Permanently postponed
Rain ended best chance to pitch in major leagues.
In the middle of it all, the entire, emotional ordeal that would come to define his career, in the midst of the literal storm that was drenching the Eastern Seaboard on the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2006, and the perfect, figurative one that was conspiring at that moment to make him the victim of the cruelest bit of circumstance the inherently cruel game of baseball could possibly produce — in the middle of all that, Brian Mazone, anxious, restless, bored, headed to the dugout to see the skies for himself.
Out of the Philadelphia Phillies’ clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park he strode, past the coaches’ offices and the video room, down the steps, through the dugout tunnel, clad in team-issued, home-white game pants and a T-shirt. It was perhaps 2½ hours before the first pitch of a game that, judging from a radar full of giant yellow and orange blobs, appeared doomed. He was 30 years old, with eight years in the minors, and that evening, weather permitting, he would be making his big league debut.
He heard the rain before he saw it, loud splatters of dream-piercing liquid darts. The dugout was flooded beneath several inches of it. It was pooling in various corners of the field. Mazone had rarely known rain like this; the nearly 2½ inches that fell in Philadelphia that day, the biggest day of his professional life, were roughly half the total rainfall for all of 2006 in his native San Diego.
But the climb up those last few steps, from the dugout to the field of a big league stadium, was a moment he had envisioned for a quarter of a century, and now, unsure whether he would get the chance again — later that evening or ever — he braced himself against the downpour and ascended.
As long as he lives, he will never forget that rain.
Twelve years later, he doesn’t recall exactly when he first became aware of the rain and the mortal threat it posed to the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. But he had seen it out his Philadelphia hotel window when he awoke that morning, having been summoned by the Phillies the night before from Rochester, New York — where his Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons were preparing for the International League playoffs, and where Mazone broke down in heaving sobs as he heard the words, “You’re going to Philly.”
“I remember standing at the window, the drapes open, just watching,” he recalled of that morning in the hotel. “When you see that kind of rain, you know you’re in trouble.”
His wife, Amber, having stayed behind with their two young children while Brian hustled to the airport to catch the next flight, got up the next morning and headed south to join him. The rain began mere minutes into her five-hour drive, and it never stopped.
“I remember thinking, ‘This is not good,’” she said. “He had so many ups and downs in baseball, it was like, ‘Of course this would happen.’”
It was raining when Brian got to the stadium at around 1:30 p.m., some 5½ hours before the scheduled first pitch against the Houston Astros, walking in the home clubhouse to find his uniform — red-on-white, No. 49 — hanging at the locker he had been assigned.
And now, as he stood by the dugout railing, the ground beneath him drenched, the stands empty, the rain began to pick up in intensity. And Mazone, in the empty stadium, took the full brunt of it, squinting through streaks of rain cut with tears at a fieldlevel view that, in the mind of someone who had been picturing it since age 5, was akin to the one from the top of Everest.
“I couldn’t even see much,” he recalled. “But at that point I really didn’t care.”
Finally, he walked off the field, drenched. Down the stairs to the flooded dugout. Through the tunnel. Up the stairs to the clubhouse. Through the doorway. To his locker.
There hung his uniform. He looked at it again. He took it down, slipped his arms into the sleeves, buttoned it up. He took a seat. And that’s where he still sat a little while later, when they came to tell him they needed to see him in the manager’s office.
Why Brian Mazone? Why, when there have been more than 19,000 players to appear in the major leagues, 750 of them on active rosters at this very instant, tell the story of one of the millions who never did?
Why Mazone? Because baseball finds room to celebrate the proverbial “cups of coffee” — players whose big league careers last for one measly game, or less. Moonlight Graham, who played an inning in right field for the 1905 New York Giants but didn’t get to bat, is a folk hero thanks to “Field of Dreams.”
It was around 5:30 when Mazone was called into the manager’s office — the rain falling, the game called off and rescheduled for three weeks down the road, the Phillies telling Mazone they needed him back in Rochester for the International League playoffs, some of his extended family already en route — that the tears began.
“The hardest one of those (conversations) I’ve ever had to do,” said Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies assistant general manager at the time, himself a former fringe big league outfielder who lived in constant fear of another demotion. “I remember being really emotional about it. You’re basically changing someone’s life.”
Mazone would have two more close brushes with the big leagues before he’d had enough.
In May 2007, a rash of injuries left the Phillies scrambling for a starter, and it almost certainly would have been Mazone, who was back at Triple-A — except days earlier he had signed a contract with South Korea’s Samsung Lions, a difficult decision that ultimately was little more than a cold cash-grab. The $300,000 salary was roughly four times what he was making in Triple-A. He left the following week.
“It paid for our house,” he said, “and everything in it.”
And in late March 2009, back in the states, he was one cut away from making the Los Angeles Dodgers’ roster out of spring training and was preparing to head west with them for a final exhibition game at Dodger Stadium — when he was diagnosed with a staph infection in his leg, which required six weeks of rest and agonizing, twice-daily flushing of the open wound. He stayed back in Arizona as the team flew to L.A.
“It just wasn’t meant to be, I guess,” he said softly.
He lasted until the spring of 2011 before grim reality and the tug of home finally extinguished the dream. He landed a real job, coached his boys through their Little League years, settled into a new daily rhythm free of buses and bullpens.
“I wish I’d sucked earlier,” he said, “because it would have been easier to walk away. If I’d gotten my face pounded in, I would’ve (said), ‘Look, you’re 29, 30 years old, maybe you don’t have it anymore.’ But every year I’d turn around in September and I’d be top two or three in every category. I knew, at 34, I’d worked as hard as I could, dedicated myself for one thing — to get to the big leagues, the thing you’ve wanted since you were 5.”