T-Bone had taste of the bigs

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This article was published 09/06/2010 (5941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lord Tennyson will tell you that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Tennyson was mute on whether that same principle also applies to Major League Baseball.

To wit: Is it better to have played three games in the Majors only to have your heart torn out and spend the rest of your career trying to get back to the big leagues? Or are you better off never knowing the thrill or the heartbreak?

Ray Sadler lived it and he will tell you the correct answer is actually something in between. "If I could do it again, I’d have enjoyed it more when I was up there," says Sadler, whose major-league career was shorter than a Britney Spears marriage. "I did enjoy it. But I’ve learned that with that kind of stuff, you never know when you’re going to get back or when your last game will be.

"If I had to do it again, I’d just relax and enjoy it."

Sadler never got that chance the first time in a whirlwind major league career that was little more than an extended long weekend, beginning with an abrupt injury call-up by the Pittsburgh Pirates on May 8, 2005, and ending five days later on May 13, when, two days after he’d belted a home run for his first-ever major league hit, Sadler was sent back down to the minors.

He has never returned and has spent the intervening years headed in the opposite direction, descending rung after rung through the minors until he finally landed this season in the independent Northern League with the Kansas City T-Bones.

There have been a lot of long and lonely hours riding buses through the minors in the five years since Sadler received the tiniest taste of a lifelong dream, hours surely spent wondering about the vagaries of a sport that demotes a man who has just hit a home run in only his third major league game and yet spends millions and a roster spot without flinching on entitled underachievers every day.

Thinking too much about something like that could make a ballplayer crazy. Or at least bitter. So Sadler chooses to do the opposite.

"I don’t think about it," says the 29-year-old outfielder from Texas. "I can’t worry about that. All I can do is focus on what I’m doing here and worry about what I’m doing for this team."

Sadler is one of three former major leaguers on the T-Bones, an unusually high number for a last-stop outfit like the Northern League.

Sadler’s trip to the majors can only be described as extraordinary. A 30th rounder in 1999, little was expected of him. But he showed speed — stealing 30 bases in A-ball in 2002 — and some power, hitting 20 homers in AA-ball in 2004. Originally drafted by the Cubs, he was traded to the Pittsburgh organization in 2003 and is an unwitting part of a bizarre chapter of baseball history.

Sadler was acquired by the Pirates in August 2003 in exchange for Randall Simon, who became an international laughingstock a month earlier when, during a Pirates game in Milwaukee, Simon clubbed the Italian Sausage to the ground during the Sausage Race, a famous between-innings promotion the Brewers do every game. Simon was suspended for three games and fined by the Milwaukee police for disorderly conduct.

It took Sadler two years, and an injury to a Pittsburgh regular, to finally get his taste of the majors and less than a week to have it taken away, despite the homer and a respectable 2-for-8 performance at the plate.

In stark contrast to Sadler is teammate Dewon Brazelton, whose taste of the majors was leisurely and flavourful. The third overall pick in the 2001 amateur draft, Brazelton spent five seasons in the majors and was the opening day starter for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2005.

He is a man who would appear to have little in common with Sadler and yet Brazelton says their common membership in that most exclusive of clubs — former major leaguers — unites them in a way only another member could understand.

"Do you have any idea," asked Brazelton, "how good of a ballplayer you have to be to be bad in the majors? I was very fortunate to have had some success and I’m still spending money today that I made 10 years ago. A guy like Ray, he just spent a couple of days in the majors. But I can tell you that both of us are just as proud of what we accomplished, just by getting up there."

Love lost, but a souvenir forever.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca