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........................................| 83 The 2005 Portland Beavers, the Triple-A affiliate of the San Diego Padres, provide a few strands of the rich tapestry of minor league baseball. Veteran catcher Michel Hernandez is still chasing the American pot of gold he had decided to seek long ago. Back in 1996 at age eighteen, he bolted out of a stadium in Mexico with four Havana Industriales teammates , leaving behind his island nation, family and friends, and the only life he had ever known. His long haul in the minors has been punctuated by a single September call-up, in 2003, and precisely one, deeply treasured major league hit.1 Hard-throwing right-hander Clay Hensley, a twenty-five-year-old native of Tomball, Texas, is set to make his first-ever appearance at the TripleA level—but not right away. On April 4 Hensley is one of thirty-eight minor leaguers suspended for failing a test for performance-enhancing drugs, the first players ever to be publicly identified. He begins the season with a fifteen-game suspension.2 The colorfully named Tagg Bozied is coming back to Portland from one of the most bizarre injuries in baseball history. Bozied was considered a top prospect for the Padres the previous summer, batting .315 at Portland with sixteen homers and fifty-eight RBI. The sixteenth homer and the fifty-eighth RBI, though, led to his being carted out of Portland’s PGE Stadium via ambulance. After hitting a walk-off grand slam, Bozied rounded third and got set to launch himself into the arms of jubilant teammates at the plate. The leap turned into a disaster when he ruptured the patellar tendon in his left knee. Bozied hasn’t played since.3 Steve Sparks, who was the only knuckleballer besides Tim Wakefield in the major leagues in 2004, is trying to get back to the bigs once again at age thirty-nine. Sparks is the journeyman supreme, having pitched professionally since 1987. He has hurled for five big league teams over nine seasons and has been mediocre at best: 59–76 with a 4.88 ERA. Still, that has been good enough to earn him more than $10 million in major league salary. He is not quite ready to give it up.4 6 “It’s the Life—the One Everyone Wants to Live” Portland, Oregon 84 | chapter 6 Then there is twenty-seven-year-old Mike Bumstead, whose fame, such as it is, has little to do with baseball. A devoutly religious player the Beavers will ultimately enlist to speak on “Faith Night,” Bumstead vowed to hold on to his virginity until he got married. One night in the summer of 2003, playing Double-A ball for the Mobile BayBears, he couldn’t take his eyes off the singer of the national anthem, the former Miss Mobile, Christin Kelly. Ultimately he proposed to her on the same spot, right there at Hank Aaron Stadium. Their wedding, in December 2004, was chronicled a month later by Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen network in a reality series about couples tying the knot. A few days before the episode aired, Jason Vondersmith of the Portland Tribune wrote: “The Portland Beavers’ Mike Bumstead has never pitched a complete game. Before Dec. 11, he hadn’t gone all the way, either.”5 All these Beavers have a single goal: they are eager to get up, or get back, to the major leagues. Thirteen of the twenty-four players on the Opening Day roster have played at least a little at the big league level. ● Brad Baker is on the verge. At least it looks that way. In 2004 he seemingly put it all together as a closer, with combined Double-A and Triple-A numbers of 3–1 with thirty-four saves and a 1.48 ERA. He was named the Padres’ co–minor league pitcher of the year, and flew out on the company’s dime to San Diego for a banquet, where he was brought up on stage to shake hands with Padres manager Bruce Bochy and general manager Kevin Towers. Brad and his wife, Ashley, married just a few weeks, stayed in a room where one window looked out onto shiny new PETCO Park and the other onto navy ships in the harbor on sparkling San Diego Bay. The Baseball Prospectus for 2005 has given Baker a rosy report, saying that his “devastating change-up . . . baffles opposing hitters,” that he has “drawn comparisons...

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