Minor League Baseball Quotes

Detectives discovered gross contradictions to Eric’s insta-profile already cemented in the media. In Plattsburgh, friends described a sports enthusiast hanging out with minorities. Two of Eric’s best friends turned out to be Asian and African American. The Asian boy was a jock to boot. Eric played soccer and Little League. He followed the Rockies even before the family moved to Colorado, frequently sporting their baseball cap. By junior high he had grown obsessed with computers, and eventually with popular video games.

You see,” Bouton wrote, “you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” Truer words were never written.

This is the same advice they give people who’ve just come out of rehab. After a grueling period of work (or what passes for grueling work in our soft-handed world) you will crave some kind of reward. Don’t let this cause you to rush into a big decision, like a new house or a marriage or partial ownership of a minor league baseball team, that you may later regret. The interesting thing about this piece of advice is that no one ever takes it.

BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?

In June 1981, a strike shuttered the major leagues for fifty days, the first time in baseball history that players walked out during the season. Determined to make his people earn their keep, George Steinbrenner ordered his major-league coaches into the minors to scout and help mentor the organization’s prospects. Berra drew Nashville, where Merrill was the manager. Merrill was a former minor-league catcher with a degree in physical education from the University of Maine. He began working for the Yankees in 1978 at West Haven, Connecticut, in the Eastern League and moved south when the Yankees took control of the Southern League’s Nashville team in 1980. Suddenly, in mid-1981, the former catcher who had never made it out of Double-A ball had the most famous and decorated Yankees backstop asking him, “What do you want me to do?” Wait a minute, Merrill thought. Yogi Berra is asking me to supervise him? “Do whatever you want,” Merrill said. “No,” Berra said. “Give me something specific.” And that was when Merrill began to understand the existential splendor of Yogi Berra, whom he would come to call Lawrence or Sir Lawrence in comic tribute to his utter lack of pretense and sense of importance. “He rode buses with us all night,” Merrill said. “You think he had to do that? He was incredible.” One day Merrill told him, “Why don’t you hit some rollers to that lefty kid over there at first base?” Berra did as he was told and later remarked to Merrill, “That kid looks pretty good with the glove.” Berra knew a prospect when he saw one. It was Don Mattingly, who at the time was considered expendable by a chronically shortsighted organization always on the prowl for immediate assistance at the major-league level.

Managing games comes second. Managing people comes first.

so-and-so is using?’ You just knew. I never held it against anyone. It was one of those things where you knew they were just trying to keep their jobs, extend their careers. I guess I didn’t

When Michael returned to the Bulls in 1995 after a year and a half of playing minor-league baseball, he didn’t know most of the players and he felt completely out of sync with the team. It wasn’t until he got into a fight with Steve Kerr at practice that he realized he needed to get to know his teammates more intimately.

I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending...But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained.

I heard myself sigh heavily, and I wondered if this was really how it all ended; framed by a brainless thug, shunned by my colleagues, stalked by a whining computer nerd who couldn’t even make it in minor-league baseball. It was well beyond ignoble, and very sad—I’d shown such tremendous early progress, too. The

Fifteen minutes in the majors means you’re a great baseball player,” said Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland—who never got his fifteen minutes above the Triple-A level. “People just can’t understand how good you have to be to get there at all.

Lucas, she’s from a family of genetic baseball beasts! Her dad’s a freaking All-Star and she’s got one brother playing pro, another in the minors and two more tearing up the college leagues. They’ve probably taught her everything they know.

I’m twenty-six and I have more money than I know what to do with,” Orion explained. “I also own a private submarine, a minor league baseball team, and forty percent of Madagascar.” He yanked

The Al Saud operate something like baseball’s farm team system, in which ambitious young princes start off with relatively junior minor league positions and, if they are talented and fortunate, advance to more senior major league posts.

Take away the family as a cohesive unit, and the spread of drugs, crime, teenage pregnancy and truancy seemed easier to explain.

I’m twenty-six and I have more money than I know what to do with,” Orion explained. “I also own a private submarine, a minor league baseball team, and forty percent of Madagascar.

The day’s most notable clash occurred when a group of pacifists visited Lodge, an acerbic Boston Brahmin with a white beard. Lodge was an enthusiastic proponent of war who thought Wilson weak-willed, snorting contemptuously at the president’s call for “peace without victory” of a few months earlier. When the senator stepped into the hallway outside his office to meet the pacifist delegation, its spokesman, Alexander Bannwart, a former minor-league baseball player, attacked Lodge’s enthusiasm for war. The senator was furious. “National degeneracy and cowardice are worse than war!” he told Bannwart, who retorted, “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward! You’re a damned coward!” This was too much for the 67-year-old Lodge, who shouted, “You’re a damned liar!” and punched Bannwart, 36, to the floor. Bannwart fought back, slamming Lodge against a closed door. Office workers, police, and even a passing Western Union messenger joined the melee in defense of the senator. Lodge triumphantly yelled, “I’m glad I hit him first!” but it was the bloodied Bannwart whom the police hauled away in a paddy wagon.

Nobody knows the day it happened, the team it happened against, or any of the particulars. The story has been told a hundred different ways—many of them by Joe Jackson himself. What we do know for sure is that in 1908, while playing either semiprofessional baseball or minor league baseball in and around Greenville, a prodigy named Joe Jackson played a baseball game without shoes.

I floated away into that omnipresent timelessness of baseball, where boys with a dream and long-expired Major Leaguers orbit forever on equal planes.

You don't ask the sun why you orbit, you just orbit. You let the gravitational waves of the baseball season pull you in and you surrender yourself, happily.

It turned out that life only mattered inasmuch as it could be sectioned off on baseball's terms.

Baseball taught me how to love. The game made sense to me, and spending time with it felt more like an obsessive relationship than a simple want.

From the first moment I started to uncover the infinite mysteries of baseball--like why players chose to wear certain numbers, what the brown stuff in players' mouths was, and just what the hell a balk entailed--I was hooked.

See what I mean?' Schmarzo said. 'This life fucks with you, man. I always say it's like scratching lottery tickets: when you have enough guys together playing the lottery--buying scratch-offs--of course one or two of them is gonna win big. It's inevitable. But they win and you're left sitting there scratching away. you throw your money and time away one dollar and one day at a time. But those guys won, right? Maybe I can too. So we keep coming back for more until we realize we're broke and out of time.' He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and got to work staring another hole through the floor. 'That's what it's like to play single-A baseball.

Days during the baseball season don't start with M, T, W, F, or S. They only start with G or O: game day or off day.

You realize that the sleeping stadium is more beautiful at night, with the unshakable quietus rooting it to the earth. It rests like a graveyard--empty but throbbing all at once. With the pollution of light extinguished, maybe you even see the Dog Star blinking back at you.

League before landing the job in Charlotte in 1998. He was only thirty

Matt Swierad has been broadcasting minor-league baseball for twenty-three years—ever since he graduated from Jacksonville University with a degree in history. He spent seven years in the Class A South Atlantic League before landing the job in Charlotte in 1998. He was only thirty-one at the time and was on the path he wanted to be to get to the major leagues. Seven years later, Swierad was still in Charlotte and beginning to wonder if the major leagues were just a pipe dream. Then came an unexpected—if temporary—opportunity. Jerry Coleman, who had been doing play-by-play for the San Diego Padres forever, was being inducted into the Hall of Fame. The Padres needed someone to fill in for the three games that Coleman would miss during Hall of Fame weekend and put out a notice that anyone interested in the three-day job could send in an application. Swierad almost didn’t bother. “I figured there was no chance, that someone who had an in with someone out there would probably get it,” he said. “My wife finally convinced me that I should at least give it a shot.” The Knights were in Buffalo on a long road trip and had gotten to the hotel early one morning to find that they couldn’t check into their rooms right away—a frequent occurrence of Triple-A travel. When they finally got in their rooms, Swierad walked over to a nearby food court to get some lunch.

But if his speed was a gift of God, his control was the curse of Satan, for Steve Dalkowsky was wilder than a northeast gale. His fastball would explode in the stands - a hundred feet off target - and knock batters out of the on-deck circle. Batboys cowered in the dugout. He gave up more bases on balls in a single season than anyone in the history of the California League, and once in Stockton threw six wild pitches in a row. In Aberdeen one night he struck out seventeen and walked sixteen. "Hey, Dalkowsky, you pitchin' tonight?" a fan yelled after three warm-up pitches missed the screen behind home plate and splintered box seats. Dalkowsky mumbled yes and the fan shouted back, "Then I'm getting the hell out of here, and I'm taking my kids with me.

Baseball at Kearney differed from ball in a big-league park in this minor respect: here that ball was still claimed by the management, regardless of what fan was able to get his hooks on it. Before the time of London, however, boys and cops had a time of it, trying to enforce the claim. Into the proper row ran the dog, pushing past knees. There was no ball to be seen, and no one to give the culprit away, but a dog’s nose was able to tell when he reached a man with the ball in his pocket. It would be bad form to threaten force to get it back, so London merely stared the man down until in embarrassment he had to fish the ball out of his pocket. Nor would London let him throw it back over the wire to its rightful owners; he blocked the pitch, determined that the ball was his, to be surrendered only to him, his until he could turn it over to the cop.

The term in baseball nowadays is a “walk-off home run.” It didn’t exist until Kirk Gibson hit his famous pinch-hit home run off Dennis Eckersley in game one of the 1988 World Series and Eckersley referred to it as “a walk-off,” meaning, quite simply, that when someone does what Gibson did to him in that game, there’s nothing left to do except walk off the mound into the dugout and then into the clubhouse.

Before a small, unknown Methodist college was transformed into Duke University in the late 1920s, the city of Durham had been a backwater, known mostly for minor league baseball and cigarettes.

That’s a Russian Yukutsk 260!” Catherine exclaimed excitedly. “Orion! What on earth are you doing with it?” “I’m twenty-six and I have more money than I know what to do with,” Orion explained. “I also own a private submarine, a minor league baseball team, and forty percent of Madagascar.