‘A dream we didn’t even have’
Latest chapter in Raley’s too-good-to-be-true story: A trip to the ALCS with team he rooted for as a kid
Every time the phone rings, a life can change. Rachel Raley believes this to be true especially in a baseball family, because she’s experienced it more than once. And she’s learned not to dismiss any area code as a potential seismic origin.
Over the past decade she’s had her world flipped by calls from Chicago and Cincinnati, from the Dominican Republic and South Korea, and then finally from closer to home than she’d ever imagined.
Now, somehow, she’s right where she wanted to be all along. And when she turns on the television, sits next to her three little girls, and watches her husband wearing a Houston Astros uniform on a pitcher’s mound a half a continent away,
she admits that the whole thing still seems a little surreal.
“It’s almost like a dream we didn’t even have,” Raley said Thursday.
Oh, they dreamed pieces of it. A dozen years ago, when she was Rachel Shipley and a soccer player at Texas A&M, she met a tall, lanky kid from Uvalde named Brooks Raley who wanted to pitch in the major leagues one day. It didn’t take him long to prove that part of his plan wasn’t so crazy.
After just two seasons at A&M, Brooks was drafted by the Chicago Cubs, and by 2012 he’d worked his way through five levels of the minor leagues and all the way to the majors.
When he called his folks in Uvalde that August and told him he was going to suit up as a big leaguer for the first time in San Diego, they jumped on a plane and made sure they were in the stands to cheer him on.
“Obviously, there’s nothing like your debut,” said his father, Terry, who grew up in San Antonio and attended Mccollum and St. Mary’s before playing a couple of seasons in Toronto’s minor league system. “But this year might have been a close second.”
See, here’s the thing: Brooks made it to the majors eight years ago, and he’s pitching for the Astros in the playoffs this week, but those two events might as well have happened in two different lifetimes.
In his first go-around, he pitched in only 14 games combined in 2012 and 2013, and the Cubs eventually cut him loose. In 2014 he appeared in a handful of minor league games in the Angels’ and Twins’ systems, but he was battling a bone spur in his elbow, and things weren’t going well.
That winter, after undergoing
surgery, he went to the Dominican Republic to play in the winter league and build up his arm strength. That’s when he was spotted by a scout from the Korea Baseball Organization, which allows each of its 10 teams to sign up to three foreign players — many of them EX-MLB guys — to handsome contracts.
So Brooks called Rachel — they were married by then — and his folks, and told them he was off to Busan, South Korea, where he would pitch for the Lotte Giants for five seasons.
Rachel, who coaches youth soccer in the College Station area and has the summers off, spent four months with him every summer. Brooks’ mother, Deeanna, visited a few times, but when she was back in Uvalde she and Terry would set an alarm for 4 a.m. every five days so they could fire up the computer and watch Brooks pitch.
“We got pretty good at it,” Terry said, laughing. “They have an app.”
Even though a return to the majors ostensibly was a possibility throughout all of this, it didn’t always seem realistic.
Both Brooks and Rachel grew to love the people and the cuisine of South Korea — “I still miss the barbecue,” she said Thursday — and after each of his first four years they decided to go back. When they had their first child three years ago, they brought her along.
“The end goal was always to come back home,” Rachel said. “It was just a matter of when.”
After twin girls arrived last October, they made up their minds. They turned down an offer to return to South Korea, and Brooks had his agent look for any opportunity he could get in the United States.
As it turned out, the Cincinnati Reds invited him to spring training, with no guarantees. And when, after the start of the season was delayed by the coronavirus, Brooks was informed he’d made the Reds’ MLB club in August?
“That was another fun call,” his dad said. “It was almost like the first time.”
But this is when we get to the part that Rachel couldn’t even have dreamed. In early August, with her and the girls living in Cincinnati, the Reds designated Brooks for assignment. This meant they were dropping him from the roster and had a couple of days to work out a trade with another team or release him.
Rachel’s mind raced. If no other team wanted Brooks, his career might be over. And if he ended up getting shipped to Seattle or Pittsburgh? How would she and her girls get back to Texas in the middle of a pandemic?
Then a call came, and a life changed again. The Astros traded for him. That meant the whole family could pile into the car and make the 14-hour drive to College Station together, and Brooks would play for the team he grew up rooting for, right down the road.
And Thursday afternoon, having just picked up her oldest daughter from preschool, Rachel was ready to watch Brooks and the Astros finish off a playoff series victory over Oakland at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
At age 32, having established himself as a reliable lefthanded reliever over the past couple of months, Brooks might have a chance to stick with Houston for a while.
“We couldn’t be more thankful,” Rachel said. “We know it’s not like this for a lot of people. We have so many blessings.”
And who knows? The next time the phone rings, it might bring another.