The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  This is exciting! I’m not nervous at all! After the successful pitch, I celebrate with a hamburger. I eat alone and read a book. I finish my hamburger. I pay. I get to the sidewalk. It hits me. I’m nervous.

  * * *

  There is no reserve clause in the Pacific Association, and there are no multiyear contracts or farm systems. Every season starts with a blank whiteboard. In January, we start filling it with names.

  A handful of players from the previous year’s team are interested in returning and are good enough for Ben, Theo, and me to agree right away to bring back. Designated hitter Joel Carranza is a former draft pick of the Tampa Bay Rays who never played affiliated ball but did set our league’s record with 19 home runs in 2014. (Our season is his off-season—he works at a charter school in Florida the rest of the year.) Andrew Parker is a twenty-four-year-old catcher with the league’s quickest “pop” time—the 1.9 seconds between the ball popping his glove and then popping the shortstop’s glove on a throw down to second—and a walks-and-power approach at the plate. (He is studying to be an accountant; he’s one of the few players in this league who has no dreams of gutting out a career in affiliated ball, and this will be his last summer in the sport regardless of what happens.) Matt Hibbert is a speedy outfielder who had the Stompers’ second-most steals and third-best on-base percentage in 2014. He wants to fight for the leadoff and center field jobs.

  That’s it. A team of three, with the other nineteen players to be winnowed down from a list that starts at seven billion. We don’t know where to look, we don’t know what to look for, and we don’t know whom to ask. This puts us at the mercy of what resembles an elaborate ring of email scammers, each promising us huge returns on tiny investments. These emails come from players, parents, college coaches, and amateur “scouts” who produce lists of indy-qualified players as a hobby. Some come from no-rent agents who gather indy-ball clients on the off chance one will someday make the majors, there being absolutely no profit in a 3 percent cut of a Pacific Association wage. They send us emails that have seventy teams cc’d, or emails personally tailored to us and our needs. Some are submitted through the Stompers’ general email address, the same way somebody would request directions to the park or ad-buy rates on outfield-wall signs. They contain the grammatical carelessness of a grocery list (“Hope to hear form you soon”). They get sent before spellcheck review (“I strained both my laburnums in shoulders”). They name-drop fringy retired major leaguers (Jamie Brewington! Denny Hocking!) who, we’re told, will vouch for these aspirants. They recount personal narratives that give away the players’ limitations: the long list of teams that somehow overlooked their talent, the now-famous former teammates who moved up the ladder and left them playing “what if?” on men’s league teams, the overdeveloped sense of baseball’s unfairness. “Like at the time of Jackie Robinson, there is something not right with the game we all love, there is too much emphasis on age and not enough emphasis on ability,” one tells us.

  And they lie. They lie like you can lie only if you believe the lie, like you lie when you have to believe the lie, when your career depends on the lie, because the lie is the only thing that keeps you running and lifting and writing emails begging strangers to take a chance on you. One after another promises to run a 6.5 in the 60-yard sprint—a time that would be elite even at the major league level, the time that baseball’s fastest man, Billy Hamilton, was once reportedly clocked. One says he runs “approximately” 6.3, but how approximate (plus or minus a second?) isn’t specified. One says he ran a 6.6 at a tryout at which (spoiler here) I was holding the stopwatch, a tryout at which only one person cracked 7. They say things like “I’m a great kid.” They attach a video of a “520+ ft home run,” a video that definitely shows a ball being hit—oh, I don’t know, pretty far? They elide; they list their .300 college batting average but avoid mentioning the name of their no-name college. (“Hit .171/.237/.228 [batting average / on base / slugging] in senior year of high school, so we can probably rule out UCLA,” we note about one.) They list their stats only up to 2013 if the 2014 edition shows too much suck. They blame injuries for every bad stat line but swear they’re healthy now, or they blame coaches for tinkering with their swings but swear they’re back to form. They promise velocity like online dating profiles promise fifteen-years-ago bodies. (One email bragging of a low-90s fastball came the day before a league tryout. The pitcher sat mid-70s on our radar gun. He knew he was coming to a tryout, knew we’d see the thing itself, and still padded by 15 mph.) These candidates are all flawed, and it rarely takes more than two more minutes online to find that flaw: the suspension for throwing a bat at a pitcher, the disastrous season in a lower indy league, the mean-spirited Twitter account that former teammates made to parody the guy, the five years of inactivity, the shoulder surgery that preceded a release from affiliated ball.

  We give the first fifty or so the respect that a dream deserves, but after a while we skim, mock as appropriate, and file away. The sense of unfairness these guys have? It’s not entirely wrong. Even we don’t take their abilities seriously, and while some of the mockery is mom-literally-wrote-your-cover-letter-related, much of it comes down to a decision-making shorthand that we start to develop: If you’re so good, why are you writing to us? This is a terrible, fallacious bit of reasoning; every player we ultimately sign will be, by definition, available to us, and many of them, we hope, will be valuable parts of a winning team. The question must be asked, but instead of asking it rhetorically—to be answered with a “pfft”—we should be asking it sincerely: What is this guy’s “why,” and does the “why” matter to us? Nobody good will be available to us without a good reason, but good reasons almost certainly exist.

  * * *

  I first heard about Fehlandt Lentini the previous summer, when for an article at Baseball Prospectus I went looking for candidates to be designated pinch runners in the majors. Lentini was one of my candidates, having stolen 42 bases in 42 tries for the Long Island Ducks of the independent Atlantic League. (He would reach 46-for-46 by season’s end.) It was a tongue-in-cheek article, listing candidates as diverse as Triple-A veterans and Division II college outfielders, and I only went deep enough on Lentini to discover that he had put out a rap album and that he had played in five different independent leagues since the Houston Astros released him from their minor league system twelve years earlier.

  Not all indy leagues are created equal. Through natural selection and market forces, the hierarchy of these different levels has become nearly as well defined as the A/Double-A/Triple-A structure of affiliated ball. Lentini’s most recent job in the Atlantic League put him at the very top of this collection. It’s where released big leaguers go to stay active between job offers; to show they’re healthy after rehabbing major injuries; or, more often, to fail one last time in the final days of a long career. The last category has recently included former rookie of the year Dontrelle Willis and Sean Burroughs, who was once the best hitting prospect in the minors. In that 2014 season, Lentini had nine teammates with major league experience, and most of the rest had experience in the affiliated minor leagues. The average age in the league is twenty-nine. The Ducks play their home games in Bethpage Ballpark, with a capacity of 6,000 and an average nightly attendance of 5,067. That’s 5,000 fans a night across a 140-game season, more total fans than the average Triple-A team draws. And the level of play is just a tick lower than that Triple-A team’s.

  Just below the Atlantic League is the American Association, a twelve-team league concentrated in the Midwest that includes the St. Paul Saints, for a while the most famous (and profitable) indy-ball team—its owners include the comedian Bill Murray and Mike Veeck, the son of the legendary baseball owner/GM/showman Bill Veeck. American Association games draw 3,300 fans a night. The Wichita Wingnuts, one of the more successful franchises, had seven players in 2014 with major league experience. The average player is twenty-seven years old.

  Next are the prospect leagues, which hav
e shorter schedules, younger rosters, and a level of play comparable to Single-A. In the Can-Am League, with six permanent teams in New York, New Jersey, and Canada, there is usually a player or two with big league experience—in 2015, that would include the former All-Star relief pitcher Eric Gagne, who would come briefly out of retirement to throw 4 1/3 wild innings. The Frontier League, with clubs in midsize midwestern cities, has strict age requirements to keep it dense with prospects—which, in turn, attract big league scouts, who make this the most attractive league for young players. The average age there is twenty-four and, like the Can-Am League, its per-game attendance hovers at about 2,300.

  And then there are the lowest levels, where everything gets really far-flung: the Pecos League (where ex-players tell us the $50-per-week paychecks sometimes hinge on whether the GM thinks you played well enough) and the Intercounty Baseball League (where the stats don’t even make it onto Baseball-Reference.com) and the start-ups that don’t even make it through their first seasons—the Mt. Rainier League and the Ozarks Professional Baseball League and the East Coast Baseball League, all of which canceled their seasons early and sent scores of hopeful players back home without pay.

  The Pacific Association is at a level higher than the Pecos League and the fly-by-nights—we pay more, we pay reliably, our stats make Baseball-Reference, and players who come from those dicier leagues tend to see their numbers go down when they join ours. But we’re undeniably lower than the Atlantic, the Association, the Can-Am, and the Frontier. That line in Moneyball: “There are rich teams, and there are poor teams, and then there’s fifty feet of crap, and then there’s us.” Yeah. That’s still six minor league levels and four indy-ball levels ahead of us. Every player we sign is aiming to move up to any of those levels.

  Which is all to say that a player like Fehlandt Lentini, who in 2014 hit .290 with extra-base power and played center field in the Atlantic League, would absolutely not be available to us without a good reason. In fact, San Rafael, another team in the league, had once tried to sign him by promising to move in the fences so he could hit 60 home runs. Lentini didn’t want to hit 60 home runs, and he’d always hated the lights in San Rafael—too high, not enough of them. But we could offer him two things that San Rafael couldn’t offer back then: the city of Sonoma, where he had grown up and where he wanted to live to be with his family while his sister was in high school; and a position as player-manager. At thirty-seven years old, Lentini hasn’t yet slowed down—he’s in remarkable shape and an obsessive student of hitting mechanics—but soon he will. If he wants to stay in baseball, he’ll have to make the transition to coaching and managing.

  What we don’t know is whether he’d be a good manager. In our first conference call, Ben, Theo, and I talk for an hour about what we want in a manager. The previous year, Theo had fired his manager in spring training—the guy had “lost the clubhouse,” as they say—and replaced him with Ray Serrano, a former catcher in the Atlanta Braves system and the Stompers’ designated hitter/first baseman. Ray was, in Theo’s estimation, worth six or seven wins all by himself. His attributes nicely round up much of what we want in a manager: He was an enforcer, with a sturdy physique and an unpredictable, this-guy-might-deck-me personality. He knew which of his players’ excesses to tolerate, and just how much to tolerate them. He spoke Spanish. He wasn’t political. He became one of Theo’s best friends, so it was never a pain to be handcuffed to him for six months. His salary demands were modest. He respected players and they respected him, which, Theo says, “created a chemistry in the clubhouse that I’ve never seen.” His only negatives were his lack of fame or local ties—you couldn’t put “Ray Serrano” in a press release—and his in-game tactics, which were conventionally competent but rarely creative.

  After that summer he joined the Braves’ minor league system as a coach, so we need to replace him. As we talk about candidates on our first day, we have six names:

  • The former Blue Jays manager Tim Johnson, who was fired after a short, successful career when it was discovered that his motivational, first-person Vietnam stories were fiction.

  • The retired major league catcher Kelly Stinnett, who had managed a team in the now-defunct Freedom Pro Baseball League in 2013.

  • Joey Gomes, the brother of big league outfielder Jonny Gomes. Jonny is a local hero from nearby Petaluma and a legendarily good clubhouse presence.

  • One of Theo’s friends, an assistant coach at Cal Berkeley.

  • The longtime coach of the Sonoma State baseball team, John Goelz, who is known for stressing extreme patience at the plate and raising money for his program.

  • “Spaceman” Bill Lee, the former major league pitcher/weird guy.

  Each brings something—in order: experience; ambition; a clubhouse-ready attitude; an amiable nature we knew we could work with; local ties; and publicity. But none of them seems all that likely to fulfill our vision for what a baseball team can do—not that we even know precisely what that vision will be. We just want somebody who will check off some boxes and show an inclination to listen.

  Fehlandt Lentini, who first catches our imagination as an extremely unlikely roster addition, becomes candidate number seven. There are red flags, to be sure: He is a known hothead, a player whose most-viewed YouTube highlight shows him getting in an argument with an umpire during his days in the American Association. That’s not so damning, except for the backstory: Fehlandt claims that the umpire already hated him for his constant arguing, so he told the catcher to keep moving outside with his target, farther, farther, farther, pledging he’d call it a strike no matter what. The ump, Fehlandt complains years later, just wanted to piss him off.

  During a long lunch interview with me a few weeks later, Fehlandt recounts every manager who ever pissed him off—the guys he thought were phonies, the guys he thought were drunks, the guys he thought were stupid, the guys he never felt had his back, the douchebag cocksuckers and the motherfuckers. He even rips a local junior varsity coach for using unconventional tactics. I leave that lunch worried about his obvious and consistent distrust of authority.

  But I’m looking for reasons to say yes to him, rather than reasons to say no. Unlike players, who are mostly in their early twenties, with few expenses in their lives, with delusions that they might still make the majors, and who flood our inboxes with emails and offer to fly themselves out just for a tryout, potential managers are hard to find. They’re older, they have families, they have roots, they have perspective, and they have far less interest in going to some short-term summer job just to hang out and get laid by the locals. We can’t count on the man of our dreams walking in the door.

  As Fehlandt and I keep talking, I keep finding boxes to check off. The first one is the biggest: He’d almost certainly be one of the best players in the league—maybe the best—and because manager salaries are exempt from the league’s $15,000-a-month salary cap, his pay would count only as the league minimum. This would be like having a Mike Trout on a rookie’s salary. Nobody (except, apparently, Theo) has succeeded yet in quantifying a manager’s impact, but it’s almost certainly less than one Mike Trout. Not only that, but his skill set would give us tactical leverage: We want fast outfielders, really fast ones, so we can use a two-man outfield and a five-man infield if the right situation comes up. He is undeniably baseball smart: He’s a base runner who can exploit a defense without giving up any unnecessary outs, and that requires a kind of baseball genius that statheads love. And if he doesn’t know what WAR or wRC+ stands for, he at least seems open-minded. I bring up, for instance, the idea of having a female pitcher. “If there’s a solid chick? You ball out, you ball out. I don’t care what gender,” he replies. He’s also willing to take the job even though I’ve just told him a couple of statheads with no playing experience are going to be his bosses.

  He has contacts—he’s played with hundreds of guys in leagues higher than ours and in prestigious Latin American winter leagues, and he knows dozens of higher-level
managers who could text him if one of their players loses a roster spot. These networks are essential for indy-team construction, and even if Ben and I figure out a way to build a team by spreadsheet, we will need a network like this to fill in blank spaces. He is local, and something of a local celebrity at that, so bringing him on board to be the face of the team would ease pressure from the owner to sign undeserving local players for publicity. And for a manager, he is young. Chris Jaffe, the author of the exhaustive book Evaluating Baseball’s Managers, has found that managers tend to peak at about age forty-eight, and he has written that managers who get much older lose their ability to personally connect with players. Fehlandt isn’t forty-eight, but he would be managing a much younger group than major league managers do. We hope that as a player-manager, and as a young, relatively cool guy, he could be a better liaison between us and the players than an older, more removed manager might be.

  Fehlandt is also likable as hell. Shortly after our lunch meeting, we talk for three and a half hours in the Stompers office about how to motivate players—BBQ lunch is better than beer—and about the worst owners he has played for. “They give me a flight, my bags are $60, and they tell me after they’ll only reimburse me $50. You serious? You’re penny-pinching me over $10? And you knew that when you set the flight up, why you setting me up with that airline?” We also talk about the powerhouse team we might build together. We debate a pitcher he watched throw the day before named Jon Rand, a lefty who came highly recommended by a coach Feh knew, and who showed he could mix five pitches with good command. But when I Google the guy, I find terrible college stats, innings totals that suggest his coach clearly didn’t trust him, and a low-80s fastball.