Hard Work, Dedication, Deception: How to Make a Baseball Team When You’re Freakishly Untalented

Via special invitation, I had been able to circumvent the arduous minor-league route to have a shot at the highest level of professional baseball. I felt downright sweaty with excitement as I stepped off the bus and into the Florida heat. I’d arrived in Detroit Tigers training camp.

Instead of honing my skills over a period of years at progressively higher levels of small-town minor-league ball, I forged a passable career dossier, faxed it to the Tigers, and they bought it. The key is to use generic references (I claimed to have won the prestigious Reggie Brown Award for Outstandingness during my Class AA stint with the Las Palmas Tumbleweeds) and aim for a desperate team. Certainly I was worried my boasting of having been both a “Star center fielder” as well as “Right-handed fireballer” would red-flag me in the front office, but it’s not like I was trying to catch on with the Yankees.

The Tigers set up winter residence in Lakeland, Florida (“Birthplace of Denny’s”) where, in front of an amorphous crowd of retirees and assorted Michigan residents on winter pilgrimage, we engaged in faux games and training routines designed to strain out the talent into a workable major league baseball team. Or, in the case of the Tigers, 25 guys who won’t promote dissent or infighting. I think my quiet nature gives me an outside chance.

The first morning of spring training couldn’t have offered nicer weather for throwing stuff, hitting stuff, or general running around. Under a clear blue sky and a gentle breeze, the hundred-plus spring training invitees gathered to engage in endless psychological games and hazing rituals while competing for precious roster spots. We’ve got the dozen or so guys that are certain to make the team given that they possess the ability to either pitch or hit and have major league experience. Maybe thirty other guys have a fighting chance to see the opening day roster, or at least a degrading assignment to the minors. Forty or so more are either completely washed up and hoping for a rash of injuries, or looking to carve out a very tiny niche on the team by specializing in one minute skill, like Gunther, the Austrian lefty. His slider is just unpredictable enough to occasionally deceive left-handed contact hitters into tapping slow grounders weakly to third base. Outside of that his ERA resembles a credit card interest rate.

The rest of the attendees are the Dreamers: guys like me with no real shot whom the Tigers let into camp for the first week or so just to instill confidence into the players with a chance. Some unabashedly admit being cousins of friends of Tigers’ upper management. None of the Dreamers have serious illusions about our place on the team, we’re just hoping the other guys don’t mistake us for legitimate talent and go out of their way to spike us. We just want a few days to take in the atmosphere before we’re sent to our rightful place in the stands selling programs or learning the complexities of cotton candy weaving.

The first morning practice commenced about 9 a.m., and to my surprise I made it until well past 9:15 before the coaches got wise to my two-way player scam. Batting practice for the Dreamers wouldn’t be until that afternoon so I had a few hours to come up with a decent excuse why I couldn’t hit. But the fact that I couldn’t pitch was clear right from the start.

At first, the floating, completely inaccurate way my pitches were sailing above, behind, and into the batters suggested I was either throwing knuckleballs or lacked the basic primatial ability to grasp and maneuver spherical objects. But it became clear I simply sucked.

My fastball barely had enough juice to make it to the plate. My curveball only curved downwards, and only with the assistance of gravity, rendering it indistinguishable from the fastball. My actual knuckleball usually landed closer to third base than home plate, and served to be more threatening to spectators than awe-inspiring. The only way I could manage a changeup, short of purposely rolling the ball, was to lob it in underhanded. When I tried throwing a slider something in my elbow would snap audibly, which was extraordinarily painful but served to distract the batters enough to render it my best pitch.

It actually worked for a while. Most of the batters had a tough time adjusting to pitches thrown so far below major-league speed benchmarks. Soon enough, however, my dream of becoming a major league pitcher died when I accidentally plunked the manager. I still argue that he should have been more alert and seen my errant fastball coming, even if he was in the dugout at the time.

After a severe scolding from the pitching coaches, who were so dumbfounded by my sheer lack of ability that they struggled to find the words to describe it without the rampant use of expletives, I was pulled from the mound and spent the rest of the morning in the dugout flicking sesame seed husks into Bobby Higginson’s discarded Gatorade cup.

During the early afternoon I participated in numerous calisthenics drills designed, evidently, to pull muscles and misalign joints as quickly as possible. Given that my winter training regimen was confined primarily to watching The Price is Right, perhaps for now I’ll withhold judgment on the intended impact of exercise.

Around 3 p.m., batting practice began for the Dreamers. Figuring the only way in which I would make it through the first week of spring training was to demonstrate incompetence in as little as possible, I wracked my brain to think of a good reason why I wouldn’t be able to bat on the first day. Luckily, I was spared from revealing my inability to hit a baseball, particularly one thrown with any velocity, when the calluses on my hand ballooned into grape-sized mounds of angry, pulsating flesh. Apparently I threw a few too many pitches during the morning (which tends to happen when only one try in fourteen is a strike). I was reduced to whimpering meekly with pain, but at least I had physical evidence of injury and could go back to the dugout to continue sesame seed husk-flicking.

In the early evening the team called it a day. I had three distinctly-shaped calluses that prevented me from closing my right fist, an aching back, and a pulled calf. I’d eaten nothing but sesame seeds for eleven hours, the salt from which dehydrated me to the point of visible skin cracking. I had put on an utterly humiliating display of pitching ineptitude rivaled only by elementary-school-aged girls or last year’s Texas Rangers. And I didn’t even get to bat.

But just after dark I wandered out to center field and stood in the warm breeze, looked up at the crystal-clear night sky, and in between swatting wave after wave of bloodthirsty mothball-sized Florida mosquitoes, I realized I was having a wonderful experience. Though my hopes of succeeding as a pitcher had plummeted to the ground like so many of my wobbling fastballs, maybe I could find my place somewhere else. Maybe, despite no prior evidence during any time of my life supporting such, I would be a better hitter than I thought. Perhaps my guts and guile would enable me to overcome my natural sub-Basset Hound foot speed and I could find a place as a pinch-runner or fielder.

We were still on the first day, perhaps the only day I could still hope to ultimately make the team. Nobody gets cut on Day One. And to my astonishment and triumph, the Tigers hadn’t made any exceptions for me.

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