Dave Pavlas doesn’t remember the precise moment he considered giving up baseball, but he can narrow it down to a 36-hour window. That’s the duration of a bus ride from Campeche, in the Yucatan, to Mexico City. During his days in the Mexican League, Pavlas made that seemingly endless trip more than once.
”It was the true test of whether you wanted to play baseball,“ says Pavlas, who now enjoys comparatively luxurious accommodations as part of the Nashville Sounds’ pitching staff. Jouncing along harrowing mountain roads in a hot rattletrap might be enough to provoke an existential crisis in anyone, much less a ballplayer worried about his future.
But it’s a price that aspiring major- leaguers often pay—and an experience with which several well-traveled Sounds are familiar. Sometimes the experience was far from ideal; sometimes, it seemed as blissful as Kevin Costner’s Iowa cornfield.
For pitcher Rob Mattson, who joined the Sounds after playing two years in Japan, heaven was any ballpark where he could find employment. After two seasons in Single-A ball, he returned to college to complete his undergraduate degree. He was playing ball in local beer leagues and decided to try out with the Kansas City Royals. He didn’t win a job with the organization, but a coach told him of a Dutch team that might be interested.
And so Mattson found himself playing at what many Americans might regard as the edge of the baseball world. (It wasn’t, but Mattson pitched there, too, when his team, Einhoven Phillips, traveled to the Czech Republic for a tournament.)
But during his year in this penultimate minor league, Mattson made a surprising discovery: He enjoyed it. ”They like to live after you’re done working,“ he says. Instead of six or seven games a week, the Dutch teams played only three or four. There was time to relax and find your bearings.
Even more, the experience allowed Mattson to hone his skills. ”I had a great year there,“ he recalls. ”I came home and walked on with the Braves and won a minor-league job.“
That job, in turn, proved to be a stepping stone to another one in Japan, where he rose from the minors to a spot with the Kintetsa Buffaloes of that country’s big league.
The majors in Japan, as several of the Sounds who played there will testify, is, well, different.
”The fanaticism is what stands out to me,“ says Pavlas, who played for the Yomiuri Giants in 1997. ”There are 45,000 or 50,000 every night. They do organized cheers for their team. When there’s a home run, people jump out onto the field. It’s more like a carnival than a baseball game.“
To be a gaijin, as American players on Japanese teams are termed, is to enjoy celebrity. ”I think the fans loved ’em,“ says Sounds outfielder Brent Brede, who batted .292 last season for Chiba. ”The people are very friendly. They’ll go out of their way to help you.“
”They took great care of us,“ agrees Mattson. ”If they liked you, you never had a worry.“
With the adulation and elevated status, however, came elevated expectations for the four gaijin allowed on each team. ”They expect the Americans to hit .600 with a home run every other at-bat,“ Pavlas says. ”If the team lost, it was your fault. If you win, you’re just part of the team. You really have to swallow your pride.“
Even more irksome to the visitors was the Japanese concept of substitutions: A player who commits a mistake dishonors the team and therefore should be removed immediately, without even waiting for the inning to end.
”If you made an error, they’d pull you out right away,“ complains Pavlas. ”One time,“ echoes Brede, ”I failed to make a play in center field. Two pitches later, this guy comes to take me out.“
There were other adjustments, too. Like the plodding strategy that the Americans found boring: relentless bunting, bringing in the infield even in the early innings. And the even more relentless workouts, sometimes following games. ”I love the fans,“ Pavlas says. ”Other than that, you can keep the whole thing.“
Still, all three Sounds who played in Japan agreed they would happily return, if only for the money. At the higher levels, salaries in Japan outstrip not only those in the U.S. minor leagues but the major-league minimum, too.
During his 15-year pro baseball odyssey, Pavlas has toiled in five countries and at both extremes—sometimes in the same season. In 1992, he spent spring training with the Braves but wound up in the bullpen for Jalisco, Mexico.
The next season, the Pirates offered him a contract, then promptly loaned him to the Mexico City Red Devils, who gave new meaning to the concept of tough road trips.
And the next year, as luck would have it, Pavlas became a pitcher for the Angels. That would be the Parma, Italy, Angels.
Not exactly a step closer toward the majors. On the other hand, reflects Pavlas, ”It was absolutely the most fun“ among all of his baseball travels. ”The people and their approach to life were so much different.“
The Italian approach to baseball was distinctly different, too—and one to which road-weary ballplayers could easily acclimate. ”We played only three games a week: one on Friday and two on Saturday.“
But Pavlas’ workload wasn’t even as grueling as that. He pitched only on Fridays (a restriction imposed by the Italian League to encourage the development of native-born players).
Sundays and Mondays were days off, with practices on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. That left plenty of free time for Pavlas, an art major at Rice, to visit Italy’s museums. ”I was in Florence a lot,“ he remembers. And, as you might imagine, ”we ate real good.“
If Italy was the best, Taiwan ultimately was the worst. After a favorable experience there in 1993, Pavlas accepted an offer to return in ’98, when he helped the Brother Elephants win a title. But by then, he says, organized crime had infested the league. ”Games were being thrown. If a guy made an error, you didn’t know whether it was a fix or just an error. There’d be 20,000 fans a night in ’93, but by ’98 it was just a few hundred.“
Yet for all the distance, both psychic and physical, from the major leagues to the foreign leagues, the players say they wouldn’t trade their experiences. Playing overseas, explains Mattson, instills confidence. ”When you take the mound (here), you think about the experiences you’ve had there. It relaxes you. If you’ve gone through that over there, you can do it here.
”There’s not a place I wouldn’t go back to. I’d love to play in the big leagues, but I’ll go anywhere to play if there are no more jobs.“
Pavlas, like Mattson, not only savors his travel experiences but still corresponds with many of his old teammates from Europe. And every once in a while, as he sits in the Greer Stadium bullpen, just one call away from the big leagues, he even reflects wistfully on the infernal bus trips in Mexico that nearly drove him to quit baseball.
”I stuck with it,“ he says, ”and got a Series ring (with the Yankees) in ’96. I think how lucky I am today to be playing and to have a uniform.“
