... to pitch an amazing game...[is] a feeling you'll gladly endure a season of hell to experience."
- Dick Hayhurst, "Bullpen Gospels"
It's hard for the fan to properly appreciate the feat of endurance that the achievement of "the show" represents. Although playing 150 games, not least with the travel that implies, represents quite an odyssey compared to many sports, it bears emphasizing that getting to the first game requires the running of an impressive gauntlet.
First, of course, there is the ten thousand hour rule which applies to the upper tenth of a percent of the high school talent pool. Only massive repetition allows a hitter to adjust subtle body mechanics at the right level to deal with ball movement typical of that level, and the same applies to the development of a somewhat effective slider or curve. And the difference between a .200 hitter at that level and a .250 hitter is like the difference between the four-ball juggler and the five-ball juggler - it's factors of time from one level to the next.
Then, some fraction of those players will find that magic talent/repetition combination that will attract a scout seeking to add to the ranks of roughly 4000 players participating in the MiLB system's 200+ teams. Then you are introduced to the schedule familiar to the major leaguer, but with much less comfortable travel.
"Finding a comfortable routine is especially important for a baseball player, since you are more or less doing the same thing for five straight months. And as a minor leaguer, a good portion of your routine inevitably rests atop eight big wheels.
As I write this article I am sitting through one of our four bus rides this week. Our bus pulled out of the stadium in Lakewood, N.J. at about 10:30 p.m., and we are scheduled to arrive back in Ohio at around 6 a.m. Pulling an all-nighter on a tiny coach bus is nothing out of the ordinary in the minors."
- Frank Herrmann, blogging about his Indians farm league experiences
Jim Thome, just honored by the Hall of Fame, had an unusually speedy and enduring pattern. A thirteenth round draft pick in 1989, he debuted in the majors late in the season two years later, and spent most of his lengthy career activated since then. More typical of the minor leaguer is a spottier pattern, only hinted at by these stats up a level:
"The average career of a Major League Baseball player is 5.6 years, according to a new study by a University of Colorado at Boulder research team. The study also revealed that one in five position players will have only a single-year career, and that at every point of a player's career, the player's chance of ending his career is at least 11 percent...
Between 1902 and 1993, 5,989 position players started their careers..."
- Science Daily, July 2007
This means that there was only room in all of twentieth century MLB for about a couple of seasons' worth of MiLB players, and plenty of backwaters. Dick Hayhurst talked about how he spent weeks in a slump, unable to figure out how to achieve control, and aware that he was sliding into a trough typical of players specifically deployed to "lost cause" games, and only those games, strictly to supply a warm body to fulfill the essential rule of having a pitching roster entry for a given inning.
"Ask a chameleon why it changes colors - it adapts." - Giants closer Brian Wilson
The notoriously flat interviews after a game - "You can roll over and quit, or keep battling... just looking for a good fastball to hit" (Blake DeWitt of the Cubs after a win, in this case) - really underline the sense of the usual behind the unusual: they "sit on" a fastball as they have hundreds of times before, hoping that this isn't the pitch that makes them look inept, and mutter as they walk away; tell themselves for the thousanth time as they leave the dugout, "just do what you always do, don't let them psych you out"; and every now and then, perhaps once every thirtieth game if they're lucky, have something go right enough that they are satisfied both that they were competent, and that they were seen by the fans and their teammates to be competent enough to warrant applause.
And even for an Albert Pujols or a Derek Jeter, the look back over the years is less a Marching Through Georgia and more a Groundhog Day.
n.b. The slog took a southerly turn for Billy Chamberlain, now a Chavez Ravine regular .
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