The Boys of Fall | East Bay Express | Oakland, Berkeley & Alameda

Ryan Langerhans might be the face of the 2007 Oakland Athletics, even if no one can remember his face.

The former Atlanta Braves phenom became property of the locals following an April 29 trade, and three days later stood in center field at Boston’s Fenway Park wearing Oakland’s green and gold. “He’s a player we’ve liked in the past,” A’s general manager Billy Beane told reporters at the time. “He’s off to a rough start in Atlanta and became available to us.”

The River Cats have nice digs, but big-league they ain’t. Credits: Chris Duffey

The fans’ imaginations bloomed: Another surprise star: a Jay Payton? A Milton Bradley? A Frank Thomas? Had Billy found another gold nugget in the scrap heap?

“I don’t know how to react right now,” Langerhans said of his transition. “I know I’m going to a place where I’ll have a chance to get more at-bats. I have to look at it as a good thing for me right now.”

We all know the Moneyball script by heart, the winning strategy that spawned the Michael Lewis bestseller and made Beane a household name: Buy low, sell high. Give us your tired, your injured, your rejects, your malcontents, and your deeply discounted and we’ll ride them to the top of the American League West. It’s a formula with which the franchise has won a handful of division titles, while its players have collected a pair of Most Valuable Player awards, Cy Young commendations, and a handful of Rookie and Comeback players of the year honors, despite the team having one of Major League Baseball’s lowest payrolls.

Langerhans came to bat twice that May day in Boston and struck out both times. This, it turned out, was his best game as an Athletic. The next night, he again went 0-for-2, only this time he also dropped a fly ball hit right at him in center field. His error led to a run, and the run to a loss. “I got the glove between my eyes and the ball” he explained in the postmortem. “That’s something as an outfielder you don’t want to do.”

Indeed. One hour later, Langerhans was a former Oakland Athletic. Beane quickly traded him to the Washington Nationals for Chris Snelling, another prospect turned suspect. Snelling came with a voodoo vibe: Fans from his days with the Seattle Mariners insisted on calling him by his middle name, Doyle, since playing as Chris only seemed to keep him on the disabled list. True to form, on May 10, six games into his A’s career, Snelling was injured running the bases and hasn’t played since. “Can’t spell Doyle without D.L.,” snarked one fan on AthleticsNation.com.

And the carousel of A’s center fielders spun on its dizzy way.

The Athletics are deep into a September unlike any they’ve seen since the millennium: no pennant race, a losing record, and a farm system fresh out of Miguel Tejadas, Eric Chavezes, Jason Giambis, Huston Streets, or Nick Swishers. They can boast of one major accomplishment: By mid-August they’d already used more players in a single season than they had at any time in the franchise’s forty-year history in Oakland. The previous record of 49 players was set in 1997, the year 1 BB (before Billy), while this year’s club has gone through 54. Not all of them, thankfully, would have tenures as fleeting as that of the unfortunate Langer “Stone” hans. Most would at least get to wear the home jersey once or twice.

Perhaps you don’t remember Erasmo Ramirez. It’s likely pitcher Ron Flores didn’t make you forget Mark Mulder. Blink, and you’d have missed Connor Robertson, who pitched to just nine batters. Or Kevin Mellilo, who walked in his only plate appearance. Or Dee Brown, who saw just six pitches in his A’s debut before being sent back to the farm.

This year’s Athletics have been a team of transients. They traded their backup catcher because he never got a chance to play, and then traded the starter, only to bring on two entirely new catchers. For players who’ve made less of an impression than hot dog vendors, the guys who’ve hardly plugged holes, barely filled the margins, September has been their month.

Already by August, attendance had shrunk and TV ratings were down. The daily papers moved game stories to the inside pages. The only effect the A’s might have had on the playoffs was to keep certain rival teams out. Finally, a season for the Moneyball haters — one in which the Harvard boys in the A’s front office, the book-smart execs who’ve been trumping the grizzled old scouts, finally got a little old-fashioned chin music.

But all is not for naught. Baseball is a zero-sum game. The same RBI that boosts the batter’s stats also whacks the pitcher’s ERA. And a lousy, injury-plagued season spells opportunity for a lucky few who began their seasons in Sacramento or Portland or Midland, Texas.

Many of the temporar-A’s have been young men who would never have suited up during a regular season. How do they live with the dizzying ascents and descents, with the strain of trying to play consistent ball while being treated like a yo-yo? And how do their families cope? Finally, what do we call these the players on the cusp, those who — were it not for someone’s pulled hamstring, sore wrist, or a glove that got between a fly ball and a pair of eyes — would be playing a road game in Wichita, Kansas, on a buggy summer night?

This year, we called them Oakland A’s.

Donnie Murphy was in a restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee, eating a late dinner when his cell phone rang. Not recognizing the Arizona exchange, he let it ring through and continued his postgame meal with his Sacramento River Cats buddies. The River Cats are the Athletics’ Triple-A affiliate — the minor league system ranges from the rookie leagues to Class A, Class A Advanced, Double-A, and finally Triple-A.

Murphy’s team had just beaten the Redbirds 8-2 and he had gone two-for-five, bringing his batting average to .326. At half past midnight, his phone rang again, same number. He then remembered with “kind of a sick feeling” that his manager had an Arizona number and picked up to learn he was being called back to the majors.

For Murphy, it was the third such phone call this season. “I grabbed my travel bag, my bats, and went back to the hotel,” he says from his perch in the Oakland locker room two hours before an August game.

River Cats manager Tony DeFrancesco told Murphy he had to be on a 5 a.m. plane from Memphis to Los Angeles, where he’d join his big-league teammates for a night game against the Angels. That left about three hours for sleep. “Didn’t get any anyway,” he says with a smile. Then came plane delays, rush-hour traffic, and a cab that made it to the ballpark half an hour before the opening pitch. “Driver asked me if I was going to the game,” Murphy recalls. “I told him if we make it on time, I’m starting at shortstop.”

Murphy is a slender 24-year-old with dark hair and dark, cautious eyes. He scans the locker room in the concrete basement of the Oakland Coliseum as if somebody might tap him on the shoulder and ask him to leave at any moment. It takes him a beat or two to get comfortable with an interviewer’s attention but when he does, he’s fully engaged and generous with his time. Twice teammates chide him for “telling [his] life story,” but Murphy won’t rise to the bait.

Half an hour later, only the designated hitters are left in the locker room — the rest of the team is on the field stretching. Murphy casually pulls his white jersey pants over a pair of green shorts and invites his guest to sit in the next stall (until pitcher Joe Kennedy arrives) and then the stall on his left (until Mike Piazza appears). The A’s locker room is surprisingly scruffy and public. Reporters dodge in and out among the players, and a small hotel lobby-like snack bar, which players use as a card table, juts out in front of a modest television screen.

Murphy may be on his third stint, but there’s nothing to suggest this one would be the charm. Picked in the fifth round of the Major League draft in 2002, he quickly dominated Single-A competition. At nineteen, with just one college season under his belt, he moved from Spokane in the Northwest League to Burlington, Iowa, where he feasted on pitches in the higher-caliber Midwest League.

Within two years he’d graduated to the bright lights of Wilmington, Delaware, and led the Blue Rocks in everything worth measuring in the high-A Carolina League. Then the majors came calling. In 2004, the Kansas City Royals jumped Murphy over not one, but three levels. In his big-league debut, he played seven games and finished the year as a player to watch.

The next year saw the fledgling starting back at the Royals’ Double-A affiliate in Wichita. By July, however, Murphy was called back to K.C., where he again finished the season. But when Murphy failed to even hit his weight (.156), club management reclassified him as not quite Royalty. He spent all of 2006 in the minors, and at year’s end Kansas City cut him loose altogether. The A’s picked him up and planted him with the River Cats.

But Donnie Murphy was no longer a shiny new middle infielder — in a cruel twist, his young success was now being used against him. Players who had yet to see the big leagues, many older than the five-foot-ten Californian, still had “potential,” whereas Murphy, with barely one hundred at-bats, was seen as a known quantity. It’s no accident they call the scouting report a label — at 24 years of age, Murphy was a journeyman, and that tag would stick with him no matter where he was shipped.

The Athletics opened the 2007 season with returning starters at second, short, and third. They even had a veteran backup at each position, which meant Murphy’s new position was In Case of Fire, Break Glass. But after Eric Chavez got hurt, and backup Marco Scutaro filled in for him, Murphy was designated as Scutaro’s Scutaro for three weeks in June.

A Bobby Crosby injury earned Murphy his second stint, and a role in one quirky bit of baseball history: Called upon to pinch-run in an interleague game against the Giants, Murphy plowed into San Francisco’s catcher, knocking him out of the game and the season. The Giants were forced to use their third baseman, who’d never played the position, as an emergency catcher. Lost in the excitement was the fact that the collision had banged up Murphy, too. He returned to the minors black and blue. Then came Murphy’s midnight callback to the majors in late July — Bobby Crosby had been hit by a pitch, breaking his left hand.

With the fate of his big-league dream resting on the health of those ahead of him, it’s no surprise Murphy monitors the stats. “You check the big club all the time,” he says. “I read the box scores. I watch SportsCenter — over the past two years there’ve been a lot of injuries. One day everyone’s healthy and the next day someone’s hurt.”

This latest audition has been an extended one. With the A’s out of the pennant race, there’s no rush for Crosby to return at half-speed. And when third baseman Eric Chavez’ back put him on the disabled list, backups Scutaro and Murphy became the starting left side of the infield. As a result, the 24-year-old has started more games in the majors since July than in the rest of his career put together. So how does the new incumbent shortstop handle life on the edge? With all the shuttling back and forth, does he even know where all his stuff is?

Murphy laughs at the question. “For a while I held on to my apartment in Sacramento. I had a roommate and we got a place that leases to ballplayers. I’m still paying rent on it now…,” he says, neglecting to finish the thought.

The subtext, of course, is that he’s wary of laying down deep roots in Oakland. “The first two call-ups I just rented a place at the Airport Hilton,” Murphy says. “I got to thinking, ‘Y’know, room service sort of loses its charm when you’re having it at home as well as the road.'”

All the same, he missed his wife, his dogs, and having a real home. Big leaguers at the bottom end draw a minimum $380,000 per year, and part-timers get a prorated salary. Murphy decided the time was right: He called his wife and told her to bring the dogs and get ready to move in — somewhere. “The players here tell the new guys where they can find a good place,” he says. “Of course I don’t listen to the big salary guys — I don’t think I can afford to live in Blackhawk. But they know where to go and where you can get a month-to-month or three-month lease.”

So on a day off, Murphy retrieved his stuff from his Sacramento apartment and began his move to Dublin. Murphy credits Paige, his wife, for handling the logistics, and ruefully notes that road trips are actually easier than juggling responsibilities at home, where things like grocery shopping and bill paying fill the days. “It can be a distraction, sure” he says, “and right now I’m trying to just focus on staying up here.”

Attention to detail is the least of Murphy’s issues. If anything, he stands out for his intensity. The shortstop shows up at the ballpark hours early, at 1:30 p.m. One late afternoon, he’s taking ground balls between regular second baseman Mark Ellis and third-baseman-of-the-moment Scutaro. The vets get into position with nonchalance, artists playing scales, while Murphy lasers in on his coaches, moving with correctness rather than ease. “My mind-frame is that this is my time,” he says before batting practice. “If all I get is a few days here, then I’m going to get the most out of them.”

Watching him is like watching the new kid in class: rigorously attentive to protocol, awaiting his turn, not presuming to chat up the big kids unless invited. After he’d hit a home run the night before, his teammates congratulated Murphy on his first-ever long ball. “They didn’t know I had already hit one,” two years prior in Kansas City, he sheepishly tells me. His compatriots around the card table are rookies Travis Buck and Kurt Suzuki. Insecurity has left its mark on Murphy. Until he truly feels part of the big team, he’ll hold himself a little distant.

Athletics manager Bob Geren has been there. The Oakland skipper was himself a marginal player with the Yankees. “No doubt the pressure of playing up here is significant,” he says. To quell new players’ nerves, he adds, “I try to get them in the lineup first thing.”

Geren says he’s been pleased with Murphy’s progress, but he knows what’s on the infielder’s mind. “The first two times you’re up here, you’re just thrilled to be in the big leagues.” He pauses to look up at the field around him. “But after that, you want to make your mark.”

Murphy has struggled to do that. He looks to be pressing, trying almost too hard. Although he has slugged five home runs, he’s also a batting a subpar .211. He takes big swings, and is down in the count nearly every at-bat.

But there are signs he’s become more confident of his place on the field. He seems to have adopted the unlikely role of grizzled veteran to J.J. Furmaniak, a River Cat brought up as Murphy’s backup.

It’s hard to not to smile seeing Murphy mess with his old teammate during infield practice. He hides the ball and fakes a throw to his third-base buddy, then laughs when the rookie bites. Murphy says he welcomes the opportunity to share what little he’s learned with new players: “I don’t know that much yet, but I’ll do what I can to make them feel comfortable,” he says.

He also seems more comfortable in his own skin: During one post-game radio show, the host questioned Murphy on his work ethic. “What do you do?” the broadcaster asked, incredulous that the player arrives at the park three hours ahead of many teammates.

“I sit around and play cards,” Murphy replied.

“But why so early?” the host pressed.

You could almost hear the player’s grin: “I’m just trying to get better at cards.”

Jack Cust certainly managed to build himself a winning hand. The 28-year-old lifetime minor-leaguer showed up in Oakland the day after Ryan Langerhans left with a return ticket in his back pocket. The A’s big-money Christmas present to themselves, designated hitter Mike Piazza, had separated his shoulder and was placed on the 15-day disabled list to heal. Cust had two weeks to prove himself.

Like Crash Davis, the fictional minor leaguer played by Kevin Costner in the movie Bull Durham, Cust had been busting fences in places like Tacoma, Oklahoma City, and Fresno. He’d racked up nearly two hundred home runs in the minors and five in the big leagues with four different teams — Cust had been a Diamondback, a Rocky, an Oriole, and a Padre. But mostly he’d been a River Cat, a Beaver, a Red Wing, and a Sidewinder.

This past April, fed up after a hellacious minor-league road trip, he’d asked his agent to see if there was any interest in his skills in Japan. On the day that overseas connection was being negotiated, Billy Beane called to offer Cust his long shot, and as a designated hitter, no less. Given that any position player can be the DH, Cust essentially was competing against the entire A’s roster, as well as Piazza’s healing bones.

As Sports Illustrated recalled in an August article titled “The Legend of Jack Cust,” the player “in his fourth plate appearance launched a home run. Four days later in Kansas City, Cust homered twice. He went deep again the next day in Oakland. And the next. And the next.”

His subsequent three-run blast to beat Cleveland capped a stellar week in Oakland sports history. Six home runs in seven days earned him a roster spot for the rest of the season, and at the league’s July 31 trading deadline, it was Piazza who looked to be moving on.

When August rolled around with both DH’s still in the lineup, it became an even bigger tribute to Cust’s progress that the bush-league Bambino was earning playing time over his million-dollar predecessor.

The vibe Cust gives off in the locker room is one of comfort. He dresses next to Piazza, and there’s no visible rivalry. Both are big men — Cust stands six-foot-one and weighs 230 pounds — and they have an easy give-and-take, which underscores Cust’s sense of belonging. Of course, being team leader in home runs and RBIs despite having started a month into the season hardly hurts a man’s confidence.

It’s clear both from his demeanor and his stats that Jack Cust is not going back to the minors. Unlike the Colby Lewises, Shane Komines, or Donnie Murphys, he can relax — he’s already earned a roster spot in Oakland for the spring of 2008.

Ninety miles from the Coliseum, the Sacramento River Cats are holding kangaroo court. The hoary baseball tradition is a players-only gathering where a jury of their peers adjudicates rules of etiquette. Baseball faux pas along with violations of bus and airplane courtesy — or of good taste — are weighed, investigated, and punished either financially or creatively.

Gabe Ross, the Cats’ assistant general manager, apologizes for the lengthy delay. “I’m definitely not going in there, though,” the tall thirty-year-old interjected. “They don’t let civilians in.” Of course, the thirteen players sequestered in that clubhouse all want to get out. More than half have seen time in the big leagues, and most live for another taste.

Raley Field in West Sacramento is pretty and tidy. It’s 80 degrees at game time, chilly for August, and the crew sweeping the infield in polo shirts and khaki shorts is already complaining about how cold it’ll get by mid-game. The sound system is big-league quality, but this isn’t the majors: Act now, according to one of the ads ringing the outfield, and you could get a great deal on aluminum siding in the 916 area code. Ross puts Triple-A ball somewhere between Bull Durham and The Natural. “It’s not like we climb on buses on road trips.” Then, after some reflection, he adds: “Actually, the bus trips are the easiest.”

The furious turnover in Oakland has made this a tricky year for the Athletics’ top farm team. On this late-August day, Ross can count more than 150 roster moves since April, when the minor league season commenced. “Every time a player goes west, we need to call one up from Midland,” he says, referring to Oakland’s Double-A team in the Texas League.

Ross uses outfielder Nick Blasi to summarize the role of serendipity in the minors. “Our Single-A affiliate is in Stockton, and one day we had an injury ourselves, running out of players. We called the Ports and said, ‘Hey can you lend us someone, in case of emergency,’ and they sent over this kid who gets a hit in extra innings, and then one the next day.

“Now we can’t get rid of him,” Ross concludes with a smile. By season’s end Blasi was hitting a solid .316 and starting every day in Sacramento.

Ross’ boss, River Cats manager DeFrancesco, has juggled his up-and-down squad to first place in the Coast League. Unlike other organizations, he says, the A’s pride themselves on winning in the minors: “The team likes them to get in the habit of success.”

DeFrancesco has been part of the Oakland organization for thirteen years — this was his fifth as manager of the River Cats. A company man, he has no complaints about having to keep his own team afloat while feeding his best to the foundering Athletics.

Au contraire, the real goal here is making it to the big show. Minor league managers are measured not by wins, but by how their guys perform in the majors. “That’s our reward,” DeFrancesco says, standing on the steps of the River Cats’ dugout, “when we get to shake hands and tell them they’re going up. It’s taking pride in knowing that we had a part in making that success happen.”

Much of the difference between majors and minors, the manager adds, is not talent, but maturity. “Take a guy like Donnie Murphy,” he says. “When you’re up as a 21- or 22-year-old, you’ve got to make a lot of adjustments and you need to do it really fast. The pitchers have got videotape on you and can figure out right away what works and doesn’t work for you. Now Donnie’s back up there, and he’s 24. He’s more mature in his approach, and I think that he’s going to stick this time.”

DeFrancesco admits he takes special pride when his kids move up. “Oh,” he laughs, “I check to see how my guys are doing all the time. Swisher, Crosby, absolutely. Those are just a few of the guys I keep track of.”

So what about the flip side? What does he tell players who’ve been sent down? “Yeah, that’s tough,” DeFrancesco replies, running a hand through his dark hair. “You tell them to keep their heads up. You let them know that what they did to get to the big leagues is what they need to do to return.

“Take Danny Putnam,” he continues. “The kid was called all the way up from Double-A, had a little bit of early success, and now he’s back here. This is the place for him to work on getting better. All we can do here is give them the opportunity to get back. Danny’s got that chance here.”

Danny Putnam is in some ways the most surprising of the 54 who’ve played for the Athletics this year. The Stanford grad began the year playing Double-A in Midland, Texas. Then, on April 22, his manager called him to the dugout mid-game. “‘You’re going to Baltimore,'” Putnam says, recalling the moment as he stands in the shadow of the Cats’ left-field fence. “I was thinking, ‘There is no Triple-A team in Baltimore.'” Putnam was being jumped right into an away game in the big league.

Of the many athletes who’ve suited up for the Athletics this year, only one other started his season so far from Oakland. “Surreal” is how Putnam remembers it. “I just packed up and got out of there,” he says. “I called my wife, and she had just gotten hired as a nurse there one week before. I told her, ‘we’re going to Oakland.’ She was finishing her shift, gave notice, and off we went.”

Putnam, who looks like a shorter version of former A’s mop-top Eric Byrnes, is conscious of the sacrifices baseball families make in service of the dream. “We’re a team,” he says of his wife. “We were living together in Midland, splitting a $550-a-month place, and she left her job, which she had just gotten after graduation, and I knew it was asking a lot.”

The bulk of the logistics fell to his spouse. “She’s the one who’s opening and closing the bank accounts, she deals with the deposit checks, and mostly she’s handling all the emotional stuff while I’m concentrating on my baseball career,” Putnam explains. “Let’s just say that this would be really, really difficult without a partner.”

The A’s, meanwhile, viewed 24-year-old Putnam as the right guy at the right time. They skipped over the Sacramento team because the River Cats were injury-bitten at the time, and because the San Diego–born outfielder was tearing up the Double-A Texas League with a .327 batting average.

Putnam had appeared in only two A’s spring training games and hadn’t even been invited to the big-league camp, where forty-plus players compete for 25 slots (MLB rules limit the roster to 25 until September, when the minor league season ends). Two at-bats into his first major-league game, Putnam was on first with a single. “Before I knew it we were in Boston, then Tampa Bay, then Kansas City.” Putnam ticks off the towns like a man conjuring up a memory he doesn’t ever want to lose. His family, meanwhile, moved into the Oakland Airport Hilton, the way-station for A’s on the margins.

Putnam recalls how, at one point, the family was paying rent in Midland, a weekly hotel bill in Oakland, and a mortgage on their Arizona home. “It was my wife who was living with the mental wear and tear,” he says. “I had the distraction of baseball.”

But the game soon began piling on its own wear and tear. Putnam’s batting average fell below .200 and he finished April at .133. Ballplayers call this being on the interstate (I-33), or slang it as a buck thirty-three. But a player who can’t even get a hit in one out of five at-bats isn’t viewed as a big leaguer for long. Putnam was pressing and frustrated. “I couldn’t believe how fast they adjust,” he says, toeing the dirt behind Raley Field’s left-field fence. “The pitchers found something, and I couldn’t adjust to it fast enough. Mentally, those guys are really tough.”

By May 2 he was warming the bench. He sat for the next two games, then got a start against perennial doormat Tampa Bay, which struck out the struggling rookie twice, and left him hitless in four at bats, sinking his average to .125. Putnam added up the outfielders on the A’s roster, and those due to return from the disabled list. He calculated that his time was running out.

“I talked to the guys in the locker room like Eric Chavez, and they were great,” Putnam recalls. “They told me you don’t have to hit a ten-run home run every time up. They said, ‘Look, the team liked something they saw in you. Trust what got you here.'”

He was doing the family calculus, too. Putman was paying rent on an apartment that wouldn’t do him any good if he didn’t have a job in Oakland. His family had come to see him play, but he wasn’t playing, and his wife had put her career on hold while he was on his way to a demotion. To bring up his average, he would need more chances at the plate, but his poor statistics meant he wasn’t likely to get them. In his next game at Kansas City, Putnam wasn’t allowed to pinch-hit for first baseman Dan Johnson, but was sent to the outfield to spell the pinch-hitter. Some catch, that Catch-22.

The young man still hasn’t quite nailed down his internal narrative. “It’s amazing to be a part of it. Even one day,” he says at one point. Then later: “Is it better to be playing in the minors than sitting in the majors? I can’t answer that. We all want to play. That’s what we do …” He trailed off.

The one thing these up-and-down players say repeatedly is that they love the challenge of major league ball. “That’s the best thing about it, is testing yourself against the very best,” Putnam says, eyes ablaze. This is one of the endearing things about A’s on the edge. When they speak of their big league experience, it’s not about elegant hotels, charter planes, somebody else carrying your luggage, hotter groupies, pristine baseballs, or the media spotlight. They’re just thrilled to be playing against the best. “The pitchers are unbelievable,” Putnam says reverently. You can sense his pride that he was out there battling them, if only for a few weeks.

May 10 at Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, Danny Putnam looked around to soak up his last day. He had a good view, but one he couldn’t enjoy from the bench as he watched Chris Doyle Snelling start in his place. But in the second inning, the centerfielder with the two unlucky names was pulled with what turned out to be a season-ending injury. The A’s already were up 5-0 on the strength of the first of two Jack Cust homers. Manager Bob Geren looked down to the end of his bench and called for Putnam to grab his glove.

The rest of the game was anticlimactic for everybody in the stadium except for the kid who came from Stanford by way of the Midland Rock Hounds. The A’s humiliated the Devil Rays, and Putnam was at the heart of every rally. A single, two runs, a homer. And then, in the eighth, with the game now a 17-3 joke, in an at-bat with significance only to one, Putnam singled yet again.

Afterward, Geren told Putnam he was proud of the young man for ending his stint with a bang. “He said a home run is a great way to go: Keep working hard and you’ll be back,” the player recalls.

Putnam was sent down to the River Cats, but he has not, in fact, been back. Injured three games after his demotion, he found a new apartment, moved all his stuff back again, and begged his wife to be patient about that nursing job. In the months since his big-league stint, Putnam has played in Sacramento, rehabbed at the A’s spring-training site in Arizona, and played three games with the Stockton Single-A team. He ended his season as a less-than–productive member of the River Cats, with just 37 hits, mostly singles, in 171 at-bats against minor league pitchers.

They may call them the boys of summer, but September at the Oakland Coliseum belonged mainly to players with a dream, and to diehard fans — the bandwagon crowd split back when the team fell ten games out of first place. This season’s few remaining games offer a chance to watch baseball boiled down to its bare essentials. There will be Donnie Murphy, still desperate to prove he belongs and get back the glow that brought him to the big leagues at age 21. There will be Jack Cust breathing the sigh of a man who seized an eleventh-hour reprieve and turned it into an MVP season. There will even, in spirit, be Danny Putnam, who spent two weeks of his life wearing a big-league uniform, and still can’t articulate whether it’s all over or just beginning for him.

Regardless, Putnam looks back proudly on his eleven games in Oakland. Prior to his final hit in the A’s rout of Tampa Bay, he’d batted .174 in the majors. With that last single, he wrapped up his big-league debut, perhaps even his big-league career, as a .214 hitter.

Sent back to the minors, yes, but not by way of the Interstate.