The Rotation (16 page)

The Phillies needed to hurry. But just like Sunday, the deal died again—this time between lunch with Mayberry and dinner with Francisco.

Those words carried a couple meanings for Montgomery. He no doubt understood the importance of the decision in front of him. He had the power to bring back Lee to Philadelphia to form one of the greatest rotations in baseball history. But he also had nicknamed Proefrock the Wave Maker because he makes things happen.

“I could feel the waves crashing over me because the Wave Maker is pushing for a little more, a little more,” Montgomery said with a smile.

Montgomery realized they were close. He stopped looking at the whole commitment and started to look at the difference separating the two. He decided he would close the gap. They would offer Lee a five-year, $120 million contract with a sixth-year club option increasing the value of the deal to $135 million. The option automatically vested if Lee threw 200 innings in 2015 or 400 innings 2014–15, and he did not finish 2015 on the disabled list with a left shoulder or left elbow injury.

Ruben Amaro Jr. called Darek Braunecker to finalize the deal. The phones for Amaro and Proefrock started to buzz as word spread the Phillies were the mystery team. Their phones actually had been ringing anyway because they had been trying to trade Joe Blanton, who would make $17 million over the next two seasons, to clear payroll. Braunecker took that as a good sign and called Cliff and Kristen to tell them about it.

“Hold on because we're going to get this deal done,” he told them.

Proefrock knew things were turning in their favor around 9:30 P.M. when Braunecker started to ask about relatively minor details in the contract.

“Scott, was the trade provision and suite on the road intentionally struck from the deal? Or oversight? We have full no-trade provision in other offers and suites. Trying to do a full line-item comparison,” Braunecker said.

“We don't do full no-trade and we don't do suites on the road,” Proefrock replied.

“OK. That in itself has to be worth $2.5 million, especially against full protection,” Braunecker claimed. “No joke. Y'all sell that to Montgomery.

“Any way to add that suite?” Braunecker asked again. “Family travels with him a lot.”

“Jesus Christ, Darek. When I'm on the road and I get a suite I'll give it to him,” Proefrock replied.

“Can we at least get a verbal when family is travelling with him?” Braunecker replied. “And by the way, you are the man.”

In between their discussions, Proefrock was getting texts messages from
reporters, other club officials, and even relief pitcher Chad Durbin, who was trying to re-sign with the Phillies.

Amaro called Proefrock a little before 11 P.M.

“Sorry, but we didn't get it done,” he said solemnly.

“Fuck!” Proefrock screamed into the phone.

“Gotcha!” Amaro replied.

Amaro called Montgomery to tell him the good news. Montgomery wondered if he needed to call the ownership group to tell them what had happened, but Amaro said he could call them Tuesday morning because they would not announce anything until then. So a little after 11 P.M., Montgomery went to sleep.

Amaro and Proefrock were exhausted. They had been working on one of the biggest and most surprising signings in baseball history and had not been able to tell a single soul about it. That made their efforts even more exhausting. They were the only ones who knew.

“Those couple weeks were about as tough sleep-wise as I've gone through on this job because you don't want to get too excited about the possibility of being able to have him,” Amaro said. “And at the same time have to keep it from my family, my kids, my friends, my brother, my dad, and my mom.”

Montgomery woke up Tuesday morning to learn the word was out. While the Phillies and Lee's camp would not confirm anything publicly, out of respect, Lee had called the Rangers and Braunecker had called the Yankees to inform them of their decision. The word spread through those teams with T. R. Sullivan, the Rangers beat writer for
MLB.com
, breaking the story at 10:50 P.M. on his blog: “Cliff Lee is going to the Philadelphia Phillies, industry sources said Monday night. The Rangers were told Monday night that Lee is going to the Phillies. It is a done deal.”

Montgomery had to scramble and call the ownership group, apologizing and explaining why they had not heard from him earlier. There have been worse calls to make.

Proefrock drove home to Maryland the weekend after Lee passed his physical and had his re-introductory news conference at Citizens Bank Park.

He handed his son John a baseball, with the inscription:

O
h, the smell.

Joe Blanton can still smell the manure he shoveled into a wheelbarrow on those hot, humid Kentucky summer days. He grew up on a farm in a small town called Chalybeate, about 30 minutes from Bowling Green; a no-stop-light, no-four-way-stop town with a Dairy Queen and a mini-mart.The Blanton family had beef cows and grew tobacco, and Joe handled a variety of chores whenever his father, Joey, who also worked at the family insurance company, needed help. Blanton stripped tobacco leaves in the winter and fed cows and hauled square bale hay in the summer—picking up the bales in the field and throwing them onto a wagon. Once the wagon was full he tossed the bales into the barn. It was hard work in stifling heat, which choked him while he wore jeans and long sleeve shirts to avoid cutting his arms and legs. But more than he cared to remember, he shoveled that thick layer of fresh manure inside the barn into a wheelbarrow. Once the wheelbarrow was full, he pushed it to the garden, where he dumped it and it became fertilizer.

It smelt god-awful.

“It wasn't every day, and it was only a few hours,” Blanton said, “but it felt like forever.”

Baseball provided Blanton's escape. He lettered on the varsity team six years—one of the advantages of living in a small town—playing his first four years at tiny Edmonson County High School in Brownsville before transferring to the larger, more competitive Franklin-Simpson High School in Franklin for his final two years.

“Joe was Jekyll and Hyde,” former Franklin-Simpson coach Greg Shelton said. “He was just as mild and meek and well-mannered a kid as you'll ever run into. Until you put a ball in his hand. Then he turned into a fierce competitor.”

Like the time Franklin-Simpson trailed rival Warren Central by a run in the sixth inning. Shelton told Blanton to head to the bullpen to warm up. If the Wildcats took the lead, he would pitch the seventh. On cue, they hit a two-run home run to take the lead, Blanton entered the game and retired the
side in order, striking out the final batter he faced. Blanton was so pumped up he fired his glove against the backstop.

“Just out of his mind,” Shelton said. “So out of place for him to show that kind of emotion. But he wanted it so bad. He finally had to let it release, you know?”

Big league scouts followed Blanton in high school, but word spread he would not sign because he planned to attend the University of Kentucky. Former Kentucky coach Keith Madison knew the Blanton family well because he played baseball with Blanton's father at Edmonson. (Young Joe broke Madison's strikeout record at Edmonson.) Scouts figured Blanton had no shot of signing because of that connection, although recruiting Blanton wasn't particularly easy.

Madison called him once a week, per NCAA rules, but those phone calls quickly became a painful exercise. Madison had talked to hundreds of teenagers over the years, but Blanton proved to be one of the toughest. He simply would not talk. Madison tried every conversation starter he could imagine, but each one failed. He started dreading those calls, secretly hoping Blanton's mom or dad would pick up the phone so he would have somebody to talk to.

“He's sort of like John Wayne,” Madison said. “He just talks when he has something to say.”

Blanton pitched in Kentucky's bullpen his freshman and sophomore seasons, throwing only a fastball and curveball, which convinced most scouts he would be a relief pitcher.

“I was a real raw country kid who tried to throw as hard as he could,” Blanton said. “There wasn't a lot of pitching involved when I was out there.”

Blanton started for the Wildcats his junior season and impressed Oakland A's area scout Rich Sparks. He was one of a handful of scouts that thought Blanton could be a big-league starter. A's Special Assistant to the General Manager Matt Keough felt the same way, and both kept going back to watch Blanton pitch. Sparks saw Blanton five times his junior season; Keough saw him three times.

“He had some fight a lot of guys didn't have,” Sparks said.

The A's had seven of the top 39 picks in the 2002 amateur draft, which is known famously as the
Moneyball
draft, for Michael Lewis' book turned movie about the A's and their player procurement methods. The A's selected Nick Swisher with the 16
^th
overall pick and hoped Blanton would fall to
them at 24, which wasn't a lock. Chicago White Sox General Manager Ken Williams had told A's General Manager Billy Beane that he liked Blanton and would take him with the 18
^th
pick.

The Phillies selected Cole Hamels 17
^th
, but the White Sox surprisingly took Royce Ring over Blanton. Beane couldn't believe his good fortune.

“You fucking got to be kidding me!” Beane said in
Moneyball.
“Ring over Blanton? A reliever over a starter? Blanton's going to get to us.”

The A's considered Blanton the second-best pitcher in the draft. They got him at 24.

Blanton maneuvered through the minor leagues and spent his first full season with the A's in 2005, posting a 12-12 record with a 3.55 ERA and finishing sixth in American League Rookie of the Year voting. He won a career-high 16 games in 2006 and remained in Oakland's rotation until the A's traded him to the Phillies on July 17, 2008, for Josh Outman, Adrian Cardenas, and Matt Spencer. The Phillies had been looking for a starting pitcher for the stretch run, but finished runner-up for CC Sabathia, whom the Cleveland Indians traded to the Milwaukee Brewers. Blanton was nowhere near as talented as Sabathia, but he fit Phillies General Manager Pat Gillick's philosophy that sometimes marginal acquisitions can push a team over the top.

Gillick divvied teams between himself and Assistant General Managers Ruben Amaro Jr. and Mike Arbuckle. Each man would keep in contact with his assigned teams throughout the year.

“You constantly know your needs and their needs and that could help facilitate a deal,” Arbuckle explained.

Arbuckle had the Athletics, and worked with Oakland's Assistant General Manager David Forst on the machinations of the trade. Arbuckle finalized the deal while standing in the parking lot outside of Lake Olmstead Stadium in Augusta, Georgia, where he had travelled to scout a Phillies minor-league team. The A's had been pushing for an additional player in the deal, but the Phillies pushed back. Gillick finally told Arbuckle to tell Oakland, “This is where we are. We have interest in somebody else and we're going to go in another direction if you don't want to make this deal.”

Oakland said OK.

“We bluffed them a little bit,” Gillick said.

The Phillies viewed Blanton as somebody who not only could help the starting rotation, but the bullpen because he could pitch more than five or six innings, helping keep the bullpen's arms fresh. He went 4-0 with a 4.20 ERA in 13 starts down the stretch, and 2-0 with a 3.18 ERA in three postseason starts,
including a win in Game 4 of the World Series against the Tampa Bay Rays.

Game 4 is often called The Joe Blanton Game.

Not too many people remember he allowed just four hits and two runs in six innings. They only remember he hit a two-out solo home run to left field against Rays right-hander Edwin Jackson in a 10-2 victory. The Phillies had a 5-2 lead before Blanton launched his bomb, which was the moment many Phillies fans knew they were going to win the World Series.

Blanton doesn't go long without hearing about the homer.

“People remember where they were when I hit it, which I think is unbelievable,” he said. “To remember that is pretty awesome.”

Blanton had been part of something special in 2008, and figured to be part of something special in 2011. He started the season as part of the Phillies' pitching staff of stars, and though he was the fifth man he hardly minded. He wasn't shoveling manure or hauling hay. He was playing baseball and he loved it.