TULSA, Okla. — Standing by the squat rack at the gym this February, Cam Booser’s phone dinged. It signaled a message he had spent more than a year awaiting, although anyone but Booser might have found its tone confusing. “Congratulations,” the email read. “You’ve been released.”
It was from the Twins, the organization with which he’d spent his entire career, and the seemingly bad news it conveyed might have sounded oddly celebratory. After all, for many players like Booser — late 20s, never played above A-ball — being released can be a career death sentence. But Booser saw the email and smiled. His career had already ended long ago. This email was the beginning of his comeback.
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Four years earlier, after the 2017 season, he’d walked away from the game. Baseball had tormented him. His 6-foot-3, 225-pound body was mangled from a series of surgeries and injuries. His mind was in a dark place. “I didn’t enjoy coming to the park,” he recalls. So, he put in his retirement papers and returned home to pick up a trade.
He joined a Seattle-area carpenters union, working construction around northwest Washington state. Instead of hanging curveballs, he hung ceilings. When that grew tiresome, he started giving baseball lessons. And then one day, just for the heck of it, he stepped back on the mound and tested his left arm.
The 96-mph fastball he fired sent a friend reeling from the room in excitement, and the strength he felt in his arm sent him down the comeback trail. That pitch turned into working with a trainer, which turned into an inning in a semi-pro game, which turned into a video on Twitter, which turned into a contract with the Chicago Dogs of the independent American Association. And then that — per his plan — would turn into a minor-league contract with a big-league club.
But there, the trail hit a dead end. The Twins still owned his rights, he learned, and no other MLB teams could offer him a deal until Minnesota set him free. He’d persistently pestered the Twins to cut him loose, to no avail. He pitched half a season in indy ball, with scouts trained on him but unable to snap him up. But then came that email, and freedom.
So, he hoisted the bar onto his back and began his first squat set as a free agent. By the end of it — really, “by my second or third rep,” he says — he was off the market. The phone rang again, the weight was racked and the call was answered. The Diamondbacks were on the line with a contract offer, which Booser quickly accepted. He’d been away from the game for four years, but he’d been on the open market for mere minutes.
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Standing outside the visiting dugout at Tulsa’s ONEOK Field, where his Sod Poodles prepare to face the Drillers, Booser recounts his saga so rapidly it’s as if he’s trying to breathlessly make up for lost time. “I’m proud of myself for getting back here,” he says. But the 29-year-old is more than just back. He is in Double A, a level he never reached with the Twins. He is closer to the majors than he ever was before, and his 100-mph fastball gives him as realistic a shot as anyone to complete the journey.
That journey could have ended many times before. It could have ended in college, when he had Tommy John surgery, or after it, when he went undrafted. There were two times, once in high school and once in the pros, that he broke his back. And, of course, the time he retired, dumping the game before it visited one more cruelty upon him. But standing on a professional baseball field once more, still high off a Double-A debut that didn’t go well but was nonetheless exhilarating, Booser thinks of things quite differently than he used to.
Baseball is not cruel, he has learned. It’s a gift.
“Life has got to punch you square in the mouth sometimes for you to understand how lucky you have it,” he says. “And I was fortunate enough to just get a haymaker square to the jaw.”
Players have walked away from the game after suffering less.
Booser’s injury history is exhaustive. His sophomore year of high school, he broke his femur playing football and had knee surgery. His senior year, he fractured a vertebra during an overzealous session in the weight room. He had Tommy John surgery his freshman year of college and then, after that procedure didn’t go as smoothly as it should have, an elbow scope his second year in pro ball. His third year, he tore his labrum, requiring another surgery. It’s like he was hit by a car.
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And then there was the time he was, well, hit by a car. That was in December of 2015, as he was rehabbing at the Twins’ spring training facility following shoulder surgery. He was on his bicycle when a motorist ran a stop sign and plowed through him. “I rolled on his hood, broke his windshield, slid off, slid into traffic,” Booser says. He wound up with a broken sacrum, a bone near the base of his spine.
But more fractured than any bone was his psyche. “I was already going through some stuff mentally,” he says, and the injuries hardly made things easier. In 2015, he was suspended for 50 games after testing positive for marijuana, the usage of which he chalks up to his own immaturity. “I was throwing a pity party,” he says. “I was young and very naïve.” (In 2019, it’s worth noting, MLB removed natural cannabis from its banned substance list.) Booser had enjoyed some good results in between injuries, but he focused more on where he wasn’t rather than where he was. When other pitchers were promoted, he was resentful. “I was always worried about, ‘Why am I here? Why am I not there?’” he says. In November 2017, after pitching only three games all season, he retired.
“I needed a break,” he says. “I needed, for my own mental side, to get away and figure out who I was off the field.”
His father worked in construction, so Booser would, too. He joined a company that installs acoustical ceilings — office tile and the like. He did that for two and a half years, making good money and good friends. But he missed the game, he slowly realized. “I always talked about baseball,” he says. “It’s all I wanted to be doing.” So, he did the next best thing, joining a friend as a coach at a training facility in Puyallup, Wash. And then, he says, he “got the itch a little bit.”
It was late 2020, nearly three years since he pitched. Alone in the facility, he stepped on the mound, unleashed a fastball and was surprised that he felt no pain. For a month, he continued throwing, more out of curiosity than a desire to restart his career. One day, a friend suggested that he throw in front of one of the facility’s Rapsodo machines. Booser resisted — that would make it all real, something he’d have to confront — but the friend insisted. Booser relented.
“I got on there and threw a couple warmup pitches and it was 96-98,” the left-hander says. “He just walked out of the room.”
Booser was 28 at the time. If he was going to attempt a comeback, his friend lectured, it had to be now. Through that friend, Booser connected with trainer Kyle Rogers, a former instructor at Driveline Baseball. Rogers has trained plenty of dreamers — guys trying to get back into affiliated ball, and guys trying to get there for the first time — but Booser, he says, “was my easiest project ever.” Booser was quiet and reserved, but “his arm was electric.” They worked together for four months, and then it was time for Booser to step back into the baseball world. Rogers arranged for the left-hander to pitch an inning for the semi-pro Seattle Studs.
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Booser had been sitting in the mid-90s in training but hit 97 mph on his first warmup throw. He retired the side in order — two strikeouts and a groundout — and hit 99 mph. Rogers was behind home plate with a radar gun and a camera. The trainer posted the video to Twitter, concluding a tweet with a message: “He’s ready. DM for contact info.”
Free Agent LHP Cam Booser outing with the Seattle Studs.
FB: 96-99
CT: 92-93
SL: 83-86Has been medically retired for the last 4 years. Most recently with the Twins.
He’s ready. DM for contact info. @FlatgroundApp pic.twitter.com/SRYntFU5Qz
— Kyle Rogers (@KyleRogers18) June 13, 2021
The video got more than 7,000 views. At least one of them came from the Diamondbacks front office.
Just how Booser got from that semi-pro inning to the Chicago Dogs, and thus to the Diamondbacks, isn’t quite clear.
It’s possible that the Diamondbacks themselves played a small role. Analyst Carl Gonzalez saw the video and flagged pro scout Chris Carminucci, who knows the independent leagues better than anyone in the game. Carminucci sent an email to his wide Rolodex of indy ball contacts, suggesting Booser as a possible addition. If Booser hooked on with a team, the Diamondbacks would be better able to gauge his talent.
It’s just as possible that Booser landed on the Chicago Dogs’ radar some other way. The Dogs’ hitting coach, Joe Dominiak, had coached Booser in a collegiate summer league. However it happened, the Dogs snapped up the left-hander and quickly made him their setup man. In 21 appearances, Booser posted a 1.93 ERA and struck out nearly 40 percent of his batters. After just a couple outings, scouts were asking Dogs manager Butch Hobson to pitch him in specific spots so they could get a look. But they couldn’t sign him, they learned. The second he stepped back onto the scene, Booser’s rights reverted to the Twins.
That would have been fine, if the Twins had wanted him. But they showed no interest. Neither did they respond to his numerous entreaties to give him his release. He isn’t sure why they kept him in limbo, but he got the impression that he was just a pawn the Twins were using to stonewall other teams. One interested scout told him this wasn’t uncommon. “A team is essentially is going to hold you in purgatory because they don’t have a spot for you but they don’t want anyone else to have you,” Booser says. If indy ball was purgatory, then Booser began to resign himself to a second career in the middle place. At least there, everyone played for the love of the game.
But this February, he took one more shot, cold-calling a member of the Twins front office whom he doesn’t want to name so he doesn’t “throw anybody under the bus.” This person finally got the ball rolling. He was granted his release. The Diamondbacks called. Soon he was at minor-league camp, officially back in affiliated baseball.
He begins his second act wiser, as befits his age, but far rawer than many of the much-younger pitchers he calls teammates. With Booser, Amarillo pitching coach Shane Loux has had to adjust his aim. Booser took to pitching late in high school and threw only 10 1/3 innings in college before blowing out. In his entire minor-league career with the Twins, spanning five seasons, he pitched fewer than 110 innings. Booser, Loux says, “is a blank canvas.”
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And that means going back to basics. Working with Rogers, Booser has caught himself up on the importance of good biomechanics and how to build force with his legs. With Loux, he has tackled even more basic tasks. He works to throw strikes and command his slider. A recent lesson involved pitch sequencing. Loux had stressed that Booser’s cutter to lefties wasn’t a good option because it gives lefties more time to see the ball. The very same night, Booser gave up a single to a lefty on a cutter. “Then he comes in and goes, ‘Don’t even say anything! I know what you’re going to say!’” Loux says. Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. What Booser has been missing is the experience.
To Booser, the stakes can’t help but feel heightened. He wasn’t supposed to get this chance again. Loux remembers the lefty entering the dugout after his first spring outing worried that he’d fumbled his shot. He’d hit 100 mph but he’d been wild. He walked off the mound hyperventilating, Loux says. “I waited five years for this and I didn’t get it done,” Booser told the coach. Loux has since worked with Booser on managing his emotions on the mound.
Now, Booser mostly feels gratitude. He got pasted in his Double-A debut — four hits, one walk, three runs and just two outs — but it was a thrill. He was back on a professional mound. This season will do much to determine how plausible it is he’ll ever step on a major-league one, but Booser doesn’t want to think about that. He’s learned his lesson about jealously prizing the future over the present. “I never used to think of myself as lucky being in pro ball before,” he says, but luck demands something against which to compare it. Was he lucky compared to other pitchers? His medical chart says no. Was he lucky compared to the guys in Washington Interior Exterior Systems Local Union No. 41?
Do they get to play a game for a living?
“My worst day at the field is better than my best day at the job site,” Booser says. “To me, it’s all about perspective. As long as I have a jersey, I’m going to be happy.”
(Top photo courtesy of Amarillo Sod Poodles)