Unless you're a high- profile baseball phenom, the wheels of professional baseball grind slowly as you work your way up the minor league ladder.
Many young players play in small communities, toiling in relative obscurity, hoping they improve enough and their statistics are impressive enough to catch the eye of someone in the organization.
The hope for these young players is that every year they play well enough to move up a class, from rookie ball to A ball to AA ball, then AAA, one step below the major league.
But spend enough time in professional baseball and you realize that an injury, an extended slump, even taking too long to show improvement, is enough to get your exit ticket punched.
The odds of making it to The Show are long. But show enough promise and the organization will let you grind your way through the minors in the hope that you wind up as a gem that just needs some polishing.
There are no lack of local players making their way through the minor leagues. Some have already been included in big league trades.
Londoner Jamie Romak, a power-hitting outfielder who came through the London Badgers system, was drafted by the Atlanta Braves three years ago. In January, he was part of a trade that saw the Braves send Adam LaRoche and Romak to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Mike Gonzalez and Brent Lillibridge.
"It was a shock at first," Romak said , who was playing with the Braves' minor league A team at the time. "But this is a business and when I looked at the young outfielders the Braves had, I was never going to make it with them.
"The Pirates have been a losing organization for a long time and this gives me a better chance to eventually make it to the major leagues."
"They have some good young outfielders, but this is a better situation for me," said Romak, who is playing in Lynchburg with the Hillcats, one of the Pirates A affiliates.
He played for the first time in three weeks yesterday. He was hit in the hand with a pitch and suffered bruising and ligament damage.
"But it's much better now and the doctor says as long as I can play with a little pain, it should be fine," Romak said. "It's too bad because I was hitting the ball well."
Romak knows how important it is to keep playing.
"As long as I keep hitting the ball, everything will be good," he said. "I'm pretty hungry. I want to move up."
Some other locals who are in the minors include Dorchester's Chris Robinson. The catcher is playing AA ball with the Chicago Cubs AA affiliate in Tennessee.
Londoner Adam Stern is with the Baltimore Orioles AAA team in Norfolk. He recently missed a month with an injury.
Pitcher Brock Kjeldgaard is going to start with the Milwaukee Brewers rookie affiliate in Helena, Mont; shortstop Geoff McCallum is with the Florida Marlins A team, the Jupiter Hammerheads; Mike Ambrose of St. Thomas is with the Pirates other A team, the Hickory Crawdads.
Another St. Thomas native, Mike Galloway, is having a terrific season with the Quebec Capitales, a Canadian /American Association of Professional Baseball League team.
While Romak and others are at the beginning of their careers, Tillsonburg's Mike Meyers may have come to the end of his.
The 29-year-old righthander had a solid minor league career in the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers organization. He was close to cracking the Cubs major league roster when he developed arm trouble four years ago. He missed a season and missed his shot at the bigs. Even though he pitched well last year with the Brewers minor league teams and spent a lot of time in the Brewers big-league camp in the spring, he was released.
"I'm OK with this," Meyers said. "I don't really miss it, at least not yet. Who knows, maybe in the middle of the summer it might start itching at me again. But right now it's been an OK transition in my life."
Meyers believes there's still some life in his arm.
"When I was released, I thought I'd give it a month, a month and a half to see if something pops up. I would definitely have signed with another pro team. But the phone never rang," he said. "I wasn't sitting around hoping and waiting. I thought I pitched pretty well but I just didn't feel like I got my fair share this spring."
It's a lesson younger players can't learn soon enough . . . get it done when you get the chance because you don't get many of them.
