Consider the daily stress surrounding Caleb Fields, the 2003 Fenwick graduate playing minor league baseball for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He and his teammates have been told by their coaches to be prepared to be released at any time. The one thing Fields can do to avoid that fate-produce on the field-he is not being given the opportunity to do.
In such an environment, it’s a matter of coping, not thriving. To help deal with the stress, Fields has taken to keeping a daily journal of his experiences and thoughts. It provides a look at the daily life of a minor leaguer-or at least one who is not on the fast-track to the majors.
“I think if anybody in minor league baseball made a journal like that, a lot of it would be frustration,” said Fields last week before his Single A team, the Hickory Crawdads, played the Hagerstown Suns in Hagerstown, Md. “When you go back home to Oak Park, people think it’s a glamorous life. But anyone who knows minor league baseball knows that it’s not.”
A lot of the difficulty for Fields, a pitcher and shortstop for Fenwick who has played nearly every position since, is that he is not being given a chance to prove himself. He was taken off the team’s active roster for a few days recently, and he has appeared in just 11 of the 38 games the Crawdads have played while he has been with the club, receiving only 28 at-bats. Many of those have been in pinch-hit or defensive replacement situations.
It has been a daily struggle trying to figure out what the Pirates have planned for him. And helping Fields deal with that stress is his journal, which he strives to keep daily. Fields, who went to Ascension for grade school and whose family still lives in Oak Park, provided the Wednesday Journal with one entry from May that he sent to his parents.
“The past few weeks have been good and bad,” Fields wrote. “In some ways, I feel better than ever. My attitude is awesome. I feel like I am working hard and doing my best in these terrible circumstances. Part of this new attitude involves doing the little things, like picking up the cups and encouraging all the guys.
“Many of the guys, especially Latimore and Butch, as well as a lot of the Latinos, are very young and have a tendency to get into a funk when they are not successful. It truly is about the PROCESS, not the immediate results. I have learned that to the fullest.”
Fields said one benefit of keeping the journal has been that it helps him to focus on his development, not on things out of his control.
“A lot of minor league baseball causes you to read into things,” he said. As he looks back on old journal entries that speculate about what the Pirates are thinking, he said, “Usually I’ve been wrong.”
Last Monday was one of Fields’ better days with the Crawdads. The previous day’s game was suspended by rain after three innings, but not before Fields recorded his first RBI of the season. Unfortunately, it came not via a hit, which would have been Fields’ first of the season, but by a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch.
When the game resumed as part of a modified doubleheader, Fields still was in the lineup, hitting ninth and playing left field. Still seeking that “elusive first hit,” as the Crawdads’ radio man described it from the press box, Fields had another RBI opportunity in the eighth with his team leading 7-0. With a runner at third and no outs, he blooped a ball over the shortstop’s head. Had the charging center fielder, Mark Gildea, played the ball on a hop, he likely would have had a chance to hold the runner, who was already preparing to tag up at third.
Instead, Gildea dove and made a spectacular catch, but from flat on his chest he had no chance to nab the runner at home. For Fields, it was his second RBI of the season and the game-spread over two days.
Last Wednesday, Fields finally recorded a hit, an infield single that brought his average to .036 (1-for-28).
The former Friar said it is in some ways easier to deal with his horrific numbers knowing he has been given barely any chance to play. Not many players perform when getting only one start per week, as Fields often has.
“It’s really about getting chances,” he said. “The coaches here are not in charge of the lineup,” which comes from the top brass in Pittsburgh.
That’s another factor that works against Fields. The current Pirates management is different from the group that drafted him in the 33rd round last year, and has “loyalty to nobody except the people they drafted this year,” according to Fields.
His coaches have advised players to start thinking about what they might do-college courses, independent ball, whatever-if a bad roster move comes their way.
Fields said he is in a unique position as one of the few players on the team who already has his college degree. Most minor leaguers are drafted either out of high school or after their junior year of college, but Fields was selected after his senior year at Northwestern in which he completed his communications degree.
“I was talking to one of our assistant coaches the other day, and he said, ‘Man, you must think all the guys here are dumb,'” Fields recalled with a smile. “I said, ‘No, all people have their strengths and their path. For some, college and that whole experience wouldn’t have been the best for them.'”
Fields said he has been struck by the different types of people he has encountered with the Pirates.
“One of the first kids I met was a 16-year-old from the Dominican Republic,” he said. “He just came over and was figuring out America. And here I am really scared, too-and I went to college and grew up in America the whole time. That really put it into perspective.”
So besides the baseball development, he has grown in other ways.
“Interacting with people who are not your age or don’t come from your background, it’s caused me to be more open here,” he said. “I grew up where everyone was driven in the same way-toward college. Here, with the Dominicans, this is it; this is their chance in life.”
Memorable conversations with teammates or coaches often make their way into Fields’ journal, which he hopes to have published when he is done playing.
Fields said he normally begins his entries with his “overall feelings about the day, and by the end focus it on the big picture.” He also often includes a prayer.
“It is very important to me to continue doing this in a better way and more consistently,” he wrote in the May entry. “This journal keeps me in the right mindset and also gives me something to do. It is important to keep good tabs on how I am thinking.”