Al Levine played nine years of big-league ball without ever coming up to bat.
Then, in one day, he did it twice.
What is it they say about life being like a box of chocolates?
Last week’s latest improbability was just part of an increasingly improbable year for the San Francisco Giants’ right-handed relief pitcher. He tossed like an ace in spring training, allowing nary a run for the entire preseason, yet fell victim to a numbers game and ended up being released.
Shortly thereafter, he was re-signed by San Francisco to a minor-league contract. And shortly thereafter once more, he was shocked to receive a phone call summoning him to the big club, where he’s the first Jew to wear the orange and black since migraine-inducing reliever Jose Bautista was shelled for the last time as a Giant in 1996.
Has the team told him what role he’ll play? Of course not. That’d ruin the surprise.
“Wherever they want me to throw, I’ll throw. You go day to day, whatever happens, happens,” said Levine, hunched over in front of his locker and sounding not unlike Nuke LaLoosh after being coached on how to tame the media in “Bull Durham.”
Levine (rhymes with “fine”) is a wiry 6-foot-3 and 190 pounds with an Art Garfunkel-like explosion of wavy brown hair, bright eyes and an unlined face that belies the fact he’ll turn 37 this month.
And, when you look at it, the notion of having a locker full of No. 33 jerseys and logging time on a major league club is the most improbable event of them all. When asked how early in his youth it became apparent that he was a gifted athlete, his response is faster than a Nolan Ryan heater: “Never.”
“I was never one of the guys who stood out. There were always guys who threw a lot harder. I didn’t pitch much in high school. I sat on the bench,” said Levine, who grew up in Park Ridge, Ill., just outside of Chicago.
Park Ridge wasn’t a heavily Jewish town, and Levine was the only kid who had to explain to his coach that he missed practice because he’d been in Hebrew school. He had his bar mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue.
Levine doesn’t think he’d have progressed much further than a high school reserve if it weren’t for his father, Alvin. He isn’t sure if his father thought his son had the tools to be a major-leaguer, but he is sure Alvin, a construction worker, wanted to be positive and encouraging. Whatever the case, Levine was motivated to walk onto the team at Southern Illinois University. And he made it.
And then, something funny happened. Levine matured physically. His sinker began to sink. He started getting batters out. People noticed. And he was drafted by his hometown Chicago White Sox. He broke into the big leagues at age 28. And despite fulfilling a dream and earning $157,000 in his rookie year, it was less fun than he thought it’d be.
“It was my first time in the big leagues and everyone came out of the woodwork. Everyone wanted something,” he recalled.
“My mother read everything in the papers. And she worried. She was the typical Jewish mother.”
Worst of all, Alvin died that year.
In late 1997, the Sox traded Levine to the Texas Rangers. Since then, he’s logged time on five more major league squads.
But you know what? He isn’t complaining. Because no matter what, it beats Fresno.
Fresno, you see, is where the Giants have their AAA-level minor-league team, where he’d been toiling until his April call-up. Unfortunately, that’s where his pregnant wife and 5-year-old son still are.
In fact, he was supposed to be with his wife on her next trip to the obstetrician.
“She’s very understanding. This is better than being in Fresno,” he said with a laugh, glancing around the Giants clubhouse as a television crew waited to interview him about those first two at-bats (he popped a bunt to the pitcher and advanced a runner to third with a groundout to the right side).
In the off-season, the Levines live in Scottsdale, Ariz. — the city boasting perhaps the highest density of major league ballplayers in the nation — where he plans to interrupt his own children’s baseball careers with Hebrew school classes.
“We live in a pretty much Jewish area,” he notes, “So it’s pretty easy.”