LIFE IN THE BUSHES : For Burtt, It’s Been a 14-Year Career of Fields and Dreams

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. —  “There’s more exciting Pacific Coast League action tomorrow when the Dukes and Stars play at 7 p.m. The Dukes thank you for your support and ask you to please drive home safely-- and you kids get off that dugout right now!”

As “Cub Scout Night” gets predictably out of hand in the Albuquerque Sports Stadium--scores of uniformed children asking, nay, demanding autographs and sweatbands--another mark is etched in Dennis Burtt’s voluminous minor league ledger.

He was the Albuquerque Dukes’ starting pitcher that Tuesday night against the Las Vegas Stars. The Dukes, the Dodgers’ triple-A affiliate, won the game, but Burtt was lifted with one out in the second inning and his team trailing, 6-4.

The Dukes came back for a 16-13 victory, which meant Burtt neither won nor lost in his 336th minor league pitching appearance. If you’re wondering, 336 is not a record, just nearly half a man’s life and practically all of his aspirations.

Burtt has spent 14 summers pitching in such places as Elmira, Winter Haven, Pawtucket and Toledo. He’s in his third summer at Albuquerque, living with his wife, Terri, and his 2-year-old daughter, Nichole, in a pink stucco apartment that borders a cemetery.

His baseball life spans teammates named Kevin Costner--yes, that Kevin Costner--Bruce Hurst and Wade Boggs. There was a brief trip to the major leagues, a 31.50 earned-run average that sent him back to the minors and then last Tuesday night against the Stars when he walked off the mound in the second inning and into the dugout, placing his glove, cap and self down gently on the bench, because that’s his way.

“He tries not to let things get to him,” Terri said. “He’s even tempered and easygoing. He might be stirred up inside, but basically he keeps a lot of things inside.”

He was once told by someone in the Boston Red Sox organization that he didn’t get mad enough to be a big league pitcher.

But, said Brent Strom, the Dukes’ pitching coach: “If Dennis didn’t have the temperament he has, I’m sure he would have developed a drinking problem by now.”

Burtt is 31 and has an 0-3 record this season with a 7.42 ERA. They love him in Albuquerque, though. They think he’s a great influence on the younger kids, the prospects. When it comes to his prospects, however, his age undermines another shot at the major leagues.

“I would say the chances of Dennis pitching with the Dodgers are slim,” said Charlie Blaney, Dodgers’ director of minor league operations. “That’s not to say Dennis doesn’t have a place in baseball.”

And the minors have been his place for 14 years. Perhaps it is his saving grace--and tragic flaw--that Dennis Burtt was given enough talent to chase his dream every summer, but only enough to chase.

The gods sentenced Sisyphus to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to have the rock roll down every time he was ready to push it over the summit.

In more recent mythology, a hero named Crash Davis (a.k.a. Kevin Costner) spent a lifetime in the minor leagues, including one season with the Class-A Durham Bulls. What sustained him in the movie “Bull Durham” was a brief taste of the major leagues, a genuine love of the game and the fear of what life would be like without it.

Summer is here and Dennis Burtt has started yet another push. Seemingly a deep well of optimism, even he gets discouraged and angry. When he does, he throws a ball against a wall. The ball hits the wall, then bounces back.

So does he.

Where Burtt’s love of the game comes from, he doesn’t know. He played a lot of sports as a kid. Baseball was always his favorite, but it wasn’t a passion.

It wasn’t that his father, Howard, was enamored of the game and passed that on to his son. Howard didn’t play the game. The closest he had been, before he started coaching Dennis in Little League, was selling seat cushions during Hollywood Stars’ games.

“I just had fun playing,” Dennis said. “Maybe it’s because I always won.”

Today, he holds the distinction of having won championships in all five minor leagues in which he has played. Is that one a record? Good luck checking it out. Burtt seems both proud--he displays the championship rings in a glass case hung on a wall--and embarrassed.

“How many guys have been around the minors that long?” he says.

He played at Villa Park High School. He was a sophomore whiz kid. In one inning, he played shortstop, catcher and pitcher. Also on that team was a chubby-faced kid with a bad haircut named Kevin Costner who didn’t make much of an impression.

When asked if he played with Costner in high school, Burtt said no, then paused.

“Is that who that guy was,” he said. “I knew a guy named Costner. Was that who he was? Gee, I always thought his name was Keith.”

Burtt graduated in 1975 and spent a year at Rancho Santiago College--then called Santa Ana College--before signing with the Red Sox. He was sent to a rookie team in Elmira, N.Y.

So were 18 other pitchers. Elmira didn’t have a staff, it had a mob.

“And they kept every guy for the whole season,” Burtt said. “But some of those guys only got a couple innings of work all year.”

Burtt got 44 and was 5-0 with a 1.23 ERA. The Elmira team was 50-20 that summer and easily won the New York-Penn League championship. Burtt got his first ring. So did Bruce Hurst and a singles hitter named Wade Boggs.

Duly impressed, the Red Sox assigned Burtt to their Class-A team in Winter Haven, Fla.

“What I remember about Winter Haven is that high school football was huge there and that we didn’t draw very well,” he said. “I think we averaged 50 people a night, unless a grocery store was giving away free food and then they’d pack the place. But come Friday (when the high schools played football) you could forget about it. Nobody showed up.”

He spent three seasons in Winter Haven, helping the team win the Florida State League title in 1979 by going 11-10 with three saves and a 2.37 ERA.

In 1980, he moved up to the double-A team at Bristol, Conn.

“Bristol was beautiful, very green, but it was very hot and humid during the summer,” Burtt said. “One day, when the team was out of town, a storm came through and knocked down part of the right-field wall, tore off the stadium’s aluminum roof and knocked down some light poles. So when we got back, they told us we’d have to play two weeks of games at noon.

“It was so hot. You’d cover yourself in wet towels and you still couldn’t stay cool. We took up a pool to guess how many people would show up to those games. Two and three were very popular guesses. Actually, about 20 showed up. I don’t know why.”

The same could be asked about Burtt. Why? He doesn’t have a stock answer for what seems, by now, a stock question. He only says, “This is what I do.”

He also says there are only two things that will make him quit: injury or the lack of a team willing to sign him. Burtt, a finesse pitcher who is most effective when he’s throwing in the mid-80s, believes he can pitch for another five or six years.

And there is every indication that there will still be clubs willing to pay him.

“Dennis is the ideal triple-A player,” said Pat McKernan, general manager of the Dukes. “He does his job, he’s a great example to the young kids and he does whatever is asked of him. I think for guys like Dennis, there should be a special designation, like 4-A.”

Clubs especially love Burtt because he causes no problems. If they ask him to be their long relief man, he agrees. Short relief, sure. Starting rotation, fine.

“That’s one reason I’ve been around, because I don’t cause any hassles,” Burtt said. “I basically did whatever I was told. But now I think, maybe if I would have complained, or got a little mad, maybe it would have helped me move up. It’s hard to say.”

In 1981, Burtt was 10-8 with a 2.81 ERA and Bristol won the Eastern League championship. For the two years he played in Bristol, he was writing letters and making long-distance phone calls to Terri, whom he met during the off-season in Orange County.

Toward the end of each season in Bristol, Terri would meet Burtt, then drive back home with him after the season. The routine remains much the same after nearly seven years of marriage.

After every season, they get into their van--complete with customized bed--and drive back to California. They have put 120,000 miles on the van, pulling a small trailer that contains most of their possessions and stopping at virtually every national park and monument that presents itself interstate close.

“You mean everyone doesn’t pack everything they own and drive hours and hours and unpack, then do it all over again a couple months later?” Burtt asked.

They never truly unpack. There is no home to unpack in. What with the sudden moves and the uncertainty and the fact that it doesn’t always pay a lot of money to be a baseball player, they haven’t bought a home.

This summer, Burtt will make the most he’s ever made, $35,000. But there was one summer at $14,500, and several at $17,000 and $22,000.

They spend half the off-season with his father, who lives in Moreno Valley, and the other half in Stockton with Terri’s parents.

When they can, they try to earn a few extra dollars. Terri works as a dental assistant. Dennis has worked at art supply and hardware stores. “Dennis is real content, no matter where he is,” Terri said. “To me, I think it might be nice to be able to have some place to call our own.”

But she says the thought of asking him to quit does not cross her mind.

“I’ve told him that baseball has got to be his decision,” Terri said. “He has to be finished with it, otherwise he’ll never be happy. My dream is to have our own house. I know we’ll get that down the line. To do something like tell him to give up his dream, something that can come back and haunt us, just isn’t worth it.”

Terri has been with Dennis every season since 1982, the year, Dennis was promoted to the Red Sox triple-A club at Pawtucket, R.I. While he was gone on the first trip of the season, Terri decided to go to the local shopping mall. She got lost, panicked, finally found her way home “and didn’t go out of the apartment for the rest of the summer.”

Since then, she has made solo trips in the van from Florida to Toledo and from Florida to Minnesota--when Dennis was called up by the Twins.

“For wives, there are a lot of lonely times in baseball,” Terri said. “But I like the life style. And I think, best of all, this kind of life has showed me that I can do things on my own. I can drive into a strange town like Toledo by myself and find us a place to stay for that summer.”

But next winter, Terri would like to stay in Stockton. She’s expecting the couple’s second child in early September. They have been offered the use of her parents’ house.

But Dennis wants to play winter league ball in the Dominican Republic. Terri has been along on all the winter ball trips--her first was to Venezuela--but now she wants to have a home, if only for a few months.

“It would be our own place,” Terri said. “Right now, for this one winter, that really appeals to me.”

The inevitable question was asked: What if you have a boy and eventually he wants to play pro baseball? What would you tell him?

“We’d have a talk with him and let him know what he’s getting into. But I think baseball is a good experience for most guys,” she said.

And what if Nichole wanted to marry a minor league player?

Terri laughed.

“I think I would have a very different conversation with her.”

After leaving the Red Sox organization after the 1984 season, Burtt was picked up by Minnesota and played with their triple-A affiliate in Toledo, where he was 14-8 and was called up to the big league club near the end of the 1985 season.

He was 2-2 in that time and made the team the next spring. “I can’t describe to you how that felt,” Burtt said. “It was just outstanding.”

But the rest of his major league career hasn’t been. He gave up seven runs in the two innings he pitched in the ’86 season. He was sent down and has never made it back.

But in that short time, he can tell you everything, and in great detail, as if he has a movie playing over and over in his head.

He can tell you about Twin pitcher Mike Smithson handing him the baseball from Burtt’s first victory. He can tell you about the coach who pulled him aside after a bad outing and told him, “Ray (Miller, then the Twins’ manager) has no confidence in you.”

He can tell you not only that a guy singled off him, but that the ball bounced off the shortstop’s glove. Or that another player hit a lousy blooper that landed just out of the reach of the third baseman.

“I’m not one of these guys who remembers every pitch he ever threw,” Burtt said, “But I think you remember the best and worst times. That was the major leagues for me. Being there was the best time I’ve ever had. Having to leave was the worst. One thing I think about once in a while is how a lot of players get called up and sent down, then called up and sent down again. They get a lot of opportunities. But all I got was that one shot. But I guess I got one more than a lot of people.”

And if he never gets another shot? “I can be happy with the career I’ve had,” he said.

He has won 116 games, lost 87. He thinks that after his career is over, he’d like to be, surprise, a pitching coach, ideally with a Class-A team.

Wasn’t Crash Davis loitering around with a Class-A club when we last left him? And what about Crash Davis? When Burtt saw “Bull Durham,” did he wince?

“I must admit, he reminded me of someone I know very well.”