Minor League Baseball

As part-"owner" of a minor league team, the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers --it is a publicly owned team, and I am one of more than 200 shareholders -- I am bound to take an interest in noteworthy books about minor league ball, and 2009 has brought forth a doozy, Matt McCarthy's Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit, which is shaping up as a kind of Ball Four of baseball's lowest rung. McCarthy is a Yalie who was, improbably, drafted in a late round by the Anaheim Angels in 2002, mainly because he was a lefty who could throw 90 MPH (but not consistently). He put in a struggling year on the Provo (Utah) Angels (now Orem Owls) of the Pioneer rookie league, and was released the following spring. He kept a journal of his experiences -- out of sheer boredom? or did he have a book contract already, as Scott Turow did when he entered Harvard Law School (which resulted in One L)? McCarthy doesn't say; but in any case, a good deal of the humor of the book comes not so much out of the predictable young-guy hi-jinks but out of McCarthy's obvious mental distance from his teammates. He truly is a mis-fit, as the title indicates; he's slumming. The stuff he thinks about is so far outside the norm of what anyone involved with pro baseball thinks about, you can easily see why he would find Harvard Medical School (where he wound up) a much more congenial environment.

McCarthy's book is selling well, but of course it has been controversial, for a number of reasons:

(1) He broke the locker room code, which, as Jim Bouton could tell you, wins you no friends (although later, your book may come to be considered a classic);
(2) Many of the players, coaches, and others called out by name come off as immature, racist, sexist, homophobic idiots --no surprise there;
(3) The book touches very lightly on steroids, but it's enough;
(4) The book also discusses what everyone suspects, that there is a wide, sometimes nasty gulf between Anglo and the ever more numerous Latino players in professional baseball;
(5) Although McCarthy does his best not to seem snobby, of course he is -- it's sociologically inevitable;
(6) McCarthy got some facts wrong, and possibly embellished a few things, which is pretty much the norm for all memoirs (who doesn't read these things with a shaker of salt close by?), but can get you toasted in the New York Times.

I, personally, don't care so much about the artistic license as whether McCarthy got the essence of the subject right; but some folks, wanting to neutralize that essence, will seize on a mis-reported box score or a mis-dated incident as grounds to dismiss the whole report. Chris Mehring, radio announcer and blogger for the Timber Rattlers, and a capital fellow, has indicated that he won't even read Odd Man Out, which I think is self-defeatingly pre-emptive -- I can't imagine anyone involved with the minors not reading this book -- but whatever. McCarthy has clearly touched a nerve, and this is the sort of book that ought to make those reported on uneasy; if minor league professionals had embraced Odd Man Out, I would have suspected it of being the usual b.s., and it wouldn't have risen to the top of my reading pile.

Sports at the level that McCarthy writes about are a sad enterprise, both from the inside looking out and from the outside looking in. Most of the players will never "make it," but the majority of them lack an "out" (such as McCarthy obviously had all along), so they hang on as long as they can; baseball is all they know. McCarthy writes (more about his teammates than himself, I think):

We couldn't make a living playing minor league baseball; we could barely subsist. But playing professional baseball was better than not playing professional baseball, and for many of us this was about seeing how long we could play the game and not do anything else.

Odd Man Out reveals the imaginative world of young American and Latin American athletes as dreary, pathetically uninteresting, inadequate; and that of their elders as no better, really. The most wince-worthy moment in the book comes when the minorly unhinged Provo manager, Tom Kotchman, gets some good news about how his son Casey Kotchman (now a first baseman for the Atlanta Braves) is performing in another minor league, and feels he must share it with his own completely uninterested players (my bolding):

"You guys will never know anything...until you have a kid of your own. You think about them day and night and you just want the best for them...You dedicate your whole life to your kids...You just want 'em to be healthy, and you just want 'em to grow up right...and be good at sports."

Saints preserve us.