Good fortune and good friends led me to three baseball games last week, a sports bonanza that couldn’t fail to cheer my soul.
Baseball is a wonderful game. The best.
These games, though in three different parks, shared a basic uniformity: Each was played under essentially the same set of rules. There were some modifications this year (pitch clocks, for instance), but baseball has remained largely unchanged for many decades as regards the basic skills employed: throwing, hitting, running and catching.
Beneath that uniformity, however, lay a fundamental difference: Every player in the first two games – in New York – was a major leaguer. He had made it to the “show,” the “bigs,” the pinnacle of his sport. Every player in the third game – in Nashville – was one significant rung below, in Triple-A. He was either hoping to get to the bigs, or had been bumped down for some reason, and was hoping to get back.
Professional baseball is merciless in its ranking of players by talent and ability, starting with various instructional leagues and working up to Low-A, High-A, Double-A and Triple-A before the ultimate jump.
The appreciable difference in play between even the top two levels is accompanied by an astounding difference in pay. For example, one of the players in the first New York game, Justin Verlander, is making $43.3 million this year. One of the players in the second game, Aaron Judge, is under contract for $360 million over nine years.
Those two guys are at or near the top of the pay scale, and deservedly so. But even the average Major League salary is $4.9 million a year. The minimum – minimum! – is $720,000.
The annual salary for a player at the Triple-A level just doubled this year ... to $35,800.
The financial incentive to stick it out in the minors and earn a whopping pay increase is clear. And sometimes it works pretty quickly. Just this year, a player on the Sounds roster at the start of the season – the 23-year-old outfielder Sal Frelick – was called up to the parent MLB club, the Milwaukee Brewers.
But the reality is, most haven’t been called up and never will be. And I can’t help wondering what has kept some of the players on the Sounds and the other 29 Triple-A teams chasing a dream into their 30s, when surely the chance would seem to have passed them by.
I understand that even the briefest of tenures in the Majors – the proverbial “cup of coffee” – is an experience far beyond what most guys can ever imagine. For example: The Pittsburgh Pirates called up 34-year-old Drew Maggi in April to make his MLB debut after playing in 1,154 minor league games starting in 2010. He got a standing ovation in his first at-bat. He played in three games, went 2-for-6 and has since been released.
So why watch a game whose players are, by definition, not the best? Because every professional baseball player at any level is better than any of us guys sitting in the stands, throwing back beers, second-guessing the manager and hoping a foul ball lands in our lap.
Have I mentioned that baseball is a wonderful game?
A friend asked me long ago how old I was when I realized I’d never play professional sports. The question took me aback – it had never occurred to me to think that I could. It might just be that I lacked my friend’s youthful imagination. But I suspect that I also lacked his athletic ability.
Which is why, all these many years later, I respect every player I see who is making a living at sports, no matter the game. I reserve the right to grouse when one flubs a ground ball, or walks someone on four pitches. But I don’t kid myself by thinking that I ever could have done better.
After all, my own baseball-of-sorts career ended ignominiously at age 25 on a softball field, when the opposing hitters figured out a surefire formula to get on base: “Hit it to the shortstop!” one of them called out. I was the shortstop.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.