The Only Rule Is It Has to Work Read online

  “Eat together as a team as much as possible. For the first few days, have a ‘don’t sit with the same person twice’ rule. Watch to make sure that everyone has a buddy. Actively approach guys who are friendly, team-leader types and ask them to keep an eye out for loners. Some guys do like to just be by themselves and that’s okay, but loneliness might be the most dangerous thing a baseball team has to guard against.

  “Accept the fact that there will be a stoner contingent and that one way that guys will bond is going out and getting high together.

  “If there is a fight over the music in the clubhouse, it means that there is an issue brewing that you do not know about. Investigate and remediate.”

  I think about doing any of this and my palms sweat.

  * * *

  The first thing a person needs to do before working in baseball is figure out what he thinks about baseball players. Not his relationship with major league stars—those guys are just as detached from our own world as the Rolling Stones and Billy the Kid and Zeus and Han Solo; they’re at best semifictions, built into legends who achieve our greatest ambitions or suffer through our worst fears. Yes, they are as human as we are, but where we struggle to cut dimes from our electric bill, they struggle to add millions to their contracts, and where we worry about this cough that won’t go away, they worry about damage to ligaments and tendons that have no practical value in our world. They exist for history, and we take joy from them because we accept that they are superior at an arbitrary assortment of skills that we have collectively decided have value.

  Rather, we must come to terms with what we think of the best kid in our first youth league, the one whose dad coached our town’s All-Star team, the one with the batting cage in his backyard and a competitive travel team that he cared more about than our everybody-plays weekend Little League squad. For many of us, that kid was our first exposure to celebrity—people in town knew him in a way that people in town never knew us. But he was also our peer, walking alongside us or, more likely, a few steps ahead of us. He was our teammate, but when we both look at the team picture twenty-five years later we fixate on him while he can’t quite place our face. And we, who grew at the wrong pace or in the wrong direction, also grew to envy him, or to fear him, or to disregard him, or to admire him, or simply to coexist as equals with him. It’s important to know which, because the twenty-two men on our club were all that kid. Whether Ben and I try to be their friends or try to be their bosses, whether we rule as dictators or democrats, our own prejudices will feed subtext into everything we do. They’ll notice that subtext, so we must, too.

  My answer to the question is revealed by my sweaty palms on this first day of spring training. It terrifies me how terrified I am. It’s appropriate to be nervous—the prospect of speaking in front of a group of strangers always puts me on edge—but that I’m this nervous tells me I’m not as mature and fully self-actualized as I thought I was. I realize that I never did quit thinking that Adam Ferguson was, by virtue of having the strongest arm in third grade, a better person than I was. I never did quit thinking that, because other people felt the same way, Adam had a power over me that I couldn’t overcome. I never did quit worrying that my own failure to hit .350 like he did was in fact my innate inability to do anything that well, that I was simply mediocre, and now I worry that I will waste this opportunity as surely as I wasted the chance to drive in the winning run against Adam’s Rangers when I was thirteen. I am more advanced in my career than these players; I am even more famous than most of them will be; I am paid more than they are; and I am here on this side field in Sonoma not because I failed out of something better but because I succeeded repeatedly, as a writer and as a podcaster and as a baseball analyst. But none of this gives me the swagger that they have. Nobody on this field looks at me as more accomplished than them. If I had any doubts that this social order existed, women at bars around Sonoma would surely erase them.

  All of this is to say that, as we walk to the first day of fieldwork on Saturday, May 23, I am aware that at some point this week I will have to stand up in front of these men and explain to them that I, a person they have no built-in respect for, plan to tell them that they, Baseball Stars, will be subject to my charts and tables and crazy ideas. I wear this awareness like a wet patch on the front of my pants.

  * * *

  Meet our team the way we meet them: via a bunch of personal quirks and details that are, in the messy mass of spring training warm-ups and workouts, all we can cling to to remember which guy is which. First are the returnees from the 2014 Stompers. We started with three, but the list has now grown to nine. First-base coach Tommy Lyons is a once and future first baseman recovering from Tommy John surgery; his middle name, amusingly, is John. He carries a wallet made out of duct tape—not wrapped in duct tape, but made of duct tape. “This way nobody will think there’s money in it and steal it,” he says. “There’s not any money in it, actually.” He’s best friends with our catcher Andrew Parker, who gets somebody in town to buy him a bike, and then asks Theo to pay the guy back in Stompers hats. (“No.”) Along with Erik Gonsalves, a right-handed pitcher whose pristine 1978 Firebird enhances his playboy persona, they make up the club’s barhopping cohort. And then there are the rest of the returnees: Eric Schwieger (pronounced “Schweeg,” “Schwayg,” or “Schwag,” depending on the teammate), a 6-foot-8 lefty pitcher who posts pictures of his hunting trophies on Instagram; Jesse Garcia, a lefty who beat cancer and returned to baseball; right-hander Mike Jackson Jr., who sings beautiful snippets of soul music to fill moments of silence; designated hitter Joel Carranza, who set the league’s home run record in 2014 and evangelizes for a sports psychology book that he has read fifty times; infielder T. J. Gavlik, the loyal boyfriend that ballplayers can hold up to their girlfriends as proof that not all ballplayers stray; and outfielder Matt Hibbert, who wears a Darth Vader–style breathing mask before he hits the field each day.

  Then there’s center fielder and manager Fehlandt Lentini, who has worked his connections to bring several players to spring training. His boys are second baseman Sergio Miranda, an affiliated-ball veteran who coaches infield the first day of camp, and shortstop Gered Mochizuki, who screams insults at his friend, our manager. Moch brought with him a former teammate named Matt Walker, a right-handed Canadian pitcher who showed up uninvited by us, but who offers to play the season for free because he doesn’t have a work visa. Lefty pitcher Jerome Godsey plays in a Sunday men’s league with Fehlandt, where he threw a curveball that Fehlandt said was the first curveball in a long time he could “hear.” Godsey, whose day job at a bank separates him from our underpaid players, is our oldest invitee after Feh, and he’s ambivalent about his seniority. “Thirty-five,” he says when a teammate asks him his age, then waits a few beats and comes clean: “Actually, thirty-six.” He’ll provide extra leadership, it is hoped, as will “Captain” Dan Morgan, a foul-mouthed local who stays involved at almost every level of Sonoma baseball. Feh has brought him on to be an all-purpose member of the coaching staff, his most visible roles being pregame barbecuer, in-game pitch counter, and postgame Advil supplier. Feh also brought along Marcus Kimura, a squat Hawaiian infielder who played at Sonoma State and then disappeared for a year, as well as the lefty Jon Rand, who is the dude who won’t shut up but his teammates don’t hate him for it.

  Will Price, an outfielder who came recommended by last year’s manager, Ray Serrano, is the dude who won’t shut up and his teammates do hate him for it. He smokes cigarettes—which is unusual for ballplayers, who mostly smoke weed, and who don’t trust cigarette smokers. Price is, via Ray, “Theo’s guy,” along with infielder Danny Martinez (takes his sandals off and walks barefoot on the field) and catcher Billy Gonzalez (so serious as to avoid any notice at all), whom Theo signed out of the pay-for-play California Winter League. That’s also where he found Takashi Miyoshi, our bench coach, who has a career .147 average in independent ball but who plans to manage in the big leagues someday. Yosh
i (as he is known) also serves as an agent to several Japanese-born indy ballers, and he brought us undersized infielder Yuki Yasuda, notable mainly for keeping alive the Stompers’ streak of seasons with a Yuki on the team—last year’s closer was also named Yuki. When he hits in batting practice, the team cheers for “Yuki bombs,” fly balls that scrape the top of the shallow left-field fence. Theo also gets credit for our lefty-hitting catcher Isaac Wenrich, who quotes The Sandlot, a kids’ baseball movie, the way preachers quote Scripture.

  Then there are the tryout kids: our first pick, Daniel Baptista, who looks to have lost another ten pounds since March; our second pick, Caleb Natov, a pitcher who tells me with total sincerity that he could hit .180 in the majors right now; and our third pick, Mark Hurley, who went to school at Cal State Monterey and runs face-first into a wall trying to catch a deep fly ball in practice. He’s the guy we got for six doughnuts.

  Right-handed pitcher Gregory Paulino and outfielder Collin Forgey are the two players we signed off emails. Paulino, a devout Christian who was cut by the Oakland A’s after they rehabbed his fragile right arm, is our only Dominican player. Forgey was conference player of the year at a Division I school a year earlier. I pushed for him even though his translated numbers on our spreadsheet don’t look great. I buy him a burrito the day before spring training, and we help each other get over our nerves.

  Our spreadsheet guys are almost all among the youngest. Paul Hvozdovic set a record for most times thanking Theo for a $25 Mary’s Pizza Shack gift card. Kristian Gayday makes a fast friendship with Baps at our kickoff banquet, and the two of them are inseparable during the first week. Jeff Conley’s teammates already busted him telling a girl at Town Square that he’s the ace of the Sonoma Stompers, and that he’s going to start for us on Opening Night. And Sean Conroy shows up to the first day of camp in a bright pink T-shirt—“’80s, minimall pink” is how the Stompers broadcaster, Tim Livingston, describes it. He’s the first thing we see when we look at the guys warming up in the outfield.

  “That guy,” Paul Hvozdovic tells me, “does not pass the eye test.” Sean’s torso is a little soft by ballplayer standards, his beard is a little ginger by ballplayer standards, his posture is a little stiff by ballplayer standards, and his shirt is tremendously pink by ballplayer standards. This is the sort of thing that makes me fall wildly in love with him—the confidence, the nonchalance, the mature self-actualization. It is also the sort of thing that makes me worry about how he’ll fit in. “If he’s not good, he’s going to be really easy for everybody to marginalize,” I tell Ben. “To get kicked off this team.”

  We are too bashful to try water balloons—it’s cold and overcast, anyway—and, still viewing these ballplayers as adversaries, we’re really too scared to stand out at all. They’re not afraid to stand out—they’re not afraid to carry duct-tape wallets and sing Otis Redding—but it’s still junior high in our minds, and we don’t want to be the Funny Hat Guys. We don’t have the ease of self that Sean Conroy has. And we haven’t yet figured out the most important part of sabermetrics: having the courage to act. We’re too worried about the imagined insults, about the possibility (which we can’t quantify, and thus fearfully treat as near certain) that we’ll be ignored and kicked out of the club if we don’t play on their terms. The shameful truth is that, like a couple of lame Internet writers, we’re still willing to discuss building a team according to sabermetrics only as a theoretical idea. This, of course, introduces another imagined stigma—that our stathead friends will judge us for our inaction—but that’s a judgment less immediate. “Good ideas,” Ben and I agree. “Smart. We should do those things.” Instead, we sit quietly, observing, trying to fit in but doing the exact opposite of what would actually help us fit in: anything.

  Mostly we observe the relationships among our players. We jot down notes about which throwing partner each player chooses and who puts his hands on a teammate’s shoulders. Team chemistry is notoriously difficult to measure or engineer, but we believe it’s also important—especially at this level, where normal incentives (like million-dollar contracts) don’t exist, where winning is secondary to individual promotion, where players constantly move into and out of the league, and where a decent portion of players are here specifically because they haven’t shown the makeup or discipline to hang in affiliated ball.

  The degree to which a club will get along isn’t quite as immeasurable as chemistry’s reputation says. At the University of Santa Clara, Katerina Bezrukova, an assistant professor of group dynamics, studied Silicon Valley workplaces to see whether group chemistry could be predicted, and how much it mattered. She found that chemistry was a fairly simple math problem, and that predicting trouble was as easy as identifying what she called “fault lines.” Think of fault lines like cliques in high school: If five friends all love cheerleading and five other friends all love marching band, then those ten people are divided into two groups that don’t interact—there’s the fault line between them. But if a couple of students from each group are also into, say, running the school’s canned-food drive, there is now a third, overlapping group. And if there’s a conflict between a cheerleader and a clarinetist, there are now networks for resolving it.

  For an office, this means you don’t want all your twentysomethings to be coders, making similar salaries, coming from similar educational backgrounds, with similar craft beer interests; and all your fortysomethings to be management, hanging out with each other at wine bars. It’s better to have both demographics represented in each group.

  When Bezrukova applied her research to MLB rosters, breaking teams down into simple demographic groups and modeling the fault lines between old and young players, native-born and Latin players, guys making eight figures and guys making the league minimum, and stars and scrubs, she found a swing of about three wins per year that could be explained (she concluded) by fault lines alone. All teams have diversity, but those with lots of overlap—say, the three Venezuelans on the team who play different positions; the high-priced veterans who speak different languages—outperformed teams with severe fault lines. That would mean that chemistry is not just about the individual personalities, but also about the composition of the group. It would mean chemistry isn’t magic but math.

  This can take you to some troubling destinations. We realize that, because we hadn’t signed our top Latin American target—a pitcher with affiliated experience who was available because of one very bad night involving unpaid prostitutes, a vengeful pimp, and a terrible decision to file a police report—Gregory Paulino will be our only native Spanish speaker. It’s hard enough to be Gregory in this league—he’s twenty-two, heartbroken by his recent release from the A’s, and an unaffordable $900 plane ticket away from his mother and girlfriend. Now add to that that we can’t provide him any social support whatsoever and that he’ll be on the outside of every clique on the team. We watch closely to see if the club makes time for him, and thankfully some players do: Paul Hvozdovic helps him fill out his paperwork (“this part just says don’t post any stupid shit on Facebook”) and Joel Carranza sits next to him, puts a hand on his shoulder, and translates some of the trickier parts. But Paulino also stretches alone and jogs alone, a one-man group isolated by fault lines from all the usual sources of support for a young ballplayer. How can that be good for team chemistry? You could make a case that we should simply cut him, whether we think he’s good or not.

  Or you could make a case that a female ballplayer, no matter how good, couldn’t fit into a clubhouse. You don’t want to make this case; what right-thinking person in the twenty-first century would want to make this case? It’s an awful case to make! When Ben and I were looking at potential pitchers in the early spring, we talked to Tiffany Brooks, one of the world’s best female pitchers. Ultimately, we decided that she wouldn’t be quite as good (by talent alone) as our other pitching options. But what if she had been? Would we have risked our precious clubhouse chemistry on her?

  I think we woul
d have. I think we’re good people, and that we’d have chosen justice (and talent) over comfort. I’m also open to the idea that I’m not nearly as good a person as I think I am. That I’m not as courageous. That the words of Captain Morgan spook me almost as much as they disgust me: “I have no doubt that some girl out there could be good enough to play against men,” Captain tells me. “But this is the one place left that these guys have to be themselves. It would be the worst possible thing for chemistry.” In some small way, we hope to demonstrate that Captain can’t be right. Because Captain, we strongly suspect, is saying exactly the same sort of thing about us.

  * * *

  What we think of as chemistry pervades every action. At the kickoff banquet, Theo—who heard about Jeff Conley and his boast to the girl at the bar—introduces the rookie lefty as our Opening Night starter, and everybody laughs because everybody has already heard about Big League Jeff Conley, even before most of them have met him. What we don’t know is whether this faux pas matters. Big League is by far the most common insult at this level of baseball, fired off anytime a guy acts like he’s bigger than his stage. But sometimes Big League is amusing. Hvozdovic quickly gets the nickname Big League because of, among other things, his socks, which say “MLB” on them, but Paul is actually humble and self-effacing and carries equipment like a rookie is supposed to (even though he has pitched at a higher level than half of these guys and is, technically speaking, not really a rookie). Big League, in Paul’s case, is forgiven. But sometimes Big League is doom. Like when Collin Forgey is assigned a host family room with Sean Conroy, and he starts asking for a new host family assignment on day 1 of spring training, even though he’s living in a mansion with a personal chef who cooked him the best breakfast of his life, oblivious to the fact that his host parents are good friends with the owner and that they’re hosting him and Sean as a friendly favor—he’s Big League and he never recovers. Everything he does this week goes through the Big League filter. He wants to shag balls in center field instead of left? Big League. He smacks his glove angrily when an infielder cuts off his throw home? Big League. He shows a hint of disappointment that a postworkout batting practice is just soft tosses, not live pitching? Big League. He is all but cut by the end of that Opening Night banquet, because you can’t have Big League in your clubhouse, bro.