Mike “Barbed Wire” Swanson was now, and would be for quite some time, a professional baseball player. He’d just signed a contract with the Buffalo Bison organization that included a $3,400,000 signing bonus, enough money to buy all of Amite City and raze the damned place, had he been so inclined. In a single instant, he’d gone from being the poor kid from rural Louisiana to being the (incredibly wealthy) future of a major league baseball team. And yet… none of us ever really escape our past; Mike Swanson never thought to try.
[hr]
“It was a lot of money we were talking about, you know? I hardly knew how to negotiate, they probably could have offered me half that much and I’d have signed the thing.”
Three cups of coffee and two slices of pie (a la mode, of course) later, we’ve left the little diner and are back at War Memorial Stadium, the only major league ballpark Swanson’s ever called home. We’re sitting in the stands, a view he’s never experienced during a game; something he remarks on. He’d been to a couple of Crawdad’s games when he was younger, though not many – the cost of tickets, however cheap, was a strain on his family – but sat in the bleachers then, or watched through knotholes in the fence. During the Bison’s courting period they’d flown him up to watch a game, but then he’d sat in the owner’s box. Swanson mentions that he likes to come sit up here, during an off-day, and just look at the park. I get the feeling that when he does, he’s not imagining himself down on the mound pitching for the Bison; rather, he’s imagining the childhood he never had, right here in the stands. Him and his family, watching a ballgame from on high.
“It was a lot of big changes for a kid like me. Take a poor bayou kid, give him three and a half million dollars, and then move him clear across the continent? We’re not really talking about a smooth transition.”
Things that had never been available to Swanson before – hamburgers, soda, beer – suddenly were, now that he had that signing bonus. His weight slowly crept upwards at the same time as his bank account slid downwards. He’d told himself he wouldn’t make any stereotypically flashy purchases, just because he had money: there were no sports cars, no big trips. He did, however, agree to invest a great portion of his signing bonus in a venture that a Swanson family friend had sold him on as “a sure thing”. Of course, it wasn’t. He didn’t lose everything, but he lost enough to know that he would never leave his finances to somebody else again.
Perhaps more concerning than his financial position was his play on the ball diamond. Maybe it was the weight gain, or the financial stress. It’s also possible that having uprooted his entire life was simply more tension than he could handle.
Swanson laughs about it now; looking back, why shouldn’t he? He’s one of the greatest pitchers alive, who cares how he performed in the Spike Nolan League in 2010? But at the time, a lot of people cared a whole lot, none more so than Swanson himself.
[hr]
In his three years of high school ball, Mike had won the HSAS Outstanding Pitching Award three times, and his team had finished each year in first, second and first place respectively. He’d been drafted first overall and had been the consensus pick at that spot. Mike Swanson had really never experienced any kind of failure. But he was about to.
He wasn’t playing against other green teenagers anymore, and he wasn’t enjoying the sunny summer weather of Louisiana. Located in central Canada, where the St. Lawrence River flows into Lake Ontario, even Kingston’s population of 135,000 seemed downright metropolitan to the kid from Amite City. Most significantly, however, the team he was joining was just plain bad.
At 18, Barbed Wire was among the youngest of his teammates; given his pedigree and maturity, however, he was immediately expected to step in as the ace – a role he relished. Unfortunately, it was not necessarily a role he was prepared for. Thrust into the spotlight, Mike Swanson’s entrance into the minor leagues saw him starting fifteen games, collecting only a single win along with ten – TEN – losses. That’s seven more losses than he was charged with over the entirety of his three years pitching in high school. His ERA, while not necessarily horrific, was nearly triple that of his high school average. A lesser player would have shrugged it off as the reality of entering professional baseball – a bump in the road that was still undoubtedly leading towards big league stardom. But that sort of contentment with failure was decidedly not in Swanson’s nature.
Growing up in Amite City had been a master class in failure. Everyone around him had failed in any number of ways – you didn’t spend your life on the banks of the Amite River because you’re a great success. And Dale Swanson, the father, had not dealt with failure well. Himself a celebrated athlete in his youth, there had been some who thought he would go on to a professional sporting career of his own. Of course, he hadn’t: Swanson the elder had just been the next in a long line of big fish in a singularly small pond. Dale turned to drink, and the occasional piece of thrown furniture, to deal with his life’s compound failures. And now, struggling to strike-out rookie league batters – never mind that some of these players who three, four and five years his senior – it was impossible for Swanson to avoid the thought that he, like his dad, was suited only for stardom on the Amite City stage.
[hr]
I spoke with Nick Hatfield, a bullpen guy who – at the ripe old age of 23 – was the Kingston Kodiak’s equivalent of a grizzled veteran, and by all accounts Hatfield was the team’s leader. There’s something about being 23 in rookie league, though, that reminds everyone about the power of a dream; this kid was nobody’s favourite to make it to the big leagues, but still he rode the buses for three long years along with the Mike Swansons of the world who were clearly just making a pit stop in Kingston. More than that, Hatfield made it his interest to ensure that the Swansons of the world felt comfortable on those buses; more often than not, the cagey vet and the greenhorn teenager found themselves to be roommates.
To hear Nick Hatfield tell it, Mike’s frustrations were typically taken out on hotel furniture – a habit that likely had about as significant an impact on his bank account as the failed investment. After a disappointing outing on the mound, Swanson would sulk alone in his room while the rest of the team socialized; and, in typical Swanson family fashion, would eventually take out his frustration on an end table or lamp.
One particularly forward-looking hotel manager restored a mirror destroyed by the young Swanson in a post-game fury; the shattered mirror, touched by the fame of Mike Swanson, is now appraised at many thousands of dollars.
“Mike was a funny kid. You know, he had a temper for sure. When things would go off the rails, we’d lose some games… we weren’t all that good that season. But I think that’s part of what makes a great ballplayer – that thing inside of ‘em that makes losing just awful. I never had that, I guess. But Mike did.”
Nick Hatfield now manages a Wendy’s franchise, back home in Warner Robins, Georgia. He hung around for a couple of years in the Bison system after Swanson moved up the ladder, though his career (such as it was) had already more or less come to an end. Over the next two years he’d take the mound only three more times, in rookie ball and single-A combined. I suggest to Hatfield that, in a lot of ways, he and Swanson were polar opposites. He laughs.
“You mean, like how he was good and I was bad?”
No, not like that.
“Yeah, I think that’s true. We both wanted to play ball real bad, and we were both from the South, but that’s about all we had in common. My whole thing, I guess, is that I was always willing to take the lead. I wasn’t the smartest or the hardest working and I sure as damned hell wasn’t the best pitcher, but I could talk, right? I could get the guys going again, even after a bad loss. And Mike, he was all those other things I never was. He was talented, sure, but he was just so damned competitive. When things didn’t go his way, he hated it. And he worked his tail off until they started to go his way again. I was just happy to be there.”
[hr]
Mike smiles when I mention Nick Hatfield.
“I haven’t seen that guy in a long, long time. He was a good guy. Great friend, great leader. Good pitcher.”
To call Nick Hatfield a “good pitcher” may be stretching the truth, but Mike Swanson has always been generous in his praise of others.
“It was scary though. Nobody ever really tells you that it’s okay to not be as good in the minors as you were in high school. So I guess I went out there expecting to throw strikes all day, and zip right through the system. But baseball’s a funny animal I guess. It took me a while.”
“A while” for Mike Swanson means about the fastest minor league career a high school draftee is ever going to have: despite his struggles in rookie league, the organization promoted him the very next year to single-A, where he started even more games, with similar results. While his new team was actually quite successful, finishing first in their division that year, Swanson’s personal statistics continued to suffer: his ERA surged to 5.38; his Home Runs Per 9 Innings more than tripled; his WHIP, FIP and BB/9 all went up as well. Swanson focused most, however, on his Win-Loss record – for an athlete as competitive as Barbed Wire, it’s only natural to look first and foremost at the bottom line. Against single-A competition, Swanson recorded a 4-11 season. Ouch.
Digging through old press releases, I discovered that some small doubts about Swanson’s future were clearly beginning to emerge within the Bison organization as well. Then-GM Matthew Bornac made a statement at the end of Swanson’s A-league season which, while clearly supportive of the young hurler, raised a couple of eyebrows:
[quote=Matthew Bornac]“After two seasons in the minors, the first in rookie ball, and this past season in single-A, Swanson has struggled some as he has moved up the system, and his numbers have not been promising to this point, however, we are not worried at this point about the results in terms of wins and losses, ERA and WHIP. What we are watching with Mike is simply development. Is he getting better yet, or at the age of 19 ending this year, is he stalled out?”[/quote]
Bornac went on to stress that, yes, the organization saw significant development taking place, statistics be damned. Still, the #1 prospect in baseball (despite the struggles, OSA continued to show Swanson love come ranking season, as he spent his entire minor league career at the top spot on their listing) was slipping. He was no longer the “sure” thing, but was rather the “better remind everyone how much of a sure thing he is” thing. Either way, Swanson was shipped down the line to the next stage of his development, AA ball, the very next season.
[hr]
“I think that year in Thunder Bay, single-A, was the worst year of my career. Statistically, sure. But also emotionally. One bad year, like I had in rookie league, it’s just one year, right? It might be a fluke. But then when I struggled again the very next year, it started to feel like a tailspin I might never pull out of. “
Watching Mike Swanson dominate batters inning after inning can make you forget that he is, in fact, getting older. Sitting here with him now, reliving his past, the lines on his face and the all around world-weariness of the pitcher are all too apparent; this is a man who has been through a lot.
“It was also around that time that I started to realize how many mistakes I’d made financially. When someone basically cuts you a three million dollar cheque, you don’t worry about where the next one will come from. But it took me seven years” – he stresses this figure – “before I was making more than five hundred grand a season. And all my time in the minors, I wasn’t making real money. I’d had all these dreams of sending my cousins to college, paying off all my family’s debts… it just didn’t work out that way. And by the end of that season in Thunder Bay, I was wondering if I’d ever start making real, professional athlete money.”
[hr]
He shouldn’t have worried.
The next year, in double-A, Swanson got his groove back. While he was back to playing for a bottom-feeding team, his own numbers started to flourish. Maybe it was the desperation of feeling close to the edge, maybe it was the inspiration of certain coaches the organization employed at that level, or maybe it was just the added maturity and confidence achieved by no longer being a teenager; whatever the reason, Mike “Barbed Wire” Swanson was back, baby.
Mike went 12-8 that year, a winning percentage of .600 (compared to the team’s mediocre overall figure of .483). He once again led his club in both games started and innings pitched, only this time those numbers were recorded with a team leading ERA to match. He even saw a bit of game time at the AAA level: a pair of outings which, incidentally, saw him roasted by the more experienced batters he was facing in Winnipeg. For the first time, however, this failure didn’t result in anger. Swanson returned to AA with an attitude of “I’ll get ‘em next time”.
From that point on, he promised himself that he would only be throwing strikes – not furniture. Swanson could finally remember what success tasted like, and he was ready to enjoy it. Next year, AAA. After that, only a long and celebrated MBBA career could possibly be awaiting him. His struggles were over, and hotel lamps the world over breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
Of course, nothing is ever so easy.
AAA baseball is a bit of an odd duck. The average age is considerably higher than in minor league baseball’s lower levels, and for every young kid just a hair’s breadth away from the majors there’s a tired old journeyman more or less resigned to a career of bus rides and cheap hotels. For 21 year old Mike Swanson, joining a pitching staff that included 35 year old Rafael Vasquez must have felt a little like checking himself into a nursing home.
Unlike Swanson, Vasquez wasn’t one lucky break away from the big leagues; he’d already had his shot. The aged hurler had spent twelve years in the Monty Brewster Baseball Association before finding himself demoted to triple-A, much of which he spent starting for the New Orleans Crawdads – the team which Swanson had worshipped in his youth.
[hr]
“You know, it was really tough, really weird, meeting that guy. He was a real pro ballplayer! I mean, maybe he wasn’t an ace, but he was a starter for my hometown team, growing up. I almost wanted to ask him for an autograph, you know?”
Talking about Vasquez, about the New Orleans Crawdads of his childhood, instantly transforms Mike Swanson, professional baseball player, into Mike Swanson, eight year-old. He’s positively giddy.
“Raffy, he really took me under his wing, you know? And he didn’t have to – I was, in effect, there to take his job. He was a legitimate big league player, he’d seen everything baseball had to offer, the fact that he had even one minute for me is amazing, in hindsight.”
It’s a good thing he did, too. Coming off of a strong season in double-A, expectations for Swanson had risen – and he decidedly did not live up to them. With only one more hoop to jump through before joining the major leagues, surely more of a formality than anything, Mike Swanson turned in career highs in ERA, WHIP, and worst of all: losses.
With every run he gave up, every loss he accrued, Swanson’s hard won confidence slowly disappeared. What if, just maybe, he was a true-talent double-A pitcher after all? What if everyone else had been wrong? His father had dominated high school sports and gone no further, what if Mike was just a little bit better, good enough to carve out a career as a minor league journeyman and nothing more?
I spoke with Vasquez, who was facing a fight of his own that year. When he first found himself assigned to the minor league club, the Pennsylvanian pitcher had been convinced that a few good starts would be enough to break his way back onto the Bison roster – or some other big league team would start asking about him, at least. It had always worked that way before: the quintessential AAAA guy, Vasquez was used to bouncing between the bigs and the minors, as his play and his club’s circumstances dictated. This time, however, was different.
“I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of the end for me. I showed up in Winnipeg and they sent me over to the side, with the bullpen guys. That was a first for me. I’d been a yo-yo guy, playing all up and down the organization, but always a starter. But I guess once you get tagged like that, you know, like “he can’t start anymore” kind of thing, there’s nowhere else to go but down. Thirty-five year old relievers don’t usually have much of a comeback.”
Speaking with Vasquez, it was easy to see why Swanson found him appealing as a mentor. Aside from his experience as having played in “the Brew” (as journeyman minor leaguers are known to call the Monty Brewster Baseball Association), and beyond whatever awestruck wonder Barbed Wire may have been experiencing, Vasquez has a calming, “everything will be okay” kind of temperament.
“Mikey, I called him Mikey, he was a good kid. Temper, sure, maybe a little quieter than most, but a good kid deep down. And I kind of realized, maybe I couldn’t really contribute to wins anymore, but I still had a job on that team. I was the “go calm Mikey down” guy.”
Vasquez relates that after a poor start (and Swanson had many that year), he would pull the kid aside and just sort of chat with him in the dugout. Grab a beer or two – but no more than two – after the game and reassure the young hurler that everything would, eventually, turn out okay.
“He couldn’t seem to understand that he was a twenty-one year old kid playing against thirty year old men, and nobody expected him to kill ‘em all right away. And his big problem, it was cyclical. He’d play bad and then get mad and then that would make him play worse. So I tried to keep him from getting mad.”
If Vasquez’s work with Swanson had an effect on the diamond, it’s hard to tell from his statistics that season – his play really was just not all that great. There was some reason for optimism: despite having the team’s worst ERA amongst full-time starters, his Fielding Independent Pitching, known as a more reliable tell of pitching talent, was actually ranked highest. And while Swanson, the young perfectionist, would never have cared about that number, Bison management clearly did.
“He kept belly-aching, like, “Aw Raffy, I’ll never make the Brew!”, I told him to quit whining but he never did. Told him he’d make it when he makes it, and the rest would take care of itself. I dunno if he ever believed me, but I was right – he moved up the next year, just like I figured.”
[hr]
For whatever reason, Swanson’s performance on the diamond never seemed to affect his promotion, or lack thereof, to the next level of baseball. Whether he was the worst pitcher on the team (as was the case more than once) or the best (as was the case in AA), he would always spend exactly one season per league. Come spring, like clockwork, he’d find himself assigned to a new team in a new city in a new league, and the year following his turbulent triple-A season was no different. After training camp was finished, and the final cuts made, Swanson found himself on the active roster for the Buffalo Bison of the Monty Brewster Baseball Association.
“I think probably management was under pressure from ownership to move me through the system. I can’t think of any other reason to keep moving me through levels I clearly wasn’t ready for – I mean, I guess it obviously worked out, but what if it hadn’t?”
Swanson pauses. Our time together today is almost at an end; he gives War Memorial stadium a long look. Today, in 2022, Mike Swanson is surveying is kingdom – nobody has ever owned this park the way he does. He’s the kind of player that parents tell their children about, the kind that ownership builds statues for once he’s retired. But as he does this, I see something in his eye: he’s not just surveying his kingdom, but also considering how close he came to not inheriting the kingdom at all.
“I was scared. There were all these expectations, and when you’re playing in the major leagues, the stadium is full. When I threw like crap in rookie league, nobody cared. But what if the fans here in Buffalo started to boo? If I couldn’t handle triple-A batters in Winnipeg, what made them think I could handle the pros? Why should I be able to go up against Duane Whitley?”
Another pause.
“And I was scared, too, cause Raffy wasn’t going to be there.”
Tune in sometime in the next week-ish for the final piece of this Mike Swanson profile, where we watch him break into the MBBA for good.
