”You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you too.“
— Roy Campanella
On April 13, John Wehner put on his Sounds uniform, picked up his glove, and for the 26th consecutive spring of his life, trotted out onto a baseball field. On that night, a road game against Iowa, Wehner started at second base, batted eighth, and went 1-for-3 with a double, one run scored, and a walk. Statistically, it was an OK night. But for Wehner—who as a child played baseball in a cemetery in his gritty, inner-city Pittsburgh neighborhood and who wasn’t born with the inherent skills that separate the awesome from the above-average player—any night spent being paid to play the game he has been playing since he was 6 years old qualifies as a great night. The 32-year-old utility player, with more years in the game behind him now than ahead, is well aware of the tenuous hold he—or any professional athlete—has on his job, and how fleeting the days of summer can be.
Wehner is the fifth of six children, raised by a single mother who struggled financially. There were no father-son games of catch in the backyard. Instead, he tagged along with his older brothers to their ball games, and found his heroes on the hometown professional baseball team, the Pittsburgh Pirates.
”When I was 6, I started playing ball with my older brothers,“ he says. ”I really had to muscle my way in because they were a lot older than me. There was a cemetery across the street from where we lived that had a big open field, and that’s where I played ball until I was 12. To me, playing baseball was the best thing in the world to do. It still is.“
Three Rivers Stadium was less than 10 miles away from his house. Eight wrappers from Town Talk bread would get a free bleacher seat to a Pirates game. For a quarter, he could catch the bus to the park with his neighborhood buddies and spend summer nights hoping to snag a foul ball, imagining himself on that very field. His position in neighborhood games, Little League, and all through high school was shortstop, and he idolized Tim Foli and Dale Berra.
”As long as I can remember I wanted to be a Pirate. The height of my fantasies was to play major league ball at Three Rivers, but it didn’t really seem attainable.“
Wehner played his high school ball in a dumpy little park with no grass that doubled as a football field. No scouts came to the games at Carrick High School and he graduated with no idea of what he would do for a living and no plan for the future.
His first break came through playing American Legion Ball, where he finally got to play on some decent fields. He survived several cuts to make it to the All-West game, held at Three Rivers Stadium. ”It was incredible. I had just turned 18 and I was getting to play on the field that I had been watching my whole life.“
Out of 60 kids who played that day, Wehner was named MVP, and made the cut down to the 30-man team for the state game. There were scouts there, including one from Indiana University. It just so happened that one of Indiana’s players had just flunked out of summer school. Wehner got the scholarship in his place. By late summer, he was in Indianapolis. ”That was grueling,“ he remembers. ”I had a full load at school and three hours of practice a day. My first year, I only had 14 at-bats and didn’t play much my second or third year either. But I learned a lot about the fundamentals. I also learned you weren’t always going to be handed a job.“
While attending summer school to maintain his scholarship, he received a letter from the Pirates organization inviting him to try out. By 6:30 the next morning, he was back in Three Rivers Stadium. He had, he recalls with a smile, the ”day of my life.“ He ran, threw, and hit the ball well. Four days later, he found out he had been drafted in the seventh round. On June 12, 1988, accompanied by his mother and one of his brothers, he signed a contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates for a $12,500 bonus. He attended a mini-camp at the Pirates facility in Bradenton, Fla., then reported to Watertown, N.Y., to play the short 72-game season in the Single-A NY-Penn League. He was making $700 a month and $6 a day in meal money. He thought he was rich. ”I was playing every day, and that’s where you learn the game. There are no weak links—everybody is a solid player. I still couldn’t see the major leagues then, but I just thought that I would get out there and work as hard as I could.“
In 1989, he was assigned to Salem, Va., skipping over Augusta, and was making $900 a month. ”I played my first full season—140 games, every inning, every game. I had a great year. After that, the big leagues seemed more realistic to me. But even playing at that level, that was a dream come true already.“
Even though Wehner began to think he had a chance to make it to the big leagues, he always knew he wasn’t a prospect, wasn’t ”ticketed“ to the majors like some players. ”There were some guys that had such raw talent, all they had to do was go out there and mature,“ he says. ”I’m not an overly talented guy, I was never told I was a prospect. I was told I was a good player, the kind of player everybody wants on their team.“
That kind of player is known as a gamer, as a guy who plays it hard and plays it the right way. It was enough the following year to get Wehner promoted to Double-A; he played in Harrisburg—now for $1,200 a month—and though he didn’t meet his ultimate goal of hitting .300, he thought he played well enough to get promoted to Triple-A the next year. The organization didn’t agree. They told him they didn’t feel he could handle the pressure of playing in front of the huge crowds the Triple-A team at Buffalo attracted. So Wehner went back to Harrisburg, where he soon fell into a 4-for-40 slump. ”I was beginning to think I’d be in Double-A the rest of my life,“ he recalls.
But then, the Pirates’ third baseman Jeff King got hurt. Buffalo’s Joe Redfield was called up to replace him, and Wehner went to Buffalo to take Redfield’s place. It was there that the best of times, and the worst of times, began. ”My first game in Buffalo I hit two doubles,“ he remembers. ”Then from June 15 to July 15, I played as well as I’ve ever played. There were 18,000 fans in Buffalo and the adrenaline was incredible.“
On July 15, as Wehner was coming off the field in the middle of the seventh inning, his manager, Terry Collins, called him over. ”He said, ‘Congratulations, you’re going to the big league.’ That was the most exciting moment of my life.“ Redfield had not made the most of his chances and was being sent back to Buffalo, King was still hurt, and Wehner was getting his shot. He showered up, then flew home to Pittsburgh. His mother met him at the airport; she had already provided the press with a photo of him taken as a little boy wearing Pirates pajamas.
His first at-bat was as a pinch hitter and he grounded out. His first start was on July 18 against Cincinnati, and he singled off Tom Browning for his first major-league hit. Five nights later, playing against Atlanta, Wehner got five hits, all singles, and became the first Pirate rookie to notch five hits in a game since Richie Zisk in 1973. ”I was embarrassed because a couple of them were cheap hits,“ Wehner says. ”It got a lot of attention because I was a hometown boy, but we were going for a playoff spot and I just wanted to help win the division race.“
But by August, Wehner’s back was aching; by the end of the month, the magical season came crashing to an end. ”One minute, everything’s going a million miles an hour, then it’s all over. I was in so much pain I couldn’t walk.“ Within an hour of his surgery on September 3, he was not only walking, but he had met the nurse who would become his wife.
In 1992, the Pirates signed third baseman Steve Buechele to a four-year contract, and Jeff King was healthy again. Wehner became expendable. It was then that manager Jim Leyland made Wehner a utility player, baseball’s version of the jack-of-all-trades, master of none. ”I think he thought it would help me, and I guess it has,“ Wehner says. ”I’ve played every position in the big leagues except pitcher and catcher.“ From 1992-95, he went up and down between Pittsburgh and Triple-A; he spent the entire 1996 season with Pittsburgh. In 1997, Leyland took over the Florida Marlins, and took Wehner with him after he was dropped by Pittsburgh. Wehner began the season in Triple-A Charlotte, then was called up to the Marlins, who shocked baseball when they won the World Series that year. ”It’s impossible to describe the feeling of a World Series. I didn’t get to play, but I got a ring.“
Wehner cites the following year, when the Marlins ownership traded off much of their roster (in one of the most spectacular dismantlings of a team ever) as the least fun he has ever had playing baseball. It got worse in 1999. He was set to follow Leyland to the Colorado Rockies, but the deal fell through. He was playing slo-pitch softball, eyeing an involuntary retirement from baseball and looking for a job, when the Pirates called with an offer to play Double-A ball in Altoona. ”At first I thought: I’m not going back to Double-A. But then I talked to my wife, and I figured Altoona was only 90 minutes away. I wanted to see if I still had it in me to play major league ball.“
So he reported to Altoona, then was called up to Nashville in mid-June, where he had two spectacular weeks, batting .431 with eight home runs and 15 RBIs in 17 games. The call from Pittsburgh came on July 6. ”Out of all the amazing things that have happened to me, that was the best. It was so emotional, after all the nonsense I had been through, to get to go back home to Pittsburgh. It was the first time I had ever cried.“ He finished the 1999 season in Pittsburgh.
Wehner began this, his 13th season of professional ball, in Nashville, with no promises from the Pirates but with a willingness to go if the call comes. ”I still think I can get back up to the big leagues. I think I can use my experience to help out in clutch situations. I don’t know how long I’ll keep playing. I’ve had a relationship with baseball since I was a little kid. I still love it just as much. It’s something I’ve done every single day, every single summer of my life. If I could, I’d stay in it forever. As long as they would allow me, I’d stay.“
Of the 617 young men who have played for the Sounds since 1978, 387 went on to play at least one major league ball game. At every game at Greer Stadium, there are a few Little League teams in the stands, dressed out in their uniforms, their gloves on their hands, hoping to snag a foul ball while watching their heroes on the field. Through the season, thousands of little boys will sit in those stands, dreaming the same dream that John Wehner did 25 summers ago. The law of averages says that at least one of those little boys will see his dream come true too. Twenty-five years from now, one of those little boys might be the player who gives us all one more day of summer.
