That first night in Visalia, he and Swish dressed and sat on the end of the bench. They might as well have been on the visiting team. No one even came down to say hello; if Swish hadn’t been on hand to confirm the fact Jeremy might have wondered if he still existed. In the third inning the team’s regular catcher, a hulk named Jorge Soto, came to the plate. Jeremy had never heard of Soto but he assumed, rightly, that he was competing with Soto for the catching job. On the first pitch Soto hit a shot the likes of which neither Jeremy nor Swish had ever seen. It was still rising as it flew over the light tower in left center field. It cleared the parking lot and also the skate park on the other side of the parking lot. It was the farthest ball Jeremy had ever seen hit live. Five hundred and fifty feet, maybe more. As Soto trotted around the bases, Jeremy turned to Swish and said, “I don’t think I’m ever going to catch here.”
If it was up to his new teammates, he wouldn’t have. They locked the door; if Jeremy Brown and Nick Swisher wanted in, they’d have to break it down. One day he was walking through the Visalia clubhouse when someone shouted in a mocking tone, “Hey, Badger.” Jeremy had no clue what the guy was talking about. He soon learned. His teammates, who still weren’t saying much to him, had nicknamed him “The Badger.” “It was ‘cause when I get into the shower I kind of got a lot of hair on my body,” Jeremy explained. Behind his back, they were all still having fun at his expense. Jeremy just did what he always did, smiled and got along.
Along with most of the other players drafted by the Oakland A’s in 2002, Jeremy Brown had been invited to the Instructional League in Arizona at the end of the season. By then, three months after he’d been promoted to Visalia, no one was laughing at him. In Visalia, he’d quickly seized the starting catching job from Jorge Soto, and led the team in batting average (.310), on-base percentage (.444) and slugging percentage (.545). In fifty-five games, he’d knocked in forty runs. So artfully had he ripped through the pitching in high Single-A ball that Billy Beane had invited him to the 2003 big league spring training camp—the only player from the 2002 draft so honored. Every other player in the Oakland A’s 2002 draft—even Nick Swisher—had experienced what the A’s minor league director Keith Lieppman called “reality.” Reality, Lieppman said, “is when you learn that you are going to have to change the way you play baseball if you are going to survive.” Jeremy alone didn’t need to change a thing about himself; it was the world around him that needed to change. And it did. The running commentary about him in Baseball America hung a U-turn. When the magazine named him one of the top three hitters from the entire 2002 draft, and one of the four top prospects in the Oakland A’s minor league system, his mom called to tell him: someone had finally written something nice about him. His teammates in Visalia no longer called him “The Badger.” Everyone now just called him “Badge.”
When Jeremy Brown comes to the plate on this mid-October afternoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, it’s the bottom of the second inning. There’s no score, and there’s no one on base. The big left-hander on the other team has made short work of the A’s first three hitters. He throws Jeremy a fastball off the plate. Jeremy just looks at it. Ball one. Pitch number two is a change-up on the outside corner, where Jeremy can’t do much with it anyway, so he just lets it be. Strike one. Jeremy Brown knows something about pitchers: “They almost always make a mistake,” he says. “All you have to do is wait for it.” Give the game a chance to come to you and often enough it will. When he takes the change-up for a called strike, he notices the possibility of a future mistake. The pitcher’s arm motion, when he throws his change-up, is noticeably slower than it is when he throws his fastball.
The pitcher’s next pitch is a fastball off the plate. Ball two. It’s 2-1: a hitter’s count.
The fourth pitch is the mistake: the pitcher goes back to his change-up. Jeremy sees his arm coming through slowly again, and this time he knows to wait on it. The change-up arrives waist-high over the middle of the plate. The line drive Jeremy hits screams over the pitcher’s right ear and into the gap in left center field. As he leaves the batter’s box, Jeremy sees the left and center fielders converging fast. The left fielder, thinking he might make the catch, is already running himself out of position to play the ball off the wall. Jeremy knows he hit it hard, and so he knows what’s going to happen next-or imagines he does. The ball is going to hit the wall and ricochet back into the field. The left fielder, having overrun it, will have to turn around and chase after it. Halfway down the first-base line, Jeremy Brown has one thought in his mind: I’m gonna get a triple.
It’s a new thought for him. He isn’t built for triples. He hasn’t hit a triple in years. He thrills to the new idea: Jeremy Brown, hitter of triples. A funny thing has
