Two Summers in Victoria

Of all the places I played, Victoria is the one I'd go back to.

Not because it was the highest level — it wasn't. Because two summers there produced my best baseball, one of the best men I played for, and a chain of events that nearly put me in Japan.

2009 — Darrell Evans writes my name down

I got to the Victoria Seals in the middle of a strange, good year. Three teams in one season: Newark, then Victoria, then Calgary, where I won my third championship in three professional seasons.

The Seals were brand new in the Golden Baseball League, and their first manager ever was Darrell Evans.

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

I went 9-2 with a 3.86 for him.

I've written elsewhere about the men who wrote my name on a lineup card, and Evans is on that list for a reason that has nothing to do with his numbers. Months earlier the Padres had signed me and then un-signed me over the hip. I arrived in Victoria as a guy who had just been told, in writing, that he was a liability.

Evans put me in games. That's it. That's the whole gift.

2010 — the best I ever hit

I came back to Victoria in 2010 after a stretch in the Mexican League with the Diablos Rojos and Oaxaca.

The pitching was solid: 5-4, 3.91, 80 strikeouts in 73⅔ innings. Despite not being in the Golden Baseball League all year, I missed the top ten in strikeouts by two.

But the number I actually enjoy telling people is the other one.

I hit .364/.382/.606 in forty plate appearances.

That's a pitcher. In forty trips to the plate I slugged over .600. I am aware that forty plate appearances is nothing, that the sample means little, and that any statistician would wave it away — and I don't care even slightly. For one summer on Vancouver Island I was a legitimate offensive threat and there is a record of it that will outlive me.

Ask me about my ERA and I'll give you an honest answer. Ask me about that slash line and I'll give you the whole story.

The coach who became my agent

The part of Victoria that mattered most had nothing to do with a game.

There was a coach there in 2009 who knew my story — the Perthes, the replacement at nineteen, the organizations that had backed away. And he came to a conclusion I hadn't quite let myself hold: that the level of my talent didn't match the way my career had gone.

Most people who think that keep it to themselves. He decided to do something about it.

He functioned as my agent without being one. No commission, no title, no obligation of any kind. He just started making calls on behalf of a guy he thought had been underserved by the sport.

That's how the Japan thing happened — Niigata Albirex, the Baseball Challenge League, an entertainer visa, two thousand dollars paid. I got the visa on a Friday and the tsunami hit that night, and I never reported.

The trip didn't happen. The fact that somebody built it for me did.

Why the small places matter

Victoria was independent ball on an island. It is not where anybody plans to end up.

And it gave me a Hall of Fame-argument manager who put me in games when I'd just been rejected, the best offensive summer of my life, and a man who looked at my career and decided it was wrong and went to work fixing it without being asked.

I've had four organizations tell me no in rooms with much bigger budgets. None of them gave me anything close.

The place that treats you like a player is more valuable than the place with the better logo. I learned that on Vancouver Island and it's the thing I tell every kid who's disappointed about where they're going to play.

Go where they write your name down.