A Hall of Famer, 414 Home Runs, and Six All-Star Games: The Men Who Managed Me

Four Major League organizations picked me up and none of them were allowed to keep me. I've written about that elsewhere and it's the defining fact of my career.

Here's the part that sits strangely next to it.

While medical departments were deciding I was a liability, I spent seven seasons playing for men who had done the thing I was being told I couldn't do. Not one of them ever asked me about the hip.

This is a list I'd never written down. I had to check the register to get it right.

Andy Haines — Windy City ThunderBolts, 2007–08

My first professional manager. He took a chance on a twenty-one-year-old who showed up two weeks late to spring training and had, two years earlier, been told to stop playing.

He said he liked my presence on the mound and my curveball. That was the whole evaluation, and it was enough.

We went 68–28 my rookie year and won the Frontier League championship. I pitched in four of the five games of that series without giving up a run and was named MVP of it. The next year we repeated — only the second team in league history to do it — and I threw a no-hitter.

Andy is a Major League hitting coach now. I've watched his career from a distance ever since with a specific kind of pride.

Tim Raines — Newark Bears, 2009

Tim Raines is in the Hall of Fame. 808 stolen bases. Seven All-Star selections. One of the greatest leadoff hitters who has ever lived.

He managed the Newark Bears in the Atlantic League from 2009 to 2011, and in 2009 I pitched for him.

I want to be honest about the scale of that: I was a guy the Padres had signed and un-signed months earlier. He was a first-ballot-argument Hall of Famer. He put me in games.

Darrell Evans — Victoria Seals, 2009

414 career home runs. Two-time All-Star. A World Series ring with Detroit in 1984. Bill James once made the case that Darrell Evans was the most underrated player in the history of baseball.

He was the first manager the Victoria Seals ever had, in the Golden Baseball League, and I played for him that same summer.

2009 was a strange, good year. Three teams — Newark, Victoria, then Calgary, where I won my third championship in three professional seasons.

Max "Mako" Oliveras — Mexico City Diablos Rojos, 2010

A Puerto Rican manager with a long, serious career across Latin American baseball, running the most famous club in Mexico.

His only real instruction to me in my first week: "Hess! When you don't know what is going on, just stay in the middle!" I have never received better advice about anything.

Rick Forney — Winnipeg Goldeyes, 2011

Winnipeg is where the photograph at the top of this site comes from — number 33 in the road greys. Rick Forney pitched for the Goldeyes and then managed them for years, and the American Association was where I landed the season the Diamondbacks couldn't sign me.

Willie Randolph — Bridgeport Bluefish, 2012

Eighteen seasons in the major leagues. Six All-Star selections. A World Series ring as a player, more as a coach with the Yankees, and four years managing the Mets.

He was my manager in the Atlantic League in 2012, the highest level of professional baseball outside affiliated ball. I was sleeping in the clubhouse because I had no car and my host family was thirteen miles away.

I left mid-season for the Czech Republic and I told him by text message, because I had to travel that day or miss the deadline.

That's the one I'd take back. Not the leaving — the way I left.

And the guys next to me

Dugouts are full of people who were in the show. David Cortés — a Mexicali-born reliever who pitched in the majors for the Colorado Rockies — is one I remember, and there were plenty of others whose baseball cards I'd owned as a kid.

What I actually make of this

Here's the thing I noticed writing it out.

Not one of these men ever brought up my hip. Not Raines, not Evans, not Randolph, not Haines. They watched me throw and made a baseball decision, which is the only kind of decision a manager gets to make.

Every single "no" in my career came from somewhere else — a physical, a legal department, an insurance calculation, a human resources policy. The baseball people kept saying yes. The people who had never seen me pitch kept saying no.

I don't think that's a grievance. I think it's just what the record shows, and I'd never lined it up in one place before.

Seven seasons. 44–25. Four championships. And a lineup card written, on various nights, by a Hall of Famer, a man with 414 home runs, and a six-time All-Star.

I'll take it.