Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life In the Minor Leagues of Baseball by John Feinstein

Detwiler and they hadn’t signed Jackson for that kind of money to not start. I did the math and realized I was in trouble. Even so, I went to spring training telling myself to just do my job and the rest would take care of itself. I knew I was still a good pitcher.”
    It was a completely different sort of camp for Lannan. Twice in the past he had known early that he was the opening-day starter. Thespring rotation had been built around making sure he would be ready to take the ball when the season began. Even a year earlier, when the Nationals had brought in veteran Liván Hernández and named him to start the opener, Lannan’s only doubt was whether he would start game two or game three.
    Now he wasn’t sure
where
he would start the season, much less
when
he would start.
    Often, he pitched exhibition games out of the bullpen, following one of the four locked-in starters—Strasburg, Zimmermann, Gonzáles, and Jackson—into games. He pitched well, though, and ten days before the team broke camp to head north, Johnson told him that he would be the team’s fifth starter. Relieved, he called his wife, and they made plans to go apartment hunting in Washington. They had always rented in-season in the past but this time had waited to look for a place until Lannan was told he was going north.
    They found a place they liked in the Foggy Bottom area of downtown Washington, about ten minutes from Nationals Park, and signed a lease just before the Nationals played their annual exhibition game in D.C. Many teams will play one game in their home park to give the stadium a run-through before opening day. On April 3, the Nats played the Boston Red Sox on a cold, sunny afternoon.
    “I was sitting in the dugout taking it easy when [shortstop] Ian Desmond came in during the third inning and said he needed a pair of sunglasses,” Lannan said. “I went up the tunnel to get him some, and I heard Davey [Johnson] coming up behind me as I got to the clubhouse.
    “He said, ‘Hey, come into my office for a minute.’ I’m not sure why he said it, but he also said, ‘Don’t worry, you aren’t getting traded.’ So I had no idea what it was about.
    “I got in there and he started talking about making tough decisions and how well Ross had been pitching. After a couple of minutes it suddenly hit me that he was sending me down. I was completely stunned. I’m not even sure I heard anything he said the last couple of minutes. When he stopped, I looked at him and said, ‘You’re sendingme down? Seriously? You’re sending me down?’ I couldn’t believe it. I’m sure I vented for a little while. I was angry. Finally, I went back in the clubhouse and asked to see [general manager Mike] Rizzo.
    “I vented some more. I don’t think I said or did anything unprofessional, but I was really upset. It just caught me completely off guard. One minute I’m getting Ian a pair of sunglasses; the next minute I’m packing for Syracuse.”

    Lannan’s demotion was one of the most stunning anywhere in baseball that spring. Most players know what a call to the manager’s office means. “When the manager wants to talk to you in the spring, it’s never to tell you how well you’ve been playing,” said Pete Orr, who spent most of his first seven years on the Triple-A/majors escalator. “At best, he’s going to tell you that you’re going to be playing less than you’ve been playing. At worst, he’s going to tell you that you’re being sent down.”
    The first time Orr made a team out of spring training was in 2005, when he was with the Braves. Just before the team went north, Chipper Jones sat down with him in the clubhouse one day to tell him not to be discouraged if he got sent down.
    “It was the ‘You’re going down but you’ll be back’ speech,” Orr remembered with a laugh. “It was Chipper’s way of being a leader, letting a guy who’d had a good spring not feel too bad about going back down.”
    A few days later, Orr sat in the