A Good Catch
The first question people have for Giants back-up catcher Eli Whiteside is, “How old are you?”
He has more gray hair than most of the team’s coaches. He might have more gray hair than most of the team’s owners.
It doesn’t bother him.
“As long as it’s there and not falling out,” he says.
Whiteside is 30 years old. He says his hair started turning gray when he was a high school sophomore. It went completely gray when he started playing pro ball.
Whiteside’s home run yesterday against the Pirates, which energized the Giants’ comeback win, was his fourth of the season. After languishing in the minors with Baltimore, Minnesota then the Giants, Whiteside has emerged in the past two seasons as a quiet but crucial backup to catcher Bengie Molina.
But he almost didn’t make it this far.
He had been drafted by the Orioles in 2001 but during the next six years had played in just nine major-league games. He signed with the Twins before the 2008 season. But they released him in April after just eight games for their Triple A club.
He signed with the Giants a week later and spent the rest of 2008 in Fresno. He was growing frustrated.
By then, Whiteside was 28 years old. He had married his high school sweetheart, Amy, four years earlier. They wanted to start a family.
“You start asking, ‘Is it time to stop playing?”’ Whiteside said. “I didn’t want to play in Triple A forever. I talked to my wife and my mom about it and they said, ‘Why don’t you give it one more chance?’ ”
He agreed. “I wasn’t ready to give it up yet.”
He signed another free agent contract with the Giants in November 2008. And again he was sent to Fresno to start the 2009 season.
On May 23, 2009, he was with the Fresno Grizzlies in Iowa. The game had finished and he was on his way back to the hotel when his cell phone rang. It was the Grizzlies’ manager. The Giants wanted him to join them in Seattle. Pablo Sandoval had hurt his elbow and the team needed a back-up catcher.
Whiteside has been with the club ever since, solidifying his spot by catching Jonathan Sanchez’s no-hitter last July.
”It’s in his blood to play ball,” Eli’s other, Cindy, said by phone from her home in New Albany, Mississippi. “He and his sister lived and breathed baseball and softball.”
Eli’s family has lived in New Albany, a town of about 8,000 in northeast Mississippi, for as long as anyone can remember. It is most famous as the birthplace of William Faulkner. And it’s in a dry county. If you want to drink anything harder than sweet tea, you have to drive 25 miles to Tupelo.
Eli and his sister, Mitzi, grew up on 80 acres of land owned by his grandfather, who raised cattle and grew corn. Eli helped bale hay and crush corn for feed, spending much of his childhood at his grandfather’s side.
”Eli is the most humble person you’ll ever meet,” Cindy says. “There’s never any bragging. He got that from his grand-daddy.”
Eli and his wife bought a house in New Albany three years ago. Their first child, Whittington “Whit” Jackson Whiteside, was born in February.
Andres the Giant
Andres Torres was trying to get out of the clubhouse after Monday afternoon’s game against Colorado. He had family and friends waiting in the hallway, so he threw on clothes, shoved his wallet into his pocket and quickly pulled on his shoes. (Of course, as Giants fans know, Andres Torres tends to do everything pretty quickly.)
Then a reporter showed up at his locker to ask a few questions. Torres smiled and looked the reporter full in the face, happy to accommodate him. Then another reporter stopped by. And another. Torres never let on he was in a hurry. It’s difficult to imagine that anyone in the Giants clubhouse appreciates his job – every part of the job, including talking to the press – more than Torres.
He is like a character in a movie. Sort of like “The Rookie” or maybe “Rocky.” In the Andres Torres movie, a career minor-leaguer bursts onto the scene at the ripe old age of 31 and suddenly becomes a star on one of the most storied teams in baseball.
On Tuesday, he hit a home run for the Giants’ only run, and he threw out a runner at home plate to prevent the Rockies from taking the lead. On Sunday, he hit the game-winning single in the 10th inning to complete a sweep of the Diamondbacks.
”I live for this,” Torres says.
That’s why it never occurred to him to give up when he marked his 28th, 29th and 30th birthdays without spending a single day in the major leagues. He was with the peach-fuzzed kids riding the buses in Rochester, Erie, Toledo, Des Moines. In 11 years of pro baseball, he has worn 12 different uniforms – and when a TV reporter this week challenged him to name all 12, he did.
Some guys still in the minor leagues at the age of 30 might have taken the hint. Perhaps it was time to find another line of work.
”Age doesn’t matter to me,” he says. “I knew if I kept working hard and improved my hitting, I knew someday I would be here.”
Last spring, after he signed with the Giants as a non-roster free agent, he made his first Opening Day roster. And this year, he has played his way into the everyday lineup.
Now for the first time, people recognize him on the street.
”They say, ‘Hey, Andres, good game,’ ” he says. “It makes me feel good. I really like the fans here. They appreciate what you do.”
An Unlikely Star
I notice the hand-written note sticking out from the nameplate at the top of Sergio Romo’s locker. On the front is a child’s drawing of a man: a round head, oval body and four straight lines for arms and legs. The body is colored orange with a big “G” stretching from the player’s chin to the start of his stick legs.
Across the top is scrawled “Thank You.”
Romo pulls it down and shows it to me.
“This is one of the perks of the job,” he says.
He had been asked to meet with a boy who was a big Giants’ fan and a cancer patient. The boy was in the hall outside the clubhouse. All Romo did was go out and chat with him and his family sign a few things. And for that he received this painstakingly written note.
“It’s amazing that we get the chance to do this,” Romo said. “And that it means something to someone else. I’m sure it meant more to me than him.”
Romo is one of those guys who look like the friend of the baseball player, not the player himself. He’s a few inches short of six feet. He’s slight. He doesn’t have the big leaguer’s too cool-for-school demeanor. He loooooves to talk. He has been known to bounce around the clubhouse and dugout like a four-year-old at Chuck E. Cheese. (Put him and Lincecum together and you have enough energy to light the scoreboard.)
In his second year in the major leagues, Romo still finds himself looking around and shaking his head that he has made it this far. Not that he lacks for confidence. He is fearless and ravenous on the mound: Going into Tuesday’s game, he has appeared in more games than any other Giants reliever. Opponents are batting .186 against him. In 9 of his 11 games, he held opponents scoreless, and he leads relievers with 13 strikeouts.
“I was at a pizza place the other night after a game and guy comes up to me and says, ‘Are you Sergio Romo?’ I had on a jacket with the hood up and the guy recognized me! It’s crazy.”
Romo grew up in Brawley, California, on the Mexican border, among the fields of sugar beets. lettuce and alfalfa. His father, Frank, was born in Mexico and crossed the border into the U.S. with his migrant-farmer parents when he was a baby. Frank grew up moving with the crops, from Imperial Valley to Salinas to Stockton, building his muscles lifting boxes of lettuce. Wherever he went, he found a field to play baseball. When his first son, Sergio, was two years old, he bought him a baseball glove.
“He grew up with a glove on his hand,” Frank says when I call him in Brawley.
Even as a toddler, he went with his father when Frank played for a semi-pro team in Mexicali. Sergio began pitching at age 8 and never stopped, though he wasn’t recruited out of high school. He was just 5 feet seven. After bouncing around four colleges in four years, he was drafted by the Giants in 2005 in the 28th round.
He was in the major leagues three years later, making his debut in June 2008.
He nearly doomed himself before he had barely begun, however, missing curfew, going AWOL, rubbing veterans and coaches the wrong way with his happy-go-lucky attitude coupled with fits of pique when he felt wronged. His transition into the maturing, more self-aware player who showed up this spring is a tale in itself.
And I’ll tell it in an upcoming issue of Giants Magazine. Stay tuned.
Aubrey’s Journey
When I watch Aubrey Huff launch a towering home run into the right-field stands (and beyond), as he has the past two games against the Rockies, I imagine him in his backyard in Mineral Wells, Texas.
When I talked with him recently in the Giants clubhouse, he drew a direct line from the batter’s box at AT&T to that backyard in Texas.
Some background:
Aubrey’s father was working as an electrician at an apartment complex. A man there shot his wife and was taking aim at the apartment manager. Aubrey’s father tried to wrest the gun from the assailant’s hand. The gun went off and Aubrey’s father was killed. Aubrey was six years old.
Aubrey’s mother, Fonda, worked in the meat department of the local Winn-Dixie supermarket five days a week and attended Tarleton State University on her two days off. Her son, a shy and awkward kid, loved baseball from time he could walk. So when Aubrey was nine years old and asked for a batting cage and pitching machine in the backyard, Fonda got one, though everyone thought she was nuts to spend what little money she had on what seemed like an extravagant and frivolous purchase. Aubrey would be out in the cage until dark. Fonda put up lights. She heard her son out there late into the night.
“While other guys were out partying, I was taking swings,” Huff says.
After two years of community college, he went to the University of Miami, where he flourished, leading the Hurricanes in home runs and doubles his senior year.
When he was signed by Tampa Bay, his mother moved from Texas to St. Petersburg, where she works for the school system. She is still Aubrey’s biggest fan.
“Did she talk your ear off?” Huff asked when I say I called her. “Sometimes I just have to put the phone down the table. She can talk.” He laughs.
“She’s the best. She was an amazing mother to my sister and me growing up. Without her believing in me like she did,” Huff says, “I wouldn’t be here.”
Darren Ford’s Excellent Spring
At 1 p.m. today in Vineland, N.J., home-health-care aide Carla Ford received a call from her mother, who had received a text from California.
Darren Ford, Carla’s 24-year-old son, had been named the winner this morning of the annual award given to a player in his first big-league camp “whose performance and dedication in Spring Training best exemplifies the San Francisco Giants spirit.”
The Harry S. Jordan Award is a big deal because it’s voted on by the Giants’ players, coaches and training staff. Tim Lincecum won it in 2007, Brian Bocock in 2008 and Joe Martinez last year. All three made it to the majors in the year they won.
“Darren’s very humble, so he didn’t let me know, but I’m sure he would have told me about it later,” Carla Ford said by phone a few hours after she had heard the news. (Ford’s host family from the San Jose Giants had texted Carla’s mother with the news.)
Ford has batted .500 (10-for-20) with two doubles, one triple, four RBI and four stolen bases in 17 games this spring for the Giants. Last year Ford played for Single-A San Jose. He batted 300 in 101 games and helped the team to its highest regular season win total in franchise history (93 wins) and the California League Championship.
No one in Vineland seems surprised by Ford’s success. He was a star not only in baseball but football, basketball and track in the city of about 55,000 people in Southern Jersey.
“He was always the fastest of the fast,” says Ford’s 24-year-old cousin, Kevin Ford, who said he thought Darren would end up in professional football.
Darren, too, thought he might pursue football. His mother watched him one day in high school as he sifted through letters from football, baseball and track coaches from different colleges.
“Oh my god, Darren, how are going to decide what to do?”
“Mom, I’m leaving it in God’s hands.”
“You’re right,” she said.
Soon afterward, Darren attended a baseball tryout at a local college where he caught the eye of a scout for the Milwaukee Brewers. After a year at Chipola College in Florida, the Brewers drafted Ford in the 18th round of the 2004 draft. He came to the Giants in the 2007 trade that sent Ray Durham to the Brewers.
But it’s no surprise, really, that Ford ended up in baseball instead of football. It’s in his blood. His grandfather, Ted Ford, played in the majors for four years for the Cleveland Indians and Texas Rangers, from 1970 to 1973. Ted Ford has lived in Texas since Darren was born and has had little interaction with his grandson beyond the occasional phone call. So Darren was raised and shaped by women – his mother, her five sisters and their mother – plus Darren’s own two sisters.
Carla Ford, a single parent, born and raised in Vineland, worked from 10:30 at night until 7 in the morning as an aide at a residential facility for mentally handicapped women. (Two years ago, she took on a second job, working days as a home health care aide from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.) She raised her children in a three-bedroom apartment, pushing them to play sports. She attended every game she could.
“I would always tell Darren, ‘Don’t come home (after school). Too much stuff to get into here,’ ” Carla says.
If Ford begins the season with the Giants’ Double A team in Richmond, VA, about 35 family members from Vineland are planning to attend Opening Day.
“We’re such a close-knit family,” says Darren’s grandmother, Beverly Ann Borden. “I know Darren gets very homesick, so we try to visit him every place he plays. We were in San Jose last year and everybody there treated us so well.”
Perhaps, before the year is out, San Francisco will be on the travel schedule for the Ford family from Vineland, N.J.
A Game Within A Game
When Mark DeRosa’s bunt rolled past the yellow-lined target a few yards from home plate, he huffed out of the batting cage to a hail of trash talk.
“They didn’t bring me over here to bunt!” he shot back, laughing.
DeRosa was competing in the team bunting contest this afternoon, a little competition that served mostly as an opportunity to try out new insults on each other.
There were two teams: Starting pitchers vs. position players. Five players on each team. Closer Brian Wilson boycotted the whole thing, watching from a good distance with his arms crossed..
“Not worth watching if there are no relievers,” he said.
DeRosa was joined by Kevin Frandsen, Andres Torres, Pablo Sandoval and Eugenio Velez. Freddy Sanchez was offering tips to his fellow position players.
“You want to hit it right here,” Sanchez said to DeRosa and Sandoval, pointing to the fattest part of the bat. “Right here.”
By the end of the first round -the vague rules were devised and enforced by third-base coach Tim Flannery – DeRosa and Sandoval were out as were most of the pitchers.
“You got to use ash!” Sanchez was now advising Frandsen and Torres. “Maple’s too hard.”
By the end, Frandsen was the last man standing. Not sure what he won, other than the lasting respect of Freddy Sanchez.
A Glimpse of Spring
If you can’t make it to Scottsdale this year, set your DVR to Comcast SportsNet Bay Area at 4 p.m. Saturday afternoon. (See other times and dates below.)
You’ll get an hour of spring ball like you have never seen it.
“Inside the Clubhouse: Spring Training 2010 Part 1” takes you into the clubhouse in Scottsdale, where the cameras first follow longtime clubhouse manager Mike Murphy (and his dog, Bella) as he dotes on the players like a favorite uncle.
“Everybody’s here early,” he says on the first day of camp. “First time I’ve seen that in a long time.”
You’ll hear from Bengie Molina about how much it means to him to be back with the Giants after an uncertain off-season. New players Mark DeRosa and Aubrey Huff weigh in on their expectations for the 2010 club. You’ll see Manny Burriss and top prospects Thomas Neal and Darren Ford hold hands in prayer before digging into breakfast at their favorite spot, Lo-Lo’s Chicken and Waffles.
The cameras also followed Tim Lincecum on the day in November he found out he had won a second consecutive Cy Young, and they follow him to New York for the awards ceremony in January.
And you also get to see Pablo Sandoval’s famous hike to the top of Camelback Mountain during Operation Panda.
Tune in. It’s an insider’s experience of the sights and sounds of Giants baseball in the desert (plus Tim and his Cy Young).
Air dates on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area:
Sunday March 21 @ 5 p.m. and 8:30 p.m.; Tuesday March 23 @ 6:30 p.m.; Friday March 26 @ 1:30 a.m..
Then look for the debut of “Spring Training 2010: Part II” on Tuesday March 30 at 6:30 p.m.
Day One
Day One : Those were the words at the top of today’s workout schedule, posted on the bulletin board outside the Giants’ clubhouse.
Today was the first day that the full team worked out together. There was a closed-door team meeting at 10:30 this morning. It had been scheduled to start at 10, with workouts beginning at 10:30. But the field was covered with frost, so everything was pushed back to allow the sun time to warm up the grass.
A few notes from the clubhouse:
- Jeremy Affeldt will be starting a video blog called The Set-Up on the Giants’ website. He’s one of the funniest guys in baseball. Check out his video on Comcast SportsNet Bay Area from earlier this week. You’ll get a taste for what his vlog will be like when it starts sometime next month.
- Affeldt is a big believer in chemistry on a team. He says chemistry was the key to Colorado reaching the World Series when he played there in 2007 “This team is as close to Colorado as I’ve been on. We have a lot of fun together. Lots of inside jokes.” He said it helps the team’s chemistry when the main star of the team, Tim Lincecum, is a good guy. “It’s like Matt Holliday in Colorado. He was a good family man. Really humble. You always see Lincecum signing autographs. He has so much fun when he plays. Timmy brings that dynamic. He reminds you that the game is supposed to be fun.”
- Thomas Neal, the 22-year-old minor-leaguer, is here in his first major-league camp. But he is very familiar to manager Bruce Bochy. Neal played with Bochy’s son on a traveling team in Poway, in Southern California. The two young men are still good friends, and Neal has spent many an afternoon and evening at the Bochy home. ”(Bochy’s wife) and my mom are pretty good friends,” Neal says.
- Neal has another major-league connection: He went to his high school prom with Tony Gwynn’s daughter.
- On a day-to-day basis, no one – other than perhaps Pablo Sandoval – is happier in the clubhouse than reliever Sergio Romo. He couldn’t wait to get to camp and back on the field. “I have such an appreciation of where I’m at,” he said. “I do enjoy what I do.” He said he feels invincible when he stares in at a batter. When I’m out on the mound, it’s the only place I’m not 5 feet 10.”
Notes from Scottsdale
? Here’s a sign that Tim Lincecum is not likely to change now that he has more money than he ever imagined. On his flight back to Phoenix after hammering out his new contract in St. Petersburg last week, Lincecum sat in coach – and in a middle seat.
? Rookie Dan Runzler attributes much of his success in the majors last season to fellow left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt. “I’d watch film with him. We’d go over the left-handed hitters. He’d show me guys he’s faced and say, ‘See? This is what this guy does with a 2-0 count. Here’s what he’s thinking.’ I followed Affledt around last season like a puppy dog.”
? Some might be surprised that Affeldt is helping a guy who might one day take his job as the set-up man. Affeldt shrugs. “I’m OK with that. There are 30 teams. I’ll find another job. It’s not my personality, man, to not help a kid like that. I had guys show me when I was a rookie. If they did that for me, why wouldn’t I do it for him? And he’s the kind of kid you really, really pull for.”
? Outfielder Fred Lewis spent the off-season in Mississippi working out under the direction of his now-retired father. After struggling last season, Lewis wanted to get back to basics, something he couldn’t do if he played winter ball. He bought a pitching machine like the one used by the Giants and hit a million balls. He used the pitching machine to shoot fly balls to him out on his old high school field, directing his father to change the angles and velocity to hone his skills. He ran sprints and ran the bases with the intention of stealing more this year. He arrived at camp early, too. Position players aren’t required to be in camp until Tuesday. “I’m in the best shape of my life,” Lewis said. “I couldn’t wait to get here.”
? There has been rain the past two days, though the players got some work in today. The forecast calls for more rain tomorrow.
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