From World Series MVP to full-time father to minor-league manager, Pat Borders has been around.
He never thought he’d make it to the big leagues, but Pat Borders proved just how much he belonged
It is 3 p.m. on a bright day in Batavia, N.Y., but the hands on the cockeyed clock on the cinderblock wall in the visiting manager’s office are stuck on 12:40. As Latin music blares down a short hallway from the clubhouse, Pat Borders studies his lineup card. It requires careful attention. His roster comprises 31 players. It would not do to forget someone. “It scares me every day,” he says, half-seriously.
More than an hour before their pregame drills, a few of his flock begin to spill out of the cramped clubhouse, seeking space to breathe in the bullpen just outside the door. There, by game time, the relievers will hunker down on folding chairs with the setting sun in their eyes, waiting for the evening to turn cool. Their teammates will occupy the concrete visitors’ dugout on the first-base side of Dwyer Stadium, capacity 2,600, home of the Batavia Muckdogs of the short-season New YorkPenn League. The league was founded in Batavia in 1939, perhaps shortly before that clock was hung on the wall above Pat Borders’ desk.
Only two of his players had been born in the autumn of 1992, when he became an improbable hero in Toronto and across Canada. Many of them had never heard of him before they assembled in June to form the 2015 edition of the Williamsport Crosscutters, a Philadelphia Phillies farm club based in the northern Pennsylvania town best known as the home of the Little League World Series.
Their rookie manager certainly would not have told them that he was once the MVP of the big-league World Series. He is not a boastful man, and for him, it is not even the highlight of his career.
Toronto Blue Jays fans of a certain age would instantly recognize Pat Borders today. Traces of grey have crept into his hair and goatee, and happily, the tobacco bulge inside his cheek is long gone, but at the age of 52, he looks fit and trim, and he walks without the hobble common to men who squatted behind home plate for the better part of 25 years. That boyish smile — remember the look on his face as he admired the World Series trophy? — still comes easily.
He spent six years in the minors at the start of his career, and parts of eight more at the end, quitting at 43 because he’d started to think more about being home with his family than about playing baseball.
In the intervening nine years, it has been a busy time at the Borders ranch near his hometown of Lake Wales, Fla. Borders and his wife Kathy have nine kids, ranging in age from 24 to two. Lindsay is the oldest, Landry the youngest. In between are Levi, Luke, LauraBeth, Leah, Lance, Lily and Livia. He immersed himself in their lives. “Didn’t watch baseball,” he says. “Didn’t pay attention to it on TV. I started paying attention to my kids a lot more and going to all their events. That consumed my attention, and rightfully so. Saw the bulk of them through high school and their high-school sports. It was hands-on with them as much as I could. It was good for them, good for me, good for everybody.”
Meanwhile, major-league teams occasionally invited him to coach in the minors. As his playing career wound down, everybody said the old catcher would make a great coach. Cito Gaston, his former Toronto manager, urged him to join the Jays as roving catching instructor. Borders said no. He was having too much fun at home.
Then last year, the Phillies came calling. Pat Gillick, his old boss, mentor and friend, was running the club. (“Pat always believed in me,” he says.) The talk got around to a job managing a short-season team in the low minors. He would be away from home for only three months. He could commute to spring training in Clearwater. He could still coach the high-school team in Winter Haven on spring evenings.
Finally, he agreed to become manager of the Williamsport Crosscutters.
“My wife just told me that if you’re going to do it, you better do it now,” he says. “You’re getting too old. You’re 52. You can’t start when you’re 60. We’d been talking about it. She just gave me the last push.”
Borders says he quickly took to the job, especially after learning to use a laptop computer for the first time. (“That was a big deal,” he says.) Spring training helped him ease in. He had played for Gillick in Toronto and Seattle, and everywhere he looked, he saw faces he knew, ex-players that Gillick had drawn to the Phillies’ organization. And he could relate easily to his players, most of them in their very early 20s.
“Doing things that catchers do, I guess,” he says of his daily duties. “Dealing with different personalities, patting them on the back when they need it and kicking them a little bit when they need it.”
His experience as a player, high-school coach and parent is serving him well. That, and the memory of his own beginnings in the pro ranks, starting in Medicine Hat, Alta., the first of a dozen minor-league towns he would call home early and late in his career.
He was drafted as a third baseman, then moved to first base, then played a little outfield. He made a lot of errors and didn’t hit for power. So he decided to become a catcher for a very practical reason.
“Fear of being released,” he says.
So at spring training in 1986, he approached Bobby Mattick, the Jays’ legendary developer of talent, and said he wanted to catch.
“I’d worked on it a little bit during the winter,” Borders recalls, “and Bobby put me in a game that day. In the first inning, I got hit in the throat with a foul ball and had a fingernail ripped off with another foul ball. I said, ‘ What the heck have I got myself into?’ But then I happened to get lucky and I threw somebody out and he said, ‘ OK, we’ll give you a shot.’”
Still, he never thought he would make it to the big leagues.
“I just wanted to play well enough to be back the next year, then play well enough to get through spring training without getting released,” he says. “I never thought about the brass ring. I just thought about not having to go home yet.”
Two years after he started to catch, he caught the brass ring, just in time to catch the Blue Jays’ big wave. From errorprone third baseman in Medicine Hat to catcher with two World Series rings, Borders sat atop the baseball universe in the fall of 1992.
If you believe the lines on his Baseball Reference page, that was the pinnacle for Pat Borders. By 1995, he had become a nomad, changing clubs regularly, getting occasional promotions to plug a gap in the big leagues, always in demand because of his experience, defensive prowess, easygoing personality and competitive zeal.
“He would run through a wall to help you win,” Gaston says.
But in the late spring of 2006, playing in the minors for the Dodgers, homesickness overwhelmed his enjoyment of the game. He gave two weeks’ notice and went back to the ranch.
Borders met his future wife in a pizza restaurant in Knoxville, Tenn., where the Jays had a farm club. When they married, he and Kathy knew they wanted “several” kids, he recalls.
“We didn’t think nine,” he said. “But more than two, for sure.
“I guess you have to enjoy doing things with your kids, and not feel, ‘Oh, I have to take them here or there.’ Both of us really enjoyed watching them in their different activities. It was important to them and it was fun for us. And this is not a cliché, it’s not a line — everything else was secondary after that. We enjoyed it. And it was very beneficial to them.
“They’re all very confident kids, they’re all structured, good kids. Every one of them, because of the way my wife structured it and the way we put responsibility on them to do things for themselves, they all made really good grades. Four of them have entered college so far and all have done well.”
It is almost time for Borders to change into his uniform, but he is on a roll now. During a half-hour interview, his most expansive comments are about his kids, and his remarkable wife.
“She’s solid,” he says. “She’s fine if I’m there helping or not. You have to have a really good person to support you as a baseball wife. It’s really a lot of responsibility, stress and no help at certain points from me, because I’m gone.
“She’s good at it. She’s very regimented and focused on the things that matter, and super with the kids in getting their schoolwork done and making sure they’re prepared from year to year with their work ethics and study habits. She’s a very, very diligent person. As a matter of fact, she’s been going to school to become a nurse in her spare time, and she’s probably halfway through that. She’s a very good student. If she doesn’t make an A, she’s very upset.” He pauses. “Good woman,” he says.
His Crosscutters lead their division with a 24-12 record, best in the league, but Borders is not thinking about doing this long-term. He is what he always has been, a blue-collar guy with a dogged work ethic and no lofty ambitions.
“I don’t have to do this,” he says. “This is fun for me. Once it’s not fun, I’m going to move on to the next thing in my life that I enjoy.”
He has enjoyed it all, from learning to catch in Knoxville to hitting .450 in the 1992 World Series to performing a latter-day Crash Davis role for the Durham Bulls. It was all good, he says.
The highlight? That’s easy. April 6, 1988. First inning.
“I always think of my first game, because I never really thought I was going to make it to the big leagues,” he says. “And I always think of my dad.”
On the day of Borders’ bigleague debut, his father, a civics teacher in Florida, left school and flew to Kansas City. He feared he would be late.
“As soon as I got up to bat, he walked into the stadium,” Borders says. “Charlie Leibrandt was the pitcher. Bases were loaded. I hit a triple. First pitch. He could have thrown that ball to the backstop, I’d have probably swung. My dad got there just in time to see that, and I ended up getting three hits and five RBIs that day.”
On the three-hour ride from Williamsport to Batavia that morning, Borders might have known that some of those 31 players sitting behind him in the bus look at the big leagues as he did when he was their age. “It was like something you could never reach,” he says.
And surely he knows there might be a Pat Borders or two in that bunch — smart, resourceful, gritty players who find ways to make the most of marginal talent, players willing to run through walls. One day, they might look back and say their rookie manager in Williamsport helped them to grasp what they thought was unreachable.
For Pat Borders, that would beat being a World Series hero any day of the week.