Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball by John Feinstein

Author:John Feinstein [Feinstein, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53594-6
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2014-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

20

Slice of Life

I-75

While Brett Tomko was trying to keep his job in Triple-A during that late July weekend in Toledo, Danny Worth was trying to figure out how he could put Toledo in his rearview mirror once and for all.

It wasn’t that he disliked the town. He liked the people, he liked his manager, and he liked his teammates.

He just wished he wasn’t their teammate.

“When I got back the other day, several guys came up to me and said, ‘It’s great to see you, but it sucks to see you,’ ” he said. “I felt exactly the same way.”

Worth had been sent back to Toledo from the Tigers on July 24—the ninth time he had been sent down since his first call-up to Detroit in May 2010. In all, including spring training, he’d gotten—as he called it—“the tap on the shoulder” to be sent down eleven times in his career.

“Usually, there’s a routine to it,” he said. “Jeff Jones [the pitching coach] will give me the tap and tell me that [manager] Jim [Leyland] wants to talk to me. It isn’t always that way. Once [in 2011] we had flown from Anaheim to Chicago, and we got to the hotel at about four o’clock in the morning. I got off the bus, walked into the lobby, and [general manager] Dave [Dombrowski] and Jim were standing there waiting for me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t to ask me what I thought about the in-flight movie.”

Worth’s most recent return to Toledo had not come as a shock, although he readily admitted that every time it happened it was tough to take. Shortly after getting back to town, he did a pregame TV interview. He said all the right things: he knew he just had to hang in there; this was part of the game; he had to keep his head up and play hard and hope the call to go back up would come again soon.

“I fake it,” he said, smiling. “The fact is, every time you get sent down, it’s crushing because no matter how you rationalize it, the reason it happens is because you aren’t a good enough player to stay up. I simply haven’t been able to hit enough to stay in the majors. Every time you get sent down, they tell you, ‘Hey, you’ll be back up soon,’ and you know it’s entirely possible. But you also know it’s possible you might never get back. Maybe they make a trade at your position. Maybe you get hurt. Maybe they’ve decided you’re out of chances. That’s the fear: that maybe this time down is the last time.”

It had been a trade that had sent Worth back to Toledo this time. The Tigers, looking to strengthen themselves for the second half of the season, had acquired pitcher Anibal Sánchez and second baseman Omar Infante from Miami. The acquisition of Infante meant a position player had to go down. There were three candidates: Worth, Don Kelly, and Ryan Raburn. As

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