In Another League Now

'Omaha is hot, dry and boring," reads an old Crimson sports page. "The dusty air, blown in off the great plains, is arid and uncomfortable." As the "color" piece goes on, dated 1973, it becomes clear that the on-location reporter hates Omaha. Still, he betrays his excitement about the event he is covering: the 27th annual College World Series, where the presence of a Harvard baseball team is only slightly less likely than Restic's boys making it to the Hula Bowl. This was some show--travelling all the way out there to watch one of the greatest squads in Harvard history take on the behemoths from the West and the South and the big state universities. The reporter trotted off to the stadium early for Harvard's first game; the Ivy Leaguers were the "sentimental favorite," and all kinds of people were swarming around the 9500 seats--journalists, citizens of Omaha, major league scouts squinting through smoke and hat brims in the flat Nebraska sun. The reporter must have wondered how on earth he was going to come up with something lyrical about Omaha to spice up the day's coverage.

He didn't have to worry, it turned out, because he was packing his bags, along with the team, almost before the Crimson uniforms got dirty. They dropped two straight. The problem was this: Harvard had to win the first game, play from strength--which in this case was their starting pitcher Roswell Brayton. Brayton had been first team All-East for two years running. He'd barely lost a game in that time, and in 1972 had performed the astonishing feat of pitching 40 straight innings without giving up a run (when he finally did, it was unearned)--he finished the year with an ERA of .027. This year it had hovered around .100. If Harvard was to have any luck at Omaha, the first game was key. Trouble was, Harvard drew USC for the opener, the defending national championship team. Baseball is serious there. In late October, when the real World Series is over and the major league players have all gone home to hunt and fish and sell insurance, and the fans in Boston already gnashing their teeth over the Patriots, they're still playing baseball at places like Southern Cal and Arizona State. Bats crack over the desert almost all year round there--if Harvard plays 40 games in a season, USC plays 150, and the scouts squat in the hot bleacher sun scanning the diamond for kids like Fred Lynn.

Brayton was on the mound that day, and Fred Lynn, also a college senior, was seventh at bat. Rozzie struck him out. Lynn came up two more times and never got on base; Brayton pitched "well enough to win," said the Harvard coach. But the USC pitcher pitched better, and Harvard lost, 4-1. The team dropped the clincher to Georgia Southern the following day and went back to Cambridge.

Fred Lynn and Rozzie Brayton got drafted by the big leagues that year, and after graduation they each joined the Boston Red Sox organization. The Red Sox nurture a lot of farm teams, though, and since Lynn was drafted second and Brayton tenth, the two never met until spring training in Winterhaven, Florida, a while back:

Brayton: Hey, you remember me?

Lynn (puzzled): Ah...

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Brayton: No, you remember--the College World Series in '73: I pitched against you.

Lynn (embarrassed): Um, you know, I just can't place the exact game...there were so many....

Brayton: Harvard--you beat us, 4-11

Lynn: Oh yeah, that's right, you were the, ah, yeah, I remember now....

Baseball's that way: Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee was in the locker room last October after Boston had lost the World Series. Someone was praising Reds pitcher Don Gullett. "Right," said Lee, "Don Gullett is going to the Hall of Fame. And I'm going to the Eliot Lounge to play bumper pool." So it goes. Little more than two years from that day in Omaha, Fred Lynn is the sensation of baseball, Athlete of the Year. And Brayton? Brayton's at Barney's, eating a roast beef sandwich.

"I'm pissed off," he says right away, sipping his beer. It's hard to generalize about what a professional athlete looks like--Brayton doesn't wear a suede jacket and smoke Tiparillo Slims: maybe that's what the successful ones affect. Brayton is dressed in a kind of messy, informal Brooks Brothers, probably the same way he dressed a few years back when he was in the Owl Club. His life now, two and a half years after graduation, is closer to that limbo of college than that of his contemporary alumni, who have neatened up by now. Brayton's still a professional baseball player, and after two and a half seasons, he's a borderline case, teetering, insecure about his position, and very, very vulnerable. He's semi-successful, a make-or-break case.. If there are six planes of consciousness in the spiritual world of the Boston Red Sox organization, Brayton has made it halfway; an exemplary mortal. He began at the bottom, with the Elmira Red Sox. He actually transcended the next rung, skipping the Winterhaven farm team, and played for all of 1974 for the Red Sox in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Then last year he made the Bristol (Conn.) Red Sox, of the Eastern League, Double A ball, a prayer away from the Pawtucket Red Sox which is in turn a prayer away from Boston and Fenway and eternal bliss.

"I'm pissed off. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and I want to shoot my mouth off, sort of. I mean, I wouldn't say some of this stuff for the hell of it, you know, say it to the Globe. But with The Crimson I figure I can talk."

He talks. In an immediate sense, what's bugging Brayton is that he didn't get invited--for the third year in a row--to "winter ball," the Instructional League for the 20 or so hottest prospects in the organization for extra practice and extra leverage with the powers that be. But the problem is more than this, involving the entire process of making one's way to the majors without getting the ax. You have to be noticed.

"They overdo the whole business of juding raw talent rather than the ability to win games," says Brayton. "It's like in football, where they keep computer cards on every player--your height, weight, how fast you run the hundred. They emphasize physical characteristics. One time a scout told me that the best way to impress a scout is to throw like hell for five innings, and don't worry about how long you can last, or about where the ball goes."

This is not Brayton's style. He's more or less a wily pitcher--he tries to outsmart the batter, throw a wide variety of pitches rather than blaze it by him. Less a grunt thrower like Tom Seaver than, say, a Catfish Hunter. (Whom he admires: "He'll give you one pitch to hit and if you miss it, you're gone.") In the past year the style has worked well enough, even though he's at "the bottom of the totem pole" on the best pitching staff on the league. He led the team in ERA last year, gave up one home run in 95 innings, surrendered two earned runs in his last 43 innings. "I know I'm a better strike-out pitcher than a hell of a lot of guys who can throw harder than me. There's no correlation between how hard you throw and how well you pitch."

Brayton won't mention names, and his bitterness never singles out one rival or one front office villain. Part of this is because he respects some of the pitchers he played with and lived with who are on the brink of the big time, like Don Aase and Rick Jones, who are both "outstanding" and deserving. He knows that players who got big stipends when they signed represent an "investment" and thus have a better chance. (Brayton himself was no bonus baby.) He might drop hints about Pete Broberg, the big Dartmouth pitcher who made the majors around the time Brayton was breaking in. "Broberg weighs 200 pounds and he's one of the types who's impressive to watch. He can throw through a brick wall. But that doesn't necessarily win ball games."

It's this sort of thing that bothers Brayton. One week at Winston-Salem he pitched five innings on a Tuesday. On Thursday the starting pitcher got sick and they pointed to Brayton. He walked in and pitched a shutout for 8 2/3 innings. Afterwards the coach walked up to him and said, "Brayton, you're my new spot starter." When Brayton got called up to Bristol soon after, he ever got another start. Or the way Briston manager Dick MacAuliffe likes to let a faltering starter finish a game when it's obvious he should be pulled, just to give him a complete game. Brayton can understand letting someone finish off a shutout, but sitting out while a tired pitcher gets a free hand is frustrating. The fact that he's a "slow starter" hurts him, too--spring training is important, and with the scouts, first impressions can be very important.

"I'm not saying I'm the only guy who hasn't gotten a fair shake," and indeed he's lucky, he knows, to have made it this far. Of his original 26 teammates at Elmira, six are left. Four of his roommates have been cut. When it happens, the sword of justice is swift. "The guy who gets it is always the last to know--I play with guys I know are never going to make it." Same thing with trades. Once Bristol was playing the Milwaukee Double A club. Everything was as usual. The other team took the infield and a big first baseman was out there throwing. Then a voice from a dugout called him in and he never came back out. They'd told him to pack his bags and get going. This could happen to Brayton at any moment: in early December, the player-to-be-named-later from the Ferguson Jenkins trade was still unnamed, and it was being conjectured that a minor league reliever would be going to Texas. "Hell, it might be me." Further, there is the winter draft to weather--a process where any team can lift a player from another team providing they move him up to a higher league. Brayton didn't get grabbed for either of these, but the most basic question still lies open: not knowing "at what level I'm being protected."

The door opens and several people come into Barney's. The shadow of a tennis sweater looms behind Brayton. It turns out to be an old Harvard acquaintance, a member of the Porcellian Club, like Brayton's two old roommates. The conversation is a bit strained.

"Well, gee, what are you up to?" Brayton asks.

Sweater: "I'm down in New York working at Morgan Guaranty. What about you, what do you do?"

Brayton (he pauses, savoring it, taking pleasure in the way he can lightly shrug and say, humbly): "I play baseball."

Sweater: "What? You do what? How long are you going to do that?"

Brayton: "Well, until I feel I'm not going to make the big leagues, or until I do."

He smiles, Sweater retreats, confused. Brayton turns and rolls his eyes. "Working at a bank--that's one thing I'm sure glad I'm not doing."

But in fact, if Brayton were not doing what he does, that's where he might be, or "at business school or something," he says. Brayton went to exclusive Milton Academy; his father is head of a large clothing company in Pennsylvania. This isn't held against him in baseball, where there are "just a bunch of guys, like at Harvard or anywhere else. Hell, look at Varney." And indeed, White Sox catcher Pete Varney '71 comes from Quincy, Massachusetts--his background has none of the trappings of the Harvard stereotype, unless it is the very real stereotype of the local kid plucked up by Harvard athletics. With an occasional exception. Brayton says, ball players don't know or care if the guy out on the mound comes from Teddy Kennedy's final club. "I took more grief about Harvard in college leagues." Instead there are the skeptical reactions he has to face about baseball from the guardians of his old life. His parents have "gotten used to it," he says, but sometimes the old men sidle up to him like he was Dustin Hoffman, whispering, "plastics, plastics--there's a great future in plastics."

That's part of why Brayton is a baseball player. Why isn't he out making money? (At Bristol he is paid $900 per month, the month he works--he has driven a taxi in the off-season; now he works for his father.) "This is the only thing I ever really worked hard at, the only thing I always knew wasn't going to be given to me because I went to such-and-such a school. If I make it, I'll make it on my own--if anything, my background will count against me."

A cynic might suggest that it is exactly because Brayton comes from a privileged background that he can afford to follow up the chancy business of flirting with a baseball career--he's got an out if things fall through. But he's too serious for that:

"I've wanted to do this for 16 years. It started out like when you say you want to be a fireman, a cowboy, a baseball player. I just got stuck there."

And at age 24, it still feels like he's stuck, sometimes. Like the buses: "Ask any player--the worst thing is thing is the buses." Even though the Red Sox are a "class organization" like the Phillies and the Dodgers, teams that take care of their own, life in the minor leagues can be lackluster. The big stadium is there--the hint of what could come in a wild dream--but the stands are usually near-empty; loudspeakers play "Knock Three Times" between innings and the "bullpen" is likely to be a bench near the left field line. The Eastern League has a grueling schedule, too: 40 games in 144 days, April 10 to September 1, no days off. Once in a great while a local reporter will approach Brayton, and produce a "Patrician Who Can Pitch!" story with the Harvard angle, but there's previous little attention, too. Brayton says he sends what seems like 1000 schedules to his friends, begging them to come watch him play, but sometimes there are long stretches in strangle middle-sized cities where it seems like the whole game, no matter how much you love it (and they all do, whether they bitch all Page 12/Dump Truck the time or not, Brayton says), is deferred gratification: you aren't playing minor league for its own sake, ever--it's always to get noticed, to make it big, to break through.

"The worst is a Canada trip. You're in Pennsylvania or southern Connecticut somewhere and you have a game at 7:30. You finish at 10 or 10:30 or whenever, and the bus leaves at midnight. It gets to Canada at 9 in the morning, and you have to sit around and drink coffee because you can't check into the motel until noon. Then a game that same day. There's nothing like being the starting pitcher for the first game or a Canada trip."

Other times "it's like high school, you know. You put on your uniform in your own locker room and get in the bus and go somewhere and play and drive back all sweaty." When you play, "sometimes you feel like a caged animal, people throwing peanuts at you." But who's complaining? Brayton's never one to let a few gripes grow to defiance.

"People say it's just a job, but I don't believe it. The money's no good, so if they don't like it, why aren't they out doing something else? Take me--I'm the lowest-paid guy in Bristol, and I know I could get more, but I'm too stupid even to ask for a raise. They mail you their offer, and even though most of the guys hold out for a while, I always send mine back right away. You don't want to hold on to it too long, because you don't want to be labelled a troublemaker, an 'attitude problem.' But on the other hand...you want them to know you have confidence in your ability."

"Them" again. The most rebellious thing Brayton ever did was to hint at threatening to quit when he was on Winston-Salem. Soon afterwards he was called up to Bristol. But always the paranoid, he worries that "They" only wanted to appease him.

In a year Brayton could be anywhere. He'll be married, to Hope Price, an education student at Lesley who's already met all the baseball wives and says she's looking forward to her marriage to baseball. He'll still have a dog named Slider. He'll still come up to Cambridge to check in at the Owl Club for news of friends. But this can't go on too much longer.

"I know they have everyone classified--can't miss prospect, good prospect, outside chance, highest-ever Triple A--right on down the line. I don't know where I stand, I mean, I'm 24 years old, and being 24 in Double A ball could be old. As soon as I see the hand writing on the wall, I'm not hanging around. But hell, I've been working at this since I was eight years old--there's no way I'm gonna throw it all away till I know for sure I'm not going to make it.