By Chris Kline
August 4, 2004

Baseball America assistant editor Chris Kline is in the midst of a one-week tour as a farmhand in the Pirates system, and Triple-A Nashville hasn't lost a game with him in uniform. The Sounds' human good-luck charm is providing daily updates about what it's like to be a minor leaguer. As you're about to find out, it's important to get the basics right first.

Chris was outfitted by Adidas Impossible Is Nothing

NASHVILLE--Sitting on the top step of the dugout 20 minutes before game time at Herschel Greer Stadium, I was relaxing with some sunflower seeds and a casual talk with a fan about the weather.

"Number 10? I thought you were number 34?" Sounds media-relations director Doug Scopel asked. "You have Tony's jersey on."

"Holy crap, you're right," I said as I sprinted back to the clubhouse before Alvarez got out of the shower. "I owe you one."

I switched jerseys with my locker roomie and went back out on the field. Before the game started, however, things got even worse because of another brain fart.

Both the Canadian and American national anthems were over and righthander Cory Stewart and I sat on the bench, watching Nelson Figueroa finish his warmup tosses. From out of nowhere, a batboy got up in my face.

"Chris—Steve wants to see you now," he said with a certain sense of urgency. "All I know is he said now."

I was just sitting in the corner of the dugout closest to the third-base bag in my usual gametime position, so I was confused about what clubhouse manager Steve Humphrey could want with me. I went in to the tunnel that leads into the clubhouse.

"Well mate, you're wearing the wrong pants," Humphrey said. "You're wearing Tony's pants—and he's not pleased."

I stammered for an explanation, but couldn't really say anything, so I just wore it and went back into the clubhouse and saw Alvarez sitting in front of our locker with his hat down over his eyes.

"Wow, I'm sorry, man," was all I could muster.

"Don't worry about it, man," Alvarez said. "It isn't your fault. But those were my lucky pants."

Good thing he wasn't starting tonight.

And I swear they were on the wrong side of the locker. As for wearing his jersey—which he'll only find out about only if he reads this—I never looked at the back of it, which is a typical rookie mistake.

"If you're sharing lockers, I can see you putting on somebody else's clothes, I guess," righthander John Van Benschoten mused. "But you should technically know your number."

But Alvarez had already ragged me enough after batting practice, so he didn't need to kill me after my uniform snafu. We were in the same BP group, and he was not impressed with my progress.

"Hey roomie," Alvarez said, pulling me away from the cage. "If you still want to be my roomie, you need to work on your swing. My grandmother has a better swing than you do. See me at 2:45 tomorrow."

DUGOUT CHATTER

Six-foot-11 righthander Jon Rauch started for the Trappers, and early on it was a doubles spree. Three of the first four hits Nashville got were two-baggers, prompting closer Luther Hackman to give Rauch some old-fashioned ribbing from the dugout.

"You should be in the NBA," Hackman called out. After the first double by Andy Abad, Hackman didn't let up.

"That's going to be all day, baby. You better get used to that. It's going to be all day. We're coming for you, 51."

Triple-A is interesting because players are always breaking down each other's at-bats, plays in the field, even individual pitches. Here, it's always about refining yourself just a little bit to make it to the big leagues.

"There's not nearly as much actual instruction going on at this level," Pirates roving pitching instructor Gary Ruby said. "Guys know how to take care of themselves. At the lower levels you see a lot more hands-on training, but not here. We expect it and they do too.

"You look at the routine plays, and each one of them looks completely confident and relaxed and rarely makes a mistake. In the lower levels, the guys are a lot more intense and they throw the ball away or they swing at bad pitches. It's all about getting a player to the point in their development—both physically and mentally--where they are up here."

Aside from Hackman, the best dugout chatter came from Van Benschoten, one of the most interesting individuals on a club full of them. After first baseman Carlos Rivera hit a two-run bomb, he came back to the dugout and was fixing his socks, sitting next to the man they simply call "V."

"Hey Carlos, what was that? Fastball?"

Rivera, who had been speaking Spanish more or less the rest of the night, instead decided to deadpan some English: "You know what? I don't even know, dog."

Van Benschoten is always trying to get something started in the trenches, keeping everyone around him loose. Whether it's throwing empty cups, ice or sunflower seeds, or just throwing a look in someone's direction, then looking away. You're never quite sure what's going through his mind.

"John," I began, "someone contacted us about your . . ."

"Ooh, this is good stuff, inside scoop," Van Benschoten said. "I've got to sit down for this."

"Well, it's really not that exciting, but is your last name really Van-space-Benschoten?"

"Well, yeah," he replied. "But no one ever puts the space in there. I mean nobody. Not even the Pirates. Believe me, my grandfather would be on the phone telling me as soon as he saw the space."

"There isn't even a space on your jersey."

"Well, that's because there isn't any room. This is a lot of stuff to carry around on your back."

Catcher J.R. House returned to Nashville from the big league club, and made an appearance in the dugout in the first inning before getting dressed.

As he made his way through the dugout, he stopped and talked to Stewart, who was sitting next to me. They chatted for awhile, and then he got to me—and stopped with a bewildered look on his face.

"J.R. House," he said.

"Chris Kline," I replied. "I'm not a player, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

House made his way through the rest of the players, then went back to get his gear on.

SMELLS LIKE CHICKEN

"Man, my hands stink," catcher Eddie Olszta said in the clubhouse after he and Abad were the first arrivals today. The two went fishing for catfish about 20 minutes out of town this morning in a pond owned by one of the Oak Ridge Boys, who's also a stockholder in the team.

They apparently not only got their fishing groove on, but their smell on as well. The boys were using chicken livers as bait. "My hands still smell like chicken livers," Olszta said--and this was into the fifth inning of the game.

"I'll tell you what," Abad said, "I had shaving cream all over my hands, I took two showers and I washed my hands like 10 times since then. I don't know if it's under the nails or what, but it's still lingering—even after sweating through my glove and stuff."

"You know what's the most disturbing thing to me?" Olszta said. "I took two showers too, and washed my hands dozens of times, but after BP, I got a lot of phone calls I needed to return. Now I think my phone smells like chicken livers."

Not that anyone else could smell their hands, let alone their phones, but clubhouse talk still turned to the fishing trip.

"So, how many did you guys catch?" asked Luke Allen, a native of Covington, Ga., and an experienced catfisher.

"I don't know, like 20 or 30 maybe," Olszta replied. "But that was just with my right arm."

The big fish stories continued . . .

"So what'd you do? Just nail them down and strip the skin off?" Allen asked.

"Nail their heads down?" Olszta said.

"Yeah, you nail the head to a board and pull the rest of the body on down," Allen said, as if he was talking about trying on new clothes.

"I don't know about that. And we didn't keep anything anyway. I just always used to cut their heads off, though."

"Well you guys obviously had no idea what you were doing," Allen said with a laugh.

Everyone else in the dugout would have welcomed the smell of fish or chicken livers, as an alternative to what the dugout actually smelled like.

"Man, it smells like cow crap in here," batboy William Johnson said while walking through the trenches.

The odor was kind of a cross between what Johnson described and what some Nashville players referred to as a decomposing animal.

"Wow, did a mouse or some other rodent die in here or what?" reliever Frank Brooks asked before retreating for the bullpen in the fourth. "Seriously, something stinks."

"They just need to take this astroturf out and hose down the whole thing," Abad said. "They really need to do that. It smells like crap or something died in here."

PITCHERS FEEL POWERFUL

PFP stands for Pitchers Fielding Practice, and it's a day when pitchers go through every imaginable situation taking ground balls, but also get to take batting practice as well.

This happens twice a week, and it's more a matter of keeping them sharp than anything else. Some pitchers refer to it as "eyewash" or "E-dub."

"You get what you put into it, but it isn't the same as a game situation," one pitcher said. "You're just going through the motions. There are no fans in the stands and you really don't feel that extra added pressure. That's something you have to put in your mind as you go through it."

BP is the true delight on Monday and Friday PFP sessions, as the starters take on the relievers in an intense battle for bragging rights. I was shagging flies in the outfield next to manager Trent Jewett and hitting coach Jeff Livesey, and the pitchers were yelling every time a ball went over my head.

On this day, the starters won out behind some serious blasts from Van Benschoten, who led NCAA Division I with 31 homers in 2001, when he was a two-way star at Kent State.

"Well, if I was on the outside looking in, I saw an absolute massacre," Van Benschoten said as The Vapors' 1980s hit "Turning Japanese" played loudly in the clubhouse. "I mean, putting up 15 runs is pretty tough, especially in a PFP session. That was what we were able to do and you know, pretty much we killed 'em. That all I have to say about that."

Van Benschoten wasn't at all impressed with the hitting of relievers Pat Mahomes or Hackman, who went yard twice each—once back-to-back. "That's nothing I haven't seen before," he said sarcastically. "Nothing I can't do better."

Mahomes blamed his power outage on the team's fantasy football draft the night before.

"I had a long day yesterday with the fantasy draft and I didn't have the power I normally would have, but my pop is better than Van Benschoten's pop any day of the week," he said.

After his last bomb, Mahomes decided to work out his home run trot.

"I was just making sure it wasn't rusty," he said. "I've only had a few at-bats this year and I haven't hit any this year, but I have to make sure it's right there with Sammy Sosa's."

FANTASY DRAFT TIME

As everyone in the known world gears for his or her own fantasy football draft at this time of year, these guys are no different. The players went through a 16-round draft after Sunday night's game, and here's how the first round shook out:

1. Priest Holmes, Kansas City, to righthander Nelson Figueroa
2. LaDainian Tomlinson, San Diego, to lefthander Frank Brooks
3. Ahman Green, Green Bay, to catcher Keith McDonald
4. Deuce McAllister, New Orleans, to second baseman Freddy Sanchez
5. Shaun Alexander, Seattle, to lefthander Mike Johnston
6. Marshall Faulk, St. Louis, to righthander Pat Mahomes
7. Jamal Lewis, Baltimore, to righthander Mark Corey
8. Clinton Portis, Washington, to third baseman Chris Truby
9. Edgerrin James, Indianapolis, to righthander Blake Stein
10. Fred Taylor, Jacksonville, to righthander Chris Fussell

Stein offered comments on each pick, and the general consensus was that Mahomes' and Brooks' drafts were the two worst overall. Stein's best comment came after McDonald, known to the rest of the team affectionately as "Fatty," made his first-round pick. The 31-year-old catcher is listed at 6-foot-2, 230 pounds.

"The fat kid took a cheesehead in the first round," Stein said. "With him, it's always about food."

PRISONER OF THE STREAK

After the Sounds won again—the third time in a row since my arrival and sixth straight overall—the buzz was that they were going to kidnap me and take me with them on their upcoming road trip to Tucson.

"Man, I'll ante up 20 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever," Abad said. "But if you don't go, you'll get fined like $500. Consider it team abandonment."

"Oh, there's no doubt in my mind you're going," pitching coach Darold Knowles added. "Like they said in 'Bull Durham', you don't mess with a streak. Get ready for that dry heat, boy."

So what happens if I went with them to Tucson and they lost the first night?

"We'd put your ass back on the first flight to Durham or wherever you wanted to go," Knowles said. "We'd have to get you as far away from us as possible."