Late on Thursday night, something caught my eye as it came across Twitter: the Durham Bulls had beaten the Pawtucket Red Sox 4-3 to take a 2-1 lead in the Governor’s Cup Final (aka the International League final or the Triple-A semifinal). I remembered seeing an e-mail from earlier in the day that the Bulls would be hosting the final three games of the series, so I checked into tickets for Friday’s game. Tickets were only $10, there were plenty of seats left, and there were fireworks after the game. I was immediately sold, and it didn’t even take much arm-twisting to find someone to go with me. “How many chances do you get to watch a team celebrate a championship on the field? ” is a pretty strong selling point, even though the fireworks probably made a strong back-up argument.
If you’ve never been to a Triple-A baseball game in person, it is a mixed bag at best. By mid-season, most of the best prospects that begin every year at the level are called up to the big leagues. Some teams replace them with prospects from Double-A, but many rosters are comprised mostly of Quadruple-A depth stowed away in case of emergency. This year in Durham I’ve seen Mark Fontenot, Wilson Betemit, and Ray Oldmedo and that’s only counting the Bulls’ players. As a result, the level of baseball played in Triple-A is high (my two main sources of live baseball are the Bulls and UNC baseball in the spring, and the difference is striking, let me tell you), but it often comes without the exceptional talent that makes Major League Baseball so exciting.
If you were in Durham over the weekend hoping to see prospects, Rusney Castillo and Nick Franklin were the two players most likely to draw your eye. Castillo is a $72.5 million man, just signed out of Cuba by the Red Sox and getting some minor league experience before becoming a fixture in Boston’s outfield. Franklin was the main return for Tampa Bay in the David Price trade, by way of Seattle, and he figures to be a key part of the Rays’ infield in 2015 and beyond. Blake Swihart, the Red Sox first round pick in 2011 and a pre-season Top-100 prospect, made his way to Triple-A in a late-season promotion. That was about it, though. The rest of the game was made up of guys like Fontenot or guys like Mikie Mahtook, Tim Beckham, and Ryan Lavarnway, all of who have made drops from the coveted “prospect status” and have had varying success trying to play their way back up the ladder this year. To be honest, these guys grinding away at Triple-A despite being afterthoughts in the minds of most MLB fans are my favorite part of Triple-A baseball. When I watch big league baseball, I’m constantly churning through a million things for the sake of my blog and my own conceptions of players and teams: “What does this mean for the Pirates? Are these numbers sustainable? How does that narrative the announcers are pushing fit reality?” When I watch Triple-A, I lose most of that. I see guys I remember, I tell my friends stories about them for as long as they’ll tolerate me, and I root for almost everyone. I know this sounds trite and Kevin Costner-y, but I don’t really mind.
Of course, Kevin Costner is the other inescapable part of baseball in Durham. There are more Crash Davis and Nuke LaLoosh shirseys at Durham Bulls Athletic Park on any given night than there are of current Bulls or Tampa Bay Rays players. And yes, there is a bull that sits on top of the left field “Blue Monster” that is emblazoned with the words, “Hit Bull Win Steak,” though you’ll likely be disappointed to know that to the best of my knowledge, only one person wins a steak if the bull is hit by a Bull (in all my years of going to Bulls games, I’ve only seen the Bull hit by current Dodger utilityman Luis Cruz). Like any minor league team, the Bulls attendance at any game is mostly families, general baseball fans, awkward first dates, and drunk college kids, but if you look hard enough in Durham, you’ll find your share of diehard Bulls fans in Chipper Jones shirts, rooting for the Bulls on the way I’d root for the Pirates.
Anyway, all of these details are just scene-setting in case you’re unfamiliar with the mishmash of journeyman players and prospects on the field while the families sprinkled with diehard Bulls fans looking on. On Friday, I got to the game and immediately set out to acquire beer and food (hot dogs and funnel cake). The stated goal between my friend and I was to be settled in by the second half of the game, should any drama ensue.
For most of the evening, drama seemed inevitable. Pawtucket took a 1-0 lead in the top of the first, then Durham took a 2-1 lead in the bottom of the fourth on a single by Fontenot and a double by Luke Maile, a catcher who was just promoted from Double-A for the Triple-A playoffs after Curt Casali was called up to Tampa to provide some roster depth. The Bulls could have scored another run, but Fontenot was held at third on Maile’s double and then thrown out at home on a fielder’s choice in the next at-bat. This will become important later.
The Bulls held on to that 2-1 into the ninth without much incident; Pawtucket only put three total runners on base in the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth innings. They didn’t build the lead at all, though, and the game zipped along. Adam Liberatore, excellent out of Durham’s bullpen and recently installed as their closer, ran into trouble almost right away in the ninth, though. He walked Alex Hassan and gave up a single to Garin Cecchini to start the inning. He bore down after that, though, and struck out Swihart and got Deven Marrero to bounce into a force play at third. With the Governor’s Cup just one out away, the Durham crowd came alive in a way that’s rare in minor league baseball. Rusney Castillo stepped to the plate, took strike one, and swung-and-missed at strike two. The crowd was so loud the couple in front of me had to cover their young baby’s ears to keep him from crying. After a ball, Castillo barely ticked a foul ball back to the backstop. It looked at first like Maile had held on to strike three, and the crowd peaked and crashed. Castillo laced the next ball into center field for a game-tying hit. The crowd went silent.
This is the strange nature of Triple-A baseball: one minute, the crowd was on their feet, screaming, cheering, ringing cowbells, and anticipating a championship. Maybe ten minutes later, the PawSox had tied the game, the Bulls went down feebly in the bottom of the ninth after a leadoff Vince Belnome single, and a large number of fans headed for the exits even though extra innings were just beginning. I don’t mention this to be critical of those fans; this is just how minor league baseball exists. For most of the fans, it’s a fun diversion and once it ceases to be that, the night is over whether the game is or not. It is what it is and it’s hard for me to blame fans for not wanting to watch minor league baseball until midnight.
The pattern repeated itself in the bottom of the tenth. Cole Figueroa drew a one-out walk and stole second. He was waved home when Mikie Mahtook laced a sharp single to Bryce Brentz in left field, but Brentz made a strong throw to the plate and Swihart made a really nifty catch-and-tag on the high-bouncing throw. The tag was a little high (you can see the play in this article) and I honestly have no idea of Figueroa was out or not. There’s no replay in Triple-A, though, so the call on the field stood. Mahtook moved to third on a Jeremy Moore single, but was stranded there. The remaining crowd that was so frenzied seconds earlier while Figueroa sprinted home was decimated again, as more fans got up to leave.
In the top of the 11th, Pawtucket threatened but couldn’t score. In the bottom, Nick Franklin crushed a foul ball down the right field line that looked for one second like it was going to be a Governor’s Cup winning walk-off home run before it hooked harshly foul. More fans trickled out Pawtucket threatened in the 12th, but couldn’t score. Durham went down in order. More fans trickled out. In the top of the 13th, Ivan De Jesus Jr., a journeyman infielder who was traded from the Dodgers to the Red Sox, the Red Sox to the Pirates, released by the Pirates, signed by the Orioles, and then traded by the Orioles back to the Red Sox at the waiver trade deadline just two weeks ago, hit a two-run home run to put the PawSox up 4-2. De Jesus played just two regular season games for Pawtucket. More fans left. The Bulls managed to get the go-ahead run to the plate in the bottom of the 13th in the form of Franklin, and Franklin hit a hard fly ball to middle-deep right-center that caused the fans to hold their breath for just one second, but it wasn’t to be. Pawtucket won 4-2 and forced a Game 5.
In the car on the way back to Chapel Hill, I mused a little bit about what had just happened. Durham was one strike away from an International League championship, blew the lead, had the winning run thrown out at the plate an inning later, and just barely missed a series-winning walkoff the inning after that. It reminded me a little of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, where David Freese and the Cardinals repeatedly staved off elimination before finally beating the Rangers to force a Game 7. What we had just witnessed was the sort of loss that people would talk about for decades if it had happened in a Major League game, I figured, but instead this game would only be remembered by the players and the fans that had stuck out all 13 innings. It made me think about how far Triple-A baseball is from the big leagues, even though it’s also as close as you can get.
Less than 24 hours later, I was sitting around with the same friend that went to the game with me. We had college football on the TV, and I had the Pirates playing on my iPad. Around 9 o’clock, it occurred to me to check the Bulls’ score.
“Oh no!” I said. My friend looked over, expecting some kind of football or Pirate news.
“The Bulls are down 3-0. They’re probably going to lose.”
“Oh,” she said.
And neither one of us thought about it again. It was just minor league baseball, after all.
