The Oracle: Roy Silver

If you lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and went to see a minor league baseball game in 1989, there’s a good chance that you would have seen—right there between future major leaguers Jeff Fassero, Bernard Gilkey, Ray Lankford, Craig Wilson, and Geronimo Peña—a stocky 5’9″ outfielder who led the AA Arkansas Travelers with a remarkable .348 batting average.

“A couple of injuries later,” Roy Silver explains, “and I was managing.”

Roy Silver’s name may sound like something plagiarized from a 1950s western, but the truth couldn’t be more different. “New York City,” Silver says with a chuckle. “Dad was from the Dominican, Mom was from Puerto Rico. Dad was a New York City police officer, Mom was a housewife.” Silver’s earliest memories were living in government housing in Manhattan. Then his father took the job with the force, and everything changed.

“We moved out to Long Island when I was six,” Silver recalls. “(I) had a nice, balanced upbringing. Growing up in a Latin home, but our skin color was light. We moved into a white neighborhood, with the last name Silver. We fit in perfect, until they heard us speaking Spanish one day out in the yard. But… it was too late then,” he laughs. “We were in.”

Silver had grandmothers on the Upper East Side, lived in the new affluent neighborhood in Long Island, and went to church across the tracks in Wyandanch, where he would also go to play basketball. Meanwhile, with the last name of Silver, “(I) went to a lot of bar mitzvahs,” the now 55-year-old jokes.

“I share that because it was balanced,” he explains. “That was pretty fortunate, to meet all these different cultures within a few miles of my home.”

You could get tangled in a degrees-of-separation web just by using big-league teammates. Baseball-reference.com has a whole section dedicated to it, called The Oracle. Check this out: Josh Hamilton is separated from Mickey Mantle by just four degrees. Hamilton > Jason Vargas > Julio Franco > Bill Robinson > Mickey Mantle. (Julio Franco comes up a lot in the Oracle.)

Listening to Roy Silver talk is a lot like watching The Oracle come to life. I ask him when he first met Josh Hamilton, and he tells me it wasn’t in 2006, when Silver famously allowed Hamilton to work out at his Florida-based “Winning Inning” facility in exchange for doing what amounted to janitorial work. No, the first connection came seven years prior, when Silver was the manager of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ High-A affiliate, and Hamilton was a first-round draft pick.

The Oracle will tell you that Tom Foley has three degrees of separation from Josh Hamilton, but when the Rays asked Hamilton to come hit for them after just three months of working with Silver, it was Foley—the Rays’ third-base coach who had been their field director during Silver’s time in the organization—who made the call to Silver.

“In my opinion, (Josh) wasn’t ready yet,” Silver now says matter-of-factly, “But that’s when I lost control of that.” Hamilton signed with the Rays, was taken in the Rule Five draft by the Cubs, traded to the Reds, and was swapped to the Rangers for Edinson Volquez before the 2008 season. As Hamilton rose to prominence, so did Silver, who Josh credited in his book with helping tremendously with the recovery process.

By 2016, Silver’s name was again in the headlines, this time thanks to Matt Bush, who had also spent nearly three years away from the game. Bush’s absence included a prison sentence, the result of a drunk driving incident that nearly killed 72-year-old Tony Tufano. By 2015, Bush was in a halfway house, then he was throwing baseballs to Silver in the parking lot of a Golden Corral in Jacksonville, Florida.

That connection came via the Rays, too, right?

Not exactly, says the real-life Oracle. First, there was Toronto.

Silver was conducting chapel services for the Blue Jays in 2009 when Bush—fresh off of the arrest that eventually made the rounds on YouTube—was traded to Toronto. Bush was standoffish at first, then slightly less so by the second week. The two spent a little time speaking, and Roy met Matt’s dad, Danny, who was living with the pitcher. But by the end of March, Danny had gone home to go back to work, and Matt had again been arrested, this time for throwing a baseball at a woman’s head after a party.

“I started knowing more about Roy when I read (Josh) Hamilton’s book,” Bush tells me. He remembered Silver from the chapel meetings, and (perhaps thanks to Hamilton’s success), Bush said he had no problem when the Rays informed him that one of the conditions of signing with them in 2010 was that he spend six weeks at The Winning Inning, doing many of the same tasks that Hamilton had done four years prior.

“He was an excellent caretaker of mounds,” Silver beams. “He was an artist. He was the best one I ever had.”

Bush stayed with Silver for six weeks at a time before Spring Training in 2010 and 2011. In 2012, Silver says, they didn’t meet. Whether it was the lack of meetings or, as Bush claims, just the excitement of knowing that he was likely to finally make the big leagues, the story of that year’s Spring Training—and everything after—is well-documented. Borrowed SUV, strip club, alcohol, Tony Tufano, prison, halfway house, Golden Corral parking lot, Texas Rangers.

It’s easy to tell a story of redemption. Josh Hamilton goes from his grandmother’s spare bedroom to the home run derby, wins an MVP, and goes to the World Series. Matt Bush goes from prison to the Golden Corral to the big leagues.

Likewise, it’s easy to tell a story of failure. Hamilton’s relapses, the long road of chronic pain for Tony Tufano. The countless players that didn’t make it back.

Both scenarios have this in common: closure. It dominates our culture. We live in our boxes, we work in our boxes. We categorize our experiences into boxes, and we tape them up neatly into victories and losses. Nowhere is this more the case than sports, where mottos like “Win Every Day” find themselves on t-shirts in big-league clubhouses.

But between the rejoicing and the mourning lies the harder story to synthesize: the one that more closely mirrors life. The unresolved and the untidy. The minor-league career that never quite blossomed into a cup of coffee. The managerial career that never got past High-A. The seven years between 1999 and 2006. The seven more years between 2009 and 2016. The holding of life with an open palm, finding peace in the never-settled and ever-present awareness that it could all go wrong at any moment.

“It’s taxing,” Silver admits. “When you go to bed at night, and you’re not sure. It’s like when you have kids and they’re old enough to go out without you, and you have curfew. I don’t think any parent sleeps very comfortably until they hear the door open, dreading that phone call.” 

But it is in that ambivalent chaos where Roy Silver has found his calling.

In the intervening years between Hamilton and Bush, the Rangers sent a few players to Silver’s academy in Florida, for everything from alcohol abuse to—in the case of Jorge Alfaro—assistance in learning English.”It’s a unique situation, a unique skill set,” says Rangers Assistant GM Jayce Tingler. “You get to know the person, you get to understand: there aren’t many people that have his skill set, that have his background, everything he has to offer. We’ve been somewhat successful in helping people find their second chance.”

But how?

“We were half-ass Catholics,” Silver jokes. “(Until) I was in eighth grade. My mom became a devout Jehovah’s Witness. So a ‘holy war’ ensued in my house between my mother and father. And my dad, being a hot-blooded Latino who was in charge of his household and his wife, did not take too kindly to this choice.”

As Maria pored over The Watchtower pamphlets, Carlos Silver “became a full-force Catholic,” Roy nods. “He started dragging us to church, and I’m a teenager, so it’s like ‘Screw this, I don’t really need God. I don’t really need you or Mom, just let me go to school, play baseball, and be on my way.”

Mom went to church. Dad went to mass. Roy went to recreational drugs and alcohol. 

I ask him how that changed. He credits a non-believer, a teetotal college teammate named Tony Silva. “I always bothered him, trying to get him to drink and smoke, and he wouldn’t cave,” Silver recalls. “He finally told me one night why he didn’t. It was because his Mom—he was young, and his mom was killed in a car crash by a drunk driver. And that always affected me. I never got a chance to thank Tony, because about five or six years ago, he went through a bad period in his life, and he took his life. So that was tough.”

The oracle twists again. Roy Silver quits drinking and smoking because of a teammate whose mother was killed in a drunk driving accident, then eventually helps rehabilitate a young pitcher who nearly killed someone’s father in a drunk driving accident. Success and failure evade their box and twist again in the untidy in-between.

Silver eventually did rediscover faith, as anyone who has talked to him in the last few decades can attest. (“At the core of my values is Christ,” he tells me as part of the explanation of his process.) But he doesn’t view himself as any kind of a preacher. On the contrary, Silver says when he broaches the subject with players, he always asks first if he can share something out of the Bible that has helped him in the past.

“I’ve never gotten a no,” he shrugs.

“It’s treating it as like, it’s a book,” he explains. “I’m not asking you to accept Him as your savior, but understand that Proverbs is just a book within a book that gives you great advice on money, relationships, marriage, there’s stuff in there about God, but there’s something in there for all of us (…) It’s just like open(ing) up a book on Aristotle or Buddha. Somebody that has a great quote or a great proverb that— it’s accurate, it works. It’s not about salvation at that point.

“You know, inside, I’m praying that it hooks them, in a good way, no doubt about it. But I’m not ‘Hey, we’re going to church Sunday,” he says, following the fake edict with a feigned “RRRRrrrrr” growl that sounds, perhaps, like something he might have heard long ago, maybe from a frustrated authoritarian and a formerly-half-assed Catholic.

“The thing about psychiatry or psychology or one-on-one counseling,” Silver explains, using his hands to accentuate the topic. “You can’t orchestrate when a young person—or any person—is going to open up and let you in. It’s going to happen when it happens, and it very rarely happens in a room on a couch. It can happen when you’re outside raking leaves, painting a fence. That’s when, I feel like, they’re more comfortable. You’re on the ground with them and you’re cutting out a broken sprinkler head. Now you’re down on their level, and you’re sharing about your life, just like they are, and you become kinda like their equal. The guard gets let down, and when they open up, you get out of the way. Whether it’s floodgates, whatever it is that’s coming out, let it out.”

Silver is monologuing now. He has the look in his eye and the tone in his voice that you look for, as a storyteller. It’s Delino DeShields on base running. It’s Eric Nadel on live music. It’s Jeff Banister on leadership. The lean in, the raised eyebrows, the slight increase in speed of words. When you tap into someone’s passion, it’s… well, whatever it is that’s coming out, let it out.

Silver continues. “And then if I don’t have a direct (corollary) situation in my own life, which, rarely do I—I’ve done so many stupid things, and good things in my life to draw from, or I have a friend that did something I can draw from—then I say ‘you know what? we’ll talk about this tomorrow.’ And then I go and I get into where I get my answers from, and (…) I paraphrase.”

He pauses for a moment then emphasizes. “You’re allowed to plagiarize the Bible, which is pretty cool…Jesus ain’t gonna sue you.”

“Same way it’s been,” Matt Bush says when I ask what his relationship is with Silver this year. “We meet on and off the field, he’s always there for me. Same. Same thing.”

“Every day is another day,” Silver says. “You’re never out of the woods, and you keep walking forward, and you try to give ‘em a little bit of freedom, which he’s earned, but at the same time, you’re still, we all have to stay on guard, because evil is evil. And it’s always lurking.”

I ask if he still talks to Josh Hamilton, and he smiles a wry smile that answers before his words do. “Very rarely. When we see each other, it’s good feelings and hugs, but…” Silves pauses. “Yeah, he… I don’t know. It’s not personal, but him following up with some of his relationships, I don’t think, has ever been a strong point.”

I ask if he misses the more hands-on baseball instruction from his time as a manager and at The Winning Inning, which counts 2009 Rookie of the Year Chris Coghlan among its success stories.

“I get involved every now and again with that stuff,” he says, but waves dismissively. “But we need other people that are willing to do other jobs that are behind the scenes.” 

So for now, Silver can be seen meandering the back fields in Surprise, Arizona, always talking to someone. When Joe Palumbo’s dad is walking the premises, watching his son’s continued rehab from Tommy John surgery, it is Silver who catches the good-natured barbs. The two played high school football against each other, and the competition has lasted for nearly forty years now. “I used to look for this guy to hit him” the elder Palumbo jokes. “I don’t even remember you,” Silver fires back.

The Online oracle says that—unless Trevor Plouffe makes the 2018 Rangers team—there are two degrees of separation between the corner infielder and Matt Bush. Plouffe > Logan Morrison > Jhan Mariñez > Bush. But there is more direct, five-foot-nine-inch tall connection, and he is sitting with Plouffe on the back of a golf cart in Surprise.

Plouffe has had no issues with addiction or run-ins with the law that we know of. He’s just a 31-year-old who is trying to make it back to the big leagues after a disappointing 2017 season, and he has suffered a setback, a strain in his intercostal muscle. Today’s topic could be anything, but Silver is talking with his hands again and Plouffe is listening intently.

Another conversation, another strand of connection in the web of the real-life Oracle.