be an agent. It took me about six weeks to figure out that I didn’t want to be an agent any more. Really, what sealed the deal for me was getting the internship with Minor League Baseball and working in their headquarters in St. Petersburg. Working in that kind of organization, I realized that was much more to my taste. I really felt at home. So I shifted directions and went the corporate law route with a sports focus.
You are the legal counsel for the Visalia Rawhide. What are some of the legal issues that come up that we might not be aware of?
Other than contracts, which is what I do a lot of – sponsorship contracts – I helped with the lease negotiations with the new stadium being built – well, it’s mostly renovations, but it feels like it’s new.
One thing that we had happen recently is that an East Coast independent league team tried to take our Mudville logo, which our team also owns. They tried to modify it, but they had clearly taken it and barely changed it and tried to use it themselves. So, logo protection, trademark protection… you’d be surprised how often someone tries to take a trademark and run with it.
Minor league teams often change affiliations. Would you have a role in that process if it happens?
That’s usually handled by our owner, though I’d definitely help out with that. Minor League Baseball standardizes most of those agreements. Our relationship with the Diamondbacks has been pretty solid, so I don’t foresee anything like that happening.
How does sports law practice differ from, say, corporate law?
It’s really just the subjects you touch on. I tell people I could work the same crazy hours I work for baseball, but be forced to wear a suit in some underground dungeon, but I get to come to work at a baseball stadium every day. That’s the first bonus.
Do you get a chance to join the crowd and enjoy the game from time to time?
Definitely, during the games I try and get out of the office and interact. I don’t think many minor league baseball people stay in an office on gameday. There’s always something breaking or a lost child or something that needs attention. For me, it’s a more fun environment. I get to interact with the fans and help younger people coming into baseball. I’m about five to seven years older than anyone else in the office other than our owner, so helping them get their careers off the ground, shape their futures and figure out where they want to go in baseball or in life. Some people come here for six months and say “OK, I never want to do that again,” but I think that’s a great learning process that I didn’t get to go through at 20 years old.
As assistant GM, do you have other duties outside the legal realm?
I do. I’m also the sales manager because I came from a sales background before I went back to law school. I handle all the HR functions because there are a few legal aspects in that. Fortunately, or unfortunately for the crowd here, I also manage the concession stand. I’m a vegetarian.
That would be tough in that environment.
It’s a perfect fit! (laughs)
Were you involved with baseball as a kid?
Not other than just loving the sport. My dad was a baseball player and he got me to fall in love with the sport. I tried to play softball, but I had no talent for that at all. So I became the official scorekeeper, so I learned a different aspect of the sport from an early age.
You said your dad was a ballplayer. Did he play professionally?
He played in college for a couple of years, at Kent State in Ohio. He played in high school. He didn’t have any sons, and I was the oldest of three girls, so I was the one he would play catch with in the backyard. That’s how we bonded.
What is the major focus of your job during the offseason?
Preparing for the next season. We get the question a lot. People think in the offseason we take six months off. We’re meeting with sponsors and getting our sales cycle going. It’s basically an event-planning job. But we’re essentially planning 70 separate events. I like to look at them as separate events because each game might have a different sponsor or promotion tied to it. And some people in town only come to one game a year, so we try to make each experience as memorable and special for that person, as for somebody who comes to all 70 games.
We kept track of Collin Cowgill from afar when he played for Visalia. Is he a fan favorite there?
He was, but unfortunately he got hurt pretty early on and they took him away for rehab. But his name was definitely a tie-in for us being in the cow capital of the universe.
I actually didn’t know where the Rawhide name came from.
We are in the dairy capital of the world here. The Happy California Cows commercials are basically about this area. We wanted to pay homage to that, and the fact that baseball has been in this town for over 60 years. But we didn’t want to be too cheeky about it, either. We threw around some childish names, but we wanted to be a bit more serious. We gave the players a bunch of suggestions we had received and kind of left it up to them to decide.
Rawhide sounds a bit more dangerous than something cow related.
Yeah. Like the Moo or the Tippers.
Is there some personal pride when someone who passed through Visalia moves up the ladder?
We definitely love it. That can be front office or on the field. It’s great to see people who are now in the big leagues who were nice guys when they were here. When I was here in ’06 we were a Tampa Bay affiliate, so I got to spend some time with Evan Longoria and Reid Brignac, so that was fun. That’s just a great story to tell your kids some day. But in the front office, we have a ops manager who is now with the Durham Bulls and one that went to Tacoma. So that’s fun for us to see them move on and have other opportunities, too.
How do you know somebody has the right makeup to succeed in a minor league baseball front office?
My boss at the Raiders told me if you want to work in sports you have to be just a little bit insane. I believe that. You have to be willing to lose yourself in it; to give everything you have. It’s not a 9-to-5 job by any stretch. At this point we’re working seven days a week. I was here until 9:00 last night and started before 9:00 this morning. You really have to be willing to go above and beyond what most people just coming out of school have ever done.
25 Mar
I recently asked readers to help fill in the last few slots on the Z-Meter, and you obliged. I carry 25 minor-leaguers on the meter at any given time, and keep track of their movements throughout the system, until they finally hit the majors. I kept nineteen names from last year, so I needed six more. Here are the results of your ballot-stuffing:
1. 18% Chris Carter, IF/OF, Athletics
2. 16% Lonnie Chisenhall, 3B, Indians
3. 13% Jason Heyward, OF, Braves
4. 12% Jennry Mejia, RHP, Mets
5. 12% Kentrail Davis, OF, Brewers
6. 6% Jurickson Profar, SS, Rangers
And the rest:
4%: Brian Matusz, LHP, Orioles; Eric Young, Jr., OF, Rockies
3%: Dustin Ackley, 1B, Mariners; Aaron Hicks, OF, Twins; Tyler Flowers, C, White Sox
1%: Starlin Castro, SS, Cubs; Michael Ynoa, RHP, Athletics; Jarrod Parker, RHP, Diamondbacks; Ryan Kalish, OF, Red Sox
Eight other players received no votes, so let’s not call them out and embarrass them.
We’ll add them to the list of players I felt had potential to continue growing from last season:
AAA
Austin Jackson, Detroit
Justin Smoak, Oklahoma City Redhawks
Travis Wood, Louisville Bats
AA
Lars Anderson, Portland SeaDogs
Madison Bumgarner, Richmond Flying Squirrels
Carlos Santana, Akron Aeros
Andrew Locke, Corpus Christi Hooks
Kyle Drabek, Reading Phillies
Pedro Alvarez, Altoona Curve
A
Ian Gac, Bakersfield
Mike Moustakas, Wilmington
Che-Hsuan Lin, Salem Red Sox
Collin Cowgill, Visalia Rawhide
Tim Beckham, Bowling Green Hot Rods
Zeke Spruill, Rome Braves
Brad Brach, Ft. Wayne TinCaps
Jamie Owen, High Desert Mavericks
Stephen Strasburgh, Nats
It’s been suggested that I keep the non-roster spot for a college player we admire, like we did with Strasburg last season, but I’m starting to feel like that might make for a separate post each week, rather than an addendum to the Meter.
Thanks for voting!
24 Mar
Danny Duffy’s bio in the Baseball America Prospect Handbook speaks glowingly of the 21-year-old pitcher’s excellence on the mound: his ability to throw off a hitter’s timing, his fearlessness on the inside part of the plate, his willingness to work at improving various aspects of his game. It ended by noting that despite his youth, “Duffy isn’t that far away from the majors.”
Amidst all the praise, however, were a few cautionary words. “He sometimes struggles to put bad starts behind him…one of the last remaining tests for the potential No. 3 starter is finding out how he handles adversity – because he hasn’t encountered any.”
Duffy, the eighth-rated prospect in the Royals organization, suffered a minor elbow injury this spring and wasn’t expected to pitch until mid-May. On Tuesday, he told Royals officials he was done, finished, quits with the game of baseball.
The Kansas City Star’s Bob Dutton didn’t seem to think the injury was connected with Duffy’s decision to step away from the game, but it should probably at least be considered. If a kid is known to have a hard time dealing with bad outings and people question how he will deal with adversity, it makes sense to draw a connection to elbow problems, especially if that was his first career injury. If I’m a 21-year-old kid and my elbow starts to hurt, I don’t care if the doctors say it’s just a strain – I’m probably freaking out.
There is good news, though: stuff like this isn’t all that uncommon. A couple years ago, Jose Tabata (a 19-year-old in Double-A) left the Trenton Thunder during a game and was suspended for three games. In the 1950s, Hall of Famer Billy Williams left his team and went home, requiring the intervention of Buck O’Neil. And in 2006, Zack Greinke took a couple months off to deal with some personal issues.
My guess is that Duffy goes home, gets some support and encouragement, and gives his elbow time to heal…then, in a couple months, gets the itch, realizes he misses the game, and picks up where he left off.
23 Mar
Spring is here, and it’s time to fire up the Z-Meter again. In case you don’t know what that means, check out the final post from last season. I’ve brought back most of the players from that list, but I have six spots still open. I’ve allowed you to vote as often as you like, and I’ll take the half-dozen who come out on top. Vote and share!
23 Mar
You may not know this, but Bus Leagues has a twitter account: @busleagues. We’ve started a list called Team Tweets where we are gathering all of the official accounts from the hundreds of affiliated and independent teams we cover. One of the cool things about that is that we can get in touch with the people who bring us our local baseball from time to time.
Last week, we found the twitter account of Eric Edelstein, GM of the Northwest Arkansas Naturals. The Naturals have only existed for a couple of years as the AA affiliate of the Kansas City Royals, but Eric has been with the franchise since it was called the Wranglers, and was located in Wichita, Kansas. He kindly told us a little about what it’s like to oversee a double-A team.
Your twitter bio says you’re living the dream. How did you arrive at this point?
I can give you the short story, which is that I’m very lucky.
If someone out there has the same dream, is there a standard way to become a GM?
I would say I certainly wasn’t standard, but I don’t think anyone would say there’s a standard way. I did get lucky and caught a few breaks.
I grew up in Cleveland and did a high school internship with the Cleveland Indians. While I was still in high school, I worked in the PR department and got my foot in the door there. I ended up working for Four Seasons in various ballpark operations. I went to school at Bowling Green for Sport Management and worked for the SID’s office while I was there. I worked for the fieldhouse facilities where the varsity teams practiced, so I did that all through college.
Then I got an internship in Buffalo, NY after college and did that for three months. Then I got hired on by the Bisons, and I’ve been with that company ever since. I had three seasons in Buffalo, then they moved me to their affiliate in Jamestown, NY where there was an opportunity to be a GM when I had just turned 24, to run a three-man office on a short-season team. I jumped at that opportunity, then a year later there was a change at the top in Wichita. They came to me and asked, and admitted that maybe I was a little young and not quite ready for it, but they said “If you’d want to move to Wichita and be the GM, we’ll let you do that.”
So, I went and did that. I was there for three years and I got the call that asked if I’d ever heard of Springdale, Arkansas. They said “we’ve got one more move for you here, so if you’d like to go and start a team and be part of building a stadium and a new team, it’s you.”
So I jumped at it, and here I am. Luck and timing played a big role in it. Knock on wood, I haven’t screwed anything up yet.
I grew up in Wichita. Are you talking about the Wranglers?
Yes.
So the Naturals took that AA spot in the Royals organization, right?
Exactly. It really is the same team with the same owners and many of the same administrators, including myself. We moved the team from Wichita to here.
If you weren’t able to work in baseball, what would you be doing instead?
(Long pause) I honestly don’t even know. (pause) It would have to be in some sport or event. I think even without baseball, I’d become an event person; planning, hosting and marketing events. Just in general, the most exciting thing, what gets me going is when you walk out into the ballpark on Friday night and the place is just packed. Everyone’s having a good time. The rush of the event is what I get the most joy and excitement out of.
Each minor league team is different. What are some of the things you do in Springdale that make the Naturals feel unique?
The biggest thing we try to do is we try to be a part of the community. What we do inside the ballpark – I don’t want to say it’s standard, because every team is different – but it feels more unique for people who live here because this is their team. We do the fireworks, dollar hotdogs, dollar beers and other things that are fairly standard across minor-league baseball. But what’s different than even Wichita or anywhere else I’ve been is that we try to be a bigger part of the community. We have a summertime street team that goes out, we have an inflatable speed pitch and a second mascot suit that is always out mingling throughout the community. We do free appearances and speaking engagements at rotaries and other civic clubs. We’ve really worked hard – though we have room to grow – but day-to-day we try to be a big part of the community.
You mentioned your mascot. Your team has a nickname that doesn’t easily lend itself to a mascot image. What did you end up using?
Strike the Sasquatch. We came up with the story that Strike has been living in the Ozark mountains for many years – everyone has heard of spying a Sasquatch in the mountains – and he never had a good enough reason to come out of those mountains. When he heard we were building a stadium down here, he came to check it out and decided he wanted to make it home.
I imagine you hire some of the organization’s top employees. How do you know when you have the right person?
We do a lot of hiring from within. Obviously, that’s how I was brought through, being an intern and working my way up. We continue to do that. We have a pretty extensive intern program that we run during the season that brings new talent in. We try to hire that new talent.
If we somehow don’t have the right talent here, we do try to look outside for the right person. There are often people with other teams that have the right experience but haven’t had the chance to catch on.
But we do try very hard to promote from within. My assistant GM here was an intern for me when I worked in Buffalo who came to Wichita as an account rep. When an opportunity arose, he became sales manager, and when we moved here, we made him assistant GM. My business manager started out running our team store here in Northwest Arkansas, and when an opening came up, we hired her. We have a lot of people on staff that I’ve known or worked with in some capacity at some point, and we’ve brought them through the ranks to the current jobs they’re holding.
So, sticking it out with the organization is rewarded.
Absolutely. I promote from within whenever possible.
I grew up a Royals fan, so I know the team has fewer resources to lure MLB free agents with. Double-A is where the top prospects usually end up. Does that make you feel like your job is really important to the future of the franchise?
Yeah, I think it does. The Royals are a tremendous group to work with. Dayton Moore and his entire baseball operations crew are really good people, and they reinforce that when they see you. I think a lot of times in baseball, we get trapped in what we see on Sportscenter; that’s what we know about a given team. The Royals do a good job of not just paying lip service to it, but appreciating their minor-league teams. When they come in, they’re very respectful and grateful for the job we do. It definitely makes it very rewarding.
I do feel a small piece of pride when a guy who comes through here goes up to the big leagues and has real success.
If the Naturals are doing their job right, the best players get better and leave. How do you get fans to buy in when the roster is constantly changing?
It does bring its challenges, there are definitely some people who struggle with that. The key for us – which hasn’t quite happened yet – is for one of those players to make the big leagues and become a regular. I think that’ll make it more palatable and understandable.
Being a college town here, they’re used to players going on to the professional ranks, be it football, basketball or baseball. But they’re used to it happening after the season is over. So there’s a little bit of a challenge in getting people to understand that, but we also have tried to really stress that if the organization is doing its job, the person coming up behind the guy who leaves should be able to perform just as well, or may even be an improvement.
What do you do during the offseason?
It’s all about getting ready for the next season coming up. A large portion of what we accomplish during the season is set up before we throw a pitch. All the sponsors come on board for all those signs in the outfield, and the advertisers that show up in the program and your radio broadcasts… 95% of those are booked by opening day.
Season tickets are a major determinant of how successful we are before anything on the field is decided; getting all those people back on board, setting the schedule and being ready to go. Then my job during the season becomes more about the subtle tweaks that need to be made. If we do a good job making decisions in the offseason, then it’s more about maintenance and running each event as well as we can.
In the minors, employees often have to wear many hats to get the job done. Is that true of the GM as well?
Yeah, pretty much! There’s certainly no ivory tower management here. If there’s a box that needs moved, the tarp needs pulled or phone needs answered, whoever’s available does it. You definitely have to be all in. I don’t think there’s a GM out there who would do it any differently. I definitely have a hand in just about everything going on here. There’s nothing that I’m “too good” to help out with. If a trash can needs emptied, it gets emptied.
23 Mar
About a week ago, my wife and son and I visited my parents. We used to make the trip over to their house on the New Hampshire Seacoast two or three times a month and stay for the weekend, but since the boy was born, both the regularity and duration has been halved. Just too tough to load up an infant/toddler and all the required accessories and make sure he’s behaving with his cousins and still enjoy oneself for more than a few hours at a time.
Still, for a variety of reasons, I like to visit. Obviously, I like to see my parents – even at thirty, there’s nothing like my mother’s home cooking, and my father and I have spent many an evening in the kitchen, talking about everything from the Red Sox to Barack Obama – and they like to see their grandson, but more than that, I just like being in the house. While my wife moved around a lot as a kid, I am very fortunate in that my parents still live in the house in which I grew up. Until I moved in with my wife a few months before we married, it was the only home I had ever known, and though it may be lacking in a great many respects – my mother wants nothing more than to win the lottery, buy a ton of dynamite, and blow the place up; if you know my mother, you understand that SHE WILL DO THIS if given the opportunity – the simple truth remains that it is home.
The best part about the house is the backyard. Whereas most of the other homes on the street sit parallel to the road, this 215-year-old monster, built by my father’s ancestor Joseph Locke in the 1790s, stands at an angle, maybe fifteen feet from the road at its closest point. This isn’t always a good thing: when I was nine or ten, a drunk driver mistook my parents’ bedroom for an empty parking space, slamming into the outside wall hard enough to separate it from the rest of the building. It’s a fascinating and frightening thing to stand in your living room and look up at a star-filled sky. Fortunately, the accident occurred early in the evening and nobody was injured. On the plus side, they own an acre of land, and a house that sits near the front of an acre of land allows for a huge backyard. My parents’ yard is bordered on three sides by a stone wall and squeezed another fifteen feet or so by a variety of trees, leaves, and other growth. Down the middle, though, was a wide, open expanse of sometimes rocky, sometimes mossy grass that allowed plenty of room for four children (and later, their children) to run unencumbered.
That wide, open space was where I learned to play and love baseball.
Not long after we arrived last weekend, as I was searching the freezer for something to eat, my father mentioned that my older nephew had decided, at the age of eleven, to try his hand at Little League for the first time. My father and brother-in-law had been taking him out and working with him a little bit on throwing and catching, but my father thought that maybe it would somehow help him to see the ball coming from the left side. So we took him out into the backyard to throw the ball around. In keeping with the family tradition begun by my old man, who taught me to play the game while wearing a ratty old Walt Dropo model first baseman’s mitt (that he still owns and uses), I wore a glove that my grandfather gave me twenty years ago. A Pedro Guerrero model, I rarely touched it as a boy, preferring instead the Don Mattingly model that my dad bought me; I used that glove until my freshman coach in high school ordered me to buy a new one that would allow me to actually catch the ball. That new glove served me well enough, but I don’t think it has anybody’s name in it, which is a pity.
So out we went into the spacious backyard (made even more spacious by the violent windstorms that have made a habit of tearing through every year or so and taking down a handful of mountain ash and maples) and threw the ball back and forth while I looked around and had myself a bit of introspective reminiscence. There was the stone wall separating my parents’ yard from the neighboring Ritzos, the first wall I ever hit a ball over; I had probably lost fifty baseballs over the years in the huge piles of dead leaves on the edge of Mr. Ritzo’s property.
There was the wall at the back of the property, about 200 feet away, where I took aim as a ten-year-old, celebrating wildly whenever a long drive so much as approached it. In my mind’s eye, there was the old metal swing set that doubled as my first base and the tire nailed to the tree that served as second. The tree that I considered third base, where I once made my five-year-old sister stand and act as a third base coach, giving me signals to slide or stand, is still standing – well, part of it, anyway; the rest has succumbed to the wind.
As my son ran wildly across the open space, chasing a ball here, scampering through a puddle there, I thought about some of the baseball-related moments that took place in that yard. My Aunt Rose, who later helped inspire a lengthy obsession with Jewish major leaguers, whipping a low throw that I couldn’t handle, bruising my left thumb for the first time. My brother leaning his upper body back, back, back, his hand almost touching the ground like Juan Marichal, then unleashing towering pop flies for me to circle under and catch. My father, during a routine game of catch, accidentally hitting me on the head with a throw, the impact of the ball actually leaving a small indentation just above the hairline (I still remember the way he tried to make me laugh after the fact, to make me forget the pain).
I learned to play baseball there, often by myself: throw the ball up in the air, hit it, run to pick it up, back to home plate, repeat. Emulating the Red Sox lineup could have turned me into a pretty fair switch-hitter, had I ever dared give it a try when the stakes were real. When he was available, my dad would come out and throw a few, or hit some grounders and pop flies, rewarding good plays with quiet praise and explaining necessary improvements with clear direction.
I tried to do the same with my nephew, offering a few simple instructions on which way to turn his glove and why he needed to move his feet instead of trying to reach out and stab at errant throws. What I found difficult to express, though, was something that my father never really talked about with me, not explicitly anyway: the fact that throwing and catching a ball is just the beginning. To really know the game, to really love it, you have to move beyond those simple acts until you find something deeper and more personal.
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My favorite baseball player growing up wasn’t Dwight Evans, or Jim Rice, or Mike Greenwell, or Ellis Burks, or Marty Barrett, or Wade Boggs (although, as a left handed hitter, I was thankful for any lefty to emulate in the lineup). No, my favorite was Kevin Romine, an extra outfielder who played 331 games in seven seasons with the Red Sox. Romine was a star at Arizona State in the early 1980s, compiling a school-record .408 batting average and 86 stolen bases in two seasons and playing a key role on the 1981 team that won the College World Series. He was drafted by the Red Sox in 1982 and signed by scout Ray Boone. In 1996, he was elected to the Arizona State Hall of Fame; in 2006, the school retired his number. His older son, Andrew, was the last player to wear it.
I didn’t know any of that when I was eight years old, though. All I knew about Romine was that he was born in Exeter, New Hampshire (just a couple towns over from where I grew up; who cares if he was raised in California?), he had an awesome ‘stache, and he hit the first walkoff homerun I ever saw.
Most of the details of that game were fuzzy until Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference came along. Without those two resources, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what I’m about to tell you.
The homerun came on July 16, 1988, against the Kansas City Royals. Romine entered the game in the sixth inning as a pinch-runner, part of a four run rally that trimmed a 6-0 Royals lead to 6-4. He stayed in the game in right field and drew his third walk of the season the next inning before being stranded. The Sox tied it with two runs in the eighth. They actually had a chance to take the lead going into the ninth, with runners on first and second, one out, and Boggs at the plate, but the eventual American League batting champion grounded to Brad Wellman at second, who threw to Bill Pecota for one and on to George Brett at first for one of the Chicken Man’s league-leading 23 double plays.
Boggs was the Red Sox best hitter in 1988 – he would lead the league in nine categories, including OPS – and as such was penciled into the third spot in the lineup. Once upon a time, he would have been followed by the dangerous Jim Rice. But because this was 1988 and Rice was deep into Year 2 of a sudden and precipitous decline, he was no longer feared, and no longer Boston’s cleanup man. That honor instead went to Greenwell, the second-year player who had succeeded the legendary triumvirate of Williams, Yaz, and Rice in front of the Green Monster and was making it look like he would one day join them on the Mount Rushmore of Red Sox left fielders. On his way to a second-place finish in the MVP voting behind Oakland’s Jose Canseco, Greenwell finished the season with a .325 batting average, 22 homeruns, and 119 RBI.
When the time came for the ninth inning to start on July 16, however, Greenwell wasn’t in the game. He was the player Romine had replaced as a pinch-runner back in the sixth inning. Why did Joe Morgan pull one of his best hitters midway through a winnable game? Who knows. Maybe Greenwell was feeling under the weather that day. Maybe Morgan thought the team needed a spark after falling behind 6-0. Maybe the new manager just got one of his soon-to-be famous (or infamous, depending on who you asked) hunches and decided to make a change. Whatever the reason, when the ninth inning started, eight-year-old Brian was sitting in front of the television waiting for Steve Farr to pitch to Kevin Romine, a fourth or fifth outfielder with almost exactly half the batting average and OPS of Mike Greenwell.
It took so little time for Romine to become a permanent piece of my baseball fanhood. He had hit nearly 50 homeruns in the minor leagues, the majority of them at Triple-A Pawtucket, but none in the majors. That changed on Farr’s first pitch: Romine turned on the offering and lofted it high and deep and gone into the screen above the Green Monster. His first major league homerun won the game for the Red Sox, 7-6.
Almost exactly four months later, at the age of 27, he became a father for the third time when his second son, Austin, was born.
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The familial aspect is one of my favorite things about baseball. You could 
probably say it’s the thing that makes it personal for me. We learn the game from our fathers and brother and uncles, so there’s something special about looking out on the field and seeing a guy and knowing that your father watched his father play, or that his brother plays for the Reds, or sitting at the kitchen table with your uncle and hearing stories about the great players he saw when he was young. It strengthens the generational bonds and adds a dimension to the game that not all other sports can boast.
The scout who signed Kevin Romine, Ray Boone, was the first piece in the first three-generation family in baseball history; his son, Bob, spent nineteen seasons with the Phillies, Angels, and Royals, and two grandsons – Bret and Aaron – played a combined 26 seasons in the majors.
Three years ago, Romine (now a police detective in California) himself officially became the patriarch of a baseball family when his two boys, Andrew and Austin, were selected by the Yankees and Angels in the fifth and second rounds, respectively, of the 2007 draft. Austin, born four months after his father’s homerun beat the Royals, was taken straight out of high school; Andrew followed Kevin’s footsteps to Arizona State, twice played in the College World Series, and was named to the school’s All-Decade Team.
Though I saw news of the Romine brothers’ exploits – Austin was the Yankees Minor League Player of the Year in 2009 – I had never really put two and two together and connected them to Kevin. Later in the evening, after playing ball with my nephew, I sat down to peruse the Baseball America Prospect Handbook. It was there that I stumbled upon the Brothers Romine and finally realized that they were the offspring of my long ago hero. Austin is the better prospect of the duo – a 21-year-old catcher expected to replace Jorge Posada within a couple years, he is the second-rated prospect in the entire Yankees organization – while 24-year-old Andrew came in at #27 on the list for the Angels and projects more as a player who will have to get by on defensive excellence.
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My son turns three-years-old this summer. He’s not at the level his cousin is, ready to go outside and learn the right way to catch and throw and swing a bat; he’s far more interested in picking up sticks, throwing rocks, jumping in puddles, chasing balloons. And that’s okay, obviously – he’s TWO. The other day, though, somebody gave him a miniature plastic baseball. Every so often, he’ll pick it up, show it to me, and declare, “Bay ball!” which makes me think there’s a love of the game somewhere in him, and someday it will find a way to the surface.
I love parallels. When Kevin Romine hit that homerun to beat the Royals, he was 27 years old; I was eight. In the 2016 season, Austin Romine will be 27 years old; my son will be eight. And I like to believe that even though he’ll probably be playing for the Yankees, Austin will do something to make my son say, “Wow,” and we’ll go out to the backyard with his cousin and my dad and have a catch while I tell them about this guy’s dad, a guy named Kevin who was once my favorite player.
23 Mar
Just about every team that uses the standard MiLB.com web template has a poll up in the lower right corner of the page. The questions generally ask something like, “What 2010 promotion are you most excited about?” or “Which player are you most excited to see in _____ in 2010?”
This isn’t amusing on its own. Look at the home page for the Syracuse Chiefs, however, and you’ll get a good laugh:
I’m pretty sure that 20% for Wang is mine – I threw him a courtesy vote so I could see what the actual tally was – because as cool as it would be to see a guy who won 46 games from 2006-08, including 19 each in the first two years, I can’t imagine anyone would be more excited to see him than Strasburg.
22 Mar
The Seattle Times is reporting that former Mariners star Bret Boone is taking a managerial job with the Victoria Seals of the Golden League. The team is located in British Columbia, so the 40-year-old Boone may be in a perfect position to draw fans in the Pacific NW to indie baseball this summer.
“This is a fantastic opportunity for me to start the second chapter of my baseball career,” said Boone, 40. “Returning to the Pacific Northwest is a thrill for me.”
Boone’s position with the Seals marks his first foray into professional baseball management.
The Seals open their season May 21. The Golden Baseball League is an independent league featuring nine teams, from Calgary to Tucson.
Is it just me, or is Boone looking a bit Cal Ripkenesque in this particular photo?
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