A False Spring by Jordan Pat;

Author:Jordan, Pat; [Jordan, Pat;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

*Every time a major league team made a roster cut, whether in the spring or during the season, the repercussions were felt throughout the minor league system. Each minor league team would then cut its roster. Players at Louisville would go to Austin (AA), and those at Austin to Jacksonville (A), and so on all the way down to Davenport (D). Players cut from Davenport went home.

5

At Davenport I assumed an attitude. The aloof veteran. It was a pose. A “veteran” is one who has played at least two years in professional baseball. I had played only two months at McCook. Still, that was two months more than most of my teammates, who, before the 1960 season began, had yet to play in a professional game. Ordinarily such rookies would have been sent to McCook, but because the Nebraska State League had folded after the 1959 season, they were now distributed like so many lottery tickets between Wellsville and Davenport. Most of them went to Davenport.* Only one of them—Rico Carty—ever paid off. The rest were modestly talented players who might climb as high as Austin or maybe Louisville before they finally left baseball. None compared in talent to my teammates at McCook—Hunt, Chenger, Overby, Niekro—and only first baseman George Kopacz and I had received more than a $20,000 bonus. Besides money and talent, however, these boys lacked professional experience. At McCook my teammates had lacked this experience, too, but it didn’t really matter since we competed against rookies like ourselves. Most teams in the Midwest League, however, were stocked with veterans.† And it seems that many a parent organization with a team there also had a team in the Class-D Appalachian League, which, like the NSL, was a rookie league. These teams sent their rookies to the Appalachian League and their minor league veterans to the Midwest League.* Although many rookies are potentially more talented than veterans, (how talented can a player be who returns to a Class-D league three years running?) in the lower minors it is often experience more than talent that tells. It was this lack of experience that doomed the Quad Cities Braves to last place in the Midwest League from early in the season.

Nor was I truly aloof. I remained so more by a fierce act of will than desire. Often it took all the will power I could summon to refuse my teammates’ offers to join them for a pizza after a game. I preferred to eat alone, I lied. Soon they no longer bothered to ask. I seldom spoke to them in the locker room or during games or even on the long bus rides to other towns. When we stayed overnight in one of those towns I took a single room whenever one was available. The Lone Ranger rides alone, my teammates said, and laughed. It’s ironic for me to see this now (I have the knack, it seems, of catching the drift of a conversation only after it has switched to another topic), but my teammates actually looked up to me when the season began.

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