A Major League Baseball clubhouse is not the place to find a new best friend.
It’s about as rare as a triple play and usually twice as dirty.
There are too few roster spots, too few long contracts and too much competition. It’s cut or be cut. Dog-eat-dog.
Baseball is binary. You’re up or you’re down, both figuratively and literally. You want to win. You want to play. You want to get paid. You want to stay.
You’ll have your buddies. You’ll have your pals. You’ll meet your fair share of drinking partners.
But a best friend? A groomsman? Someone for whom you’d jump in front of a moving car, even if he was batting below the Mendoza line? Those are rare. Those are special.
A little like Johnny Field and Robert Refsnyder.
You can’t make up a setting like this: A mid-June afternoon and the sky is so blue over Yankee Stadium it looks like a still lake somewhere in the mountains of Vermont. It is a couple hours before the game, so tensions are low.
Refsnyder, the former Arizona Wildcats star, the hero of the 2012 College World Series run, a former Yankee himself, stands behind the batting cage and chats with current Yankee fortress Aaron Judge. Refsnyder is no shrimp — 6 feet, 200 pounds, strong — but he looks like a child standing next to Judge. All 6 feet 7 inches and 282 pounds of him.
Then Field walks by, Refsnyder’s once-Wildcat and now-Tampa Bay Rays teammate, 5-foot-10 in cleats, 195 pounds after a workout, and it looks like those Russian Matryoshka dolls. One of them can stack inside the next.
That’s always been the knock on Field. Too small. Plucky, feisty, gamer, but too small.
He’s made a career out of proving them wrong.
He didn’t get drafted out of Bishop Gorman High School, despite hitting .504 for one of the best programs in the country, despite finishing his career with 209 hits, third most in Nevada state history. So he went to Arizona, and, oh, nothing, just was a Louisville Slugger freshman All-American and led the Pac-12 in batting as a sophomore, when he helped lead the Wildcats to the 2012 national championship.
The Rays drafted Field in the fifth round in 2013 — a year after Refsnyder went in the fifth round to the Yankees — and his path to the majors was anything but paved in gold. He worked his way up, from the Hudson Valley Renegades of the New York-Penn League in low-A in 2013 to the Bowling Green Hot Rods and Charlotte Stone Crabs of Single-A in 2014, then onto the Double-A Montgomery Biscuits, where he batted .255 in 116 games in 2015 and .272 in 45 games a year later. Halfway through 2016, he bumped up to Triple-A Durham and he spent all of last season with the Bulls, batting .261 with 12 home runs and 57 RBIs.
He entered spring training this year with a snarl on his face and a glint in his eye. This would be the year. And up until March 27, the dream only got bigger. Objects may appear closer than they really are and all.
Mentally, Field was on the cusp of achieving his lifelong wish.
Then the Rays traded for a new fourth outfielder, rendering Field to the minors. He was optioned back to the Bulls.
The guy who took his spot? That low-down, no-good, dirty, rotten … wait.
Meet Robert Refsnyder.
A quick aside: How did Johnny Field meet Robert Refsnyder?
They met when Refsnyder was a freshman at Arizona and Field was a senior at Las Vegas powerhouse Bishop Gorman High. Refsnyder’s fellow freshman, outfielder Joey Rickard, was a high school teammate of Field’s. During a trip of Field’s to Tucson, they bonded, and when Field joined the team the next year, they became fast friends. That season, 2011, would end in disappointment for the Wildcats, a loss to Texas A&M in the NCAA Tournament regional finals, but a year later, they’d make a playoff surge and become national champions. That bond lasts forever.
“I liked Johnny from the start,” Refsnyder said. “He’s very similar to me. We went through a lot of different stages at the same time. His dating life was similar to mine — he had a high school girlfriend, and I did, too, and we both broke up at the same time ...”
OK, so they played the field … and then they went to the ballpark.
“There are some childish memories,” Refsnyder said with a wry smile. “Hey, I heard Dirtbags isn’t doing that well anymore? That’s weird.”
Years later, on Dec. 12, 2015, Field would watch one of his best friends walk down the aisle, standing by Refsnyder’s side as a groomsman as he married former Arizona swimmer Monica Drake.
“That was really cool for me,” Field said. “That was my first time being a groomsman. The offseason before I’d had a couple chances, but I’d been in Australia for winter ball. So it was just so cool, not only the wedding, but getting to spend time with him at his bachelor party, meeting some of his other buddies. Seeing him on cloud nine. You could tell he wanted to marry this girl for a while. I remember when she was walking down the aisle, peeking at Rob’s face, and I’ve never seen him so happy.”
A little over two years later, Refsnyder stole his job.
The last day of spring training, March 27, both got the news.
Refsnyder thought he was going to be the fourth outfielder for the American League Central division-favorite Cleveland Indians. The team claimed him in November of last year, plucked from the Toronto Blue Jays, who had traded for him just a few months prior.
Refsnyder got his news first.
He was being traded to the Rays, in exchange for cash considerations, ostensibly taking Field’s roster spot.
Later that day, Field got called in to the manager’s clubhouse, and was let down gently.
“That night it hit me hard,” he admits. “I sulked on it. You know how close you are, and you never know when the next chance will be. But I knew I had to go to minor-league camp for two games anyway, and by the time I got there, I told myself I wasn’t going to be the guy there who was salty, who had bad body language. It took me about a day.”
It’s one thing to have a positive attitude, Field said. It’s another thing to stay ready.
Put it this way: In his last week with Durham, he batted .365.
“As difficult and trying as that circumstance was, Johnny was genuinely happy for his buddy,” Rays manager Kevin Cash said. “But he wanted an opportunity, and he knew the only way he was going to get it was to go down to Durham and do what he’s been doing the last few years. Sure enough, he comes up here and he’s been as consistent as anybody.”
Cash said they knew Field would be able to handle the setback, “since Day 1. We saw the way he handled the bus trips. We saw him waiting to play in the seventh or eighth or ninth inning and perform. But he realized, and it quickly popped up that with the way he performed in spring training, that he was going to help this club at some point.”
That point was on April 13. He got the call.
But not before he was caught off guard.
“Baseball is just weird, man,” Field said. “I’ve heard a lot of buddies say you get called up when you least expect it. I was off to a great start in Durham, and mid-game the day before, I got pinch-hit for against a lefty. I was 1-for-2 with a double, and I’m thinking maybe. … But I didn’t get called up that night. My friends were asking, ‘Why’d you come out?’ I dunno.
“Later that night, I saw the Rays had acquired an outfielder and put him on the 40-man roster,” he continued. “In my mind, I’m thinking, I might be over in this organization. I was thinking about texting my agent that I was done. I’m not sure what they were doing with this. I don’t think I’m ever going to get called up. But instead of texting, I went to the field, I was in the lineup, playing center field, it was weird. It’s 6 o’clock, like an hour before the game, the manager calls me in, ‘I gotta talk to you.’ He tells me right then and there, ‘you’re going to the Trop and playing tomorrow.’”
Field was shocked. The other Bulls coaches all clapped, and there were high-fives and hugs and handshakes, but Field didn’t quite believe it.
“I didn’t see where they needed me at the time,” he said. “It was a whirlwind. I was thinking is this a short-term thing? All those things go through your head. I had to take a step back to realize the magnitude of it.”
Field called both of his parents, Maureen and John — coincidentally a player himself for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in his day — and he shared the news. Mom was at work, and she started bawling. Dad flew into Florida.
“It’s not just me who got called up,” Field said. “It feels like my parent got called up, too. The amount of time, effort, money — they’ve been with me every step of the way. That was the most gratifying thing to me.”
The Rays hadn’t yet announced the roster move, so Field wasn’t really supposed to tell anyone about the news.
But he got a text.
“Rob already found out, and he was the first guy to text me,” Field said, ‘Congrats, hurry up and get here so I can see you.”
Their friendship is well-known in the Rays’ clubhouse. Cash said, “I tell one guy who’s playing and I expect the other guy to tell the other guy he’s not. In the clubhouse, they’re sitting side-by-side eating tougher, there’s a lot of conversation going on. That’s pretty special. As exciting as playing in Major League Baseball is, to get to do it with one of your buddies is pretty special.”
“Everybody in the clubhouse knows it, understands it, and I think it’s really cool,” said Rocco Baldelli, the Rays major league field coordinator and a former Rays player himself. “You don’t run into this often. They had a ton of memories together before they showed up here, but being able to spend this time in the big leagues together? I can’t imagine being with my best friend playing in the big leagues.
“I’ve never seen it before.”
Who knows if we’ll see it again? They shared a clubhouse again for exactly two months and six days.
This time, the cleat is on the other foot.
Refsnyder has learned the cruel realities of the business in the harshest ways, and once more, his name was called on Tuesday. Refsnyder was designated for assignment by the Rays, who activated outfielder Kevin Kiermaier from the disabled list.
This time, Field remains, despite a .224 batting average and .268 on-base percentage. When the Daily Star caught up with the pair at Yankee Stadium, Field had only just recently taken Refsnyder’s role. Now he’ll share left field with Mallex Smith for the foreseeable future.
Refsnyder? He was batting .167 at the time he was DFA’d. His future is uncertain.
It has been uncertain before, though, and he’s prevailed. That left an imprint on his friend.
“Rob’s been around, he’s had big league time, he knows how this industry works,” Field said. “He knows how cutthroat it can be. We’re both in the same role. In the back of our minds, is competitive. It doesn’t change anything about our friendship. This game is about production, but outside of baseball, nothing really changes at all. Same dry humor, same jokes we had from college. Outside of baseball, we’re the same two guys.”
