http://www.kansascity.com/2012/05/25...s-once-in.html
Pitching in majors was once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Villacis
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It is 2004, and a 24-year-old pitcher is flying high above New York City. He pulls up the window shade and gazes down at the skyscrapers below. It is a Friday, the final day in April, and in close to 24 hours, this young right-hander will take the mound at Yankee Stadium. He has thrown only 181/3 innings at Class AA Wichita this season, never more than 59 pitches in a game, but this is his time. Ever since he was a kid in Venezuela, when he idolized Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams, he has dreamed of this day.
Now he sees the buildings, steel running into steel, lives stacked on lives, and Eduardo Villacis begins to think about his career debut.
“You’re on your own,” he says to himself. “You’re on the mound tomorrow.”
It is 2012, a Thursday in May, and you’re not exactly sure where you’re calling. It may be Bilbao, Spain, or Bern, Switzerland, or some home in Venezuela. Eduardo Villacis is a tough man to track down.
You pick up the phone, dial a 15-digit number, and wait for the sound. Within a few seconds, a friendly voice picks up.
“Hello?”
“Is this Eduardo?”
“Yes.”
“Eduardo, I’m calling from Kansas City …”
“Oh, hi,” he says. “I didn’t expect you to be calling.”
The conversation begins, and he listens while you tell him why you’re calling. On Wednesday evening, the Royals started a rookie left-hander named Will Smith at Yankee Stadium in his major-league debut. Smith gave up five runs and six hits in 31/3 innings, his career ERA setting at 13.50 after one start.
You tell Villacis that in the history of the Kansas City Royals, there are only two starting pitchers who have ever made their career debut in New York: Will Smith … and Eduardo Villacis.
From his home in Venezuela, he listens to the explanation, the words about the past, and the memories from the best (and most bittersweet) day of his life crash into each other. But for now, he’s thinking of Smith making his big-league debut.
“Wow,” he says, “Good for him.”
Eight years later, and you’re probably still familiar with the Villacis story. In the opening weeks of the 2004 season, with the Royals in a tailspin and manager Tony Peņa still offering up daily doses of bumper-sticker optimism, the Royals needed a spot starter for a Saturday game at Yankee Stadium.
Two pitchers with major-league experience — Jamey Wright and Kris Wilson — were waiting at Class AAA Omaha, and a 20-year-old Zack Greinke was dominating hitters in the minors. But the Royals picked Villacis, a 24-year-old who had never been to major-league spring training — and had spent most of his minor-league career as a middle reliever.
“I don’t know too much about this kid,” Peņa would say.
The thoughts permeated the Royals’ clubhouse. Who was this kid? And why was he starting at Yankee Stadium?
“I felt like a stranger,” Villacis says now.
It was the strangest of baseball stories, a tale that has come to define a certain era of baseball in Kansas City. The no-name kid showing up at Yankee Stadium to face a lineup of future Hall of Famers and All-Stars … and then disappearing back into the cornfields of minor-league baseball, a ghost to hang over the Royals’ organization for the next eight seasons.
This, of course, is where the stories and coincidences diverge. Smith is not another Villacis. He is a mid-level prospect, a 22-year-old with a solid slider and close to 50 starts at the Class AA level or higher. Even after his beating on Wednesday, he will get another chance, starting Tuesday in Cleveland.
For Villacis, it’s a second chance that never came.
The first pitch was a ball to Derek Jeter. If there was one thing Eduardo Villacis had always counted on, it was his ability to throw strikes. Baseball men called him a strike-thrower. He liked that.
So when that first fastball to Jeter moved out of the strike zone, Villacis took a deep breath, trying to calm the nerves.
“C’mon, man,” he told himself. “You cannot walk the first guy of the inning. C’mon, C’mon, throw strikes!”
The next pitch was a fastball. A strike. And Jeter knocked it into center field for a single. It was an ominous start. But for Villacis, it was a relief. He had thrown a strike. That was out of the way. Now he was ready to pitch.
For Villacis, a kid who had once signed with the Rockies for $4,000, the hours leading up to the game had been surreal. He had warmed up near Monument Park. He soaked in the atmosphere. He marveled at the plush clubhouse. This was a fairy-tale — until it wasn’t.
Veteran players openly wondered why Villacis was there. Players quietly asked reporters about the mystery pitcher.
“Nobody called me like, ‘Hey man, congratulations, welcome to the team,’ ” Villacis says. “And it was tough. Because the impression that you get when you move up is like, ‘Nobody gives a (expletive).’ So, you’re there on your own.”
In the first inning, Villacis allowed singles to Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Gary Sheffield. Jason Giambi and Ruben Sierra walked. And the Yankees scored two runs.
In the third inning, Villacis walked two more batters, and Sierra crushed a three-run homer. And that was it.
The Royals fell to 7-15 with the loss. And after the game, Villacis walked into Peņa’s office. “Well, we didn’t expect you to throw a no-no,” he remembers hearing.
The rest of the conversation was a blur. His chance was over. He had walked four guys — “my biggest enemy,” he says — and now he was leaving, back to Wichita, back to the minors, unsure if he’d ever get another chance.
In a few weeks, he would be put on waivers, a move to create room for Greinke on the 40-man roster. He was claimed by the White Sox and posted a 5.84 ERA at three different levels in 2005. By 2006, he was out of minor-league baseball.
It is the spring of 2011, and Saturday morning comes early in Bern, Switzerland. Villacis must be at the field by 8 a.m. He is just 31 years old, but his baseball career is hanging by a thread. To continue playing, he’s chased the game to this lush green park in Switzerland, 12 miles north of the Bernese Alps.
He is a starting pitcher on the Bern Cardinals, the reigning Swiss League champs. But that’s not all. He is also the manager … and a member of the grounds crew … and pretty much everything else. He must arrive at 8 a.m. so he can help wheel a cart of equipment from one side of the park to the place where they play baseball.
“It was a nature park,” Villacis says, “like Central Park in New York.”
The players must help paint the lines, and set up the scoreboard, and drive little stakes into the ground that prop up the plastic netting that makes up the outfield fence.
“It’s like a circus,” Villacis says. “You have to create your own stadium.”
If most Americans saw this scene, Villacis says, it would look closer to a softball picnic than a professional baseball game. The Swiss care about baseball the way Americans care about test cricket. Which is to say, they don’t.
Still, Villacis was looking for a way back. In 2007 and 2008, he was a pitching coach in the Colorado Rockies’ system, working in the Pioneer League. But in 2009, the Rockies didn’t renew his contract, and he was left to move on.
He knew an old Venezuelan friend in Switzerland, and he was tipped off about the job. So here he was, managing a team of Cubans, Dominicans, former American college players and a few locals. He pitched once a week, too.
The Cardinals would repeat as Swiss League champions. And whenever Villacis’ name showed up on the team’s web site, it usually came fixed to the following words: “Former major-league pitcher …”
Villacis returned to Europe this year to pitch for San Inazio Bilbao, a team in a Spanish League. But the experience wasn’t great, Villacis says, so he returned home to Caracas. He’s still looking for a way back in.
“I think I still have something to give baseball,” he says.
Eduardo Villacis has been on the phone for nearly 30 minutes. It’s evening in Caracas, and Villacis has big plans. He has a fianceé in Houston, a lifelong friend from Venezuela, and he hopes to get married this year.
If all goes as planned, he’ll be with her in the United States later this summer, and then he’ll search for another job in baseball. This is his dream now.
“I think I belong to the baseball family,” he says.
He hopes that some organization takes a chance on him as a low-level coach or scout. He mentions the Royals. He’s still thankful for the opportunity, he says.
That Saturday in New York was one of the defining moments of his life. But for so many others, the day is the perfect representation of all that went wrong for the Royals during the last two decades. A baffling move. A bad team. Pena guaranteeing that his team would win the AL Central — only to lose 100 games.
Now, more than eight years have passed, and the Royals are mostly beyond the dark days of the last decade. But with the franchise dealing with a difficult start to the season, it’s sometimes hard to escape the ghosts of the past.
You ask Villacis about this. Does he mind that people remember him this way?
“Reality is reality,” he says. “If that has to be the way to be remembered, I don’t know if it would be the correct one, but I try to be remembered as a good player.”
He pauses for a second.
“Hey,” he says. “I made my mark.”
Villacis remembers a conversation with Frank White back in 2004, after the Royals had put him on waivers.
“I wouldn’t like to let a player like you go,” White told him.
Villacis, now 32, still hangs on to those words. How many people have heard that from Frank White? He still remembers pitching alongside Greinke at Class A Wilmington. Greinke was the future Cy Young winner, a first-round pick with otherworldly talent. And Villacis was just a guy, a durable right-hander with a solid frame. And yet, Villacis beat Greinke to the big leagues.
“I got a chance to be there before him,” Villacis says.
This is baseball. Chances come and go. Pitches are made. Batters swing. And life moves on. A young player comes in. And an older one gets shipped out.
Villacis always felt like he deserved one more chance. But eight years later, the hope is faded, the game moves on, and his career statistics are frozen in time:
One game, 31/3 innings, five runs, six hits, four walks. Career ERA: 13.50.
“It’s just one of those things,” Villacis says, “where you have a chance to do it once in your life.”
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