The sun was shining down on the Oakland Coliseum last Wednesday as the A’s hosted the Boston Red Sox in a mid-week day-game.  The long-sleeves and jackets worn by those in the shade, as many wearing Boston red as wearing Oakland green and gold, showed that it wasn’t quite as warm as it looked, but no one seemed to mind.

Least of all the A’s outfielder Matt Watson.

With his team trailing 1-0 in the bottom of the second inning, Watson walked up to the batter’s box and let a Clay Buchholz change-up sail past the outside corner for a ball.  No point in swinging at something he couldn’t do much with; why not wait for something he could drive or take a walk to get on base for a teammate to knock him around? 

Ball Four never came.  The next pitch from Buchholz was a 93 MPH fastball on the outer part of the plate and up in the strikezone.  The left-handed Watson pulled it up into the air towards the right-field wall. 

“Does it have enough?”, asked A’s announcer Glen Kuiper.  He quickly answered his own question with an excited “yes!”.

Watson circled the bases with his head down, desperately trying to hold back a smile.  Any home run is worth celebrating, but when it’s the first in your Major League career, it’s all the more precious, hence Kuiper’s cry of “get the baseball, folks”.  But when that first Major League home run comes at age 31, when you’ve toiled in the Minors, overseas in Japan and Korea and then back to an independent league in the States, when you thought that your chance to hit a Big League long ball, just one, had gone, adhering to baseball etiquette and not showing up the pitcher must be the ultimate act of restraint.

“It was nice to finally get one”, said Watson after the game, adding with a smile, “I got the ball … I hit the first one short enough to make it a little easier to get”.  His shot had landed just above the out-of-town scoreboard in right-field, right beside the 362 ft sign, and bounced down onto the warning track.  Most players would dream of their first Major League home run being a towering shot, majestically spiralling into the air and landing in the upper deck or leaving a dent in a car parked outside the stadium, but this was probably how Watson dreamed it when he got the call from the A’s on 5 July.  Who cares how far it goes so long as it goes far enough and I can keep the ball as a souvenir.

That home run capped off an incredible journey for Watson, one that, by chance, I had followed over the years.

The 2004/05 off-season was a tumultuous time for A’s fans.  General Manager Billy Beane traded two-thirds of the Big Three, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, within days of each other and I joined many other A’s fans in logging onto various A’s websites and blogs trying to make sense of what the future would bring for our team (and, by association, us fans). 

One of the blogs I came across was the now-dormant Elephants in Oakland site. It was written by a guy called Zachary D. Manprin who was not afraid to voice his opinion on anything A’s related while slamming the A’s beat writers and taking pot shots at the popular Athletics Nation blog (‘Pathetics Nation’, as he liked to call it) for good measure. 

Over the 04/05 off-season, Elephants in Oakland ran a three-part interview with an outfielder on the A’s Triple-A team, the Sacramento River Cats*.  That outfielder was Matt Watson.  He came across as a likeable, hard-working guy, the sort of person you’d like to see given a chance. 

Elephants in Oakland took up the campaign, rooting for their man and railing at Beane for overlooking him in favour of players seemingly no more deserving.  Watson only played in nineteen games for the A’s during the 2005 season, having played in fifteen games for the Mets in 2003, and he went 9-for-48 in that limited period.  He weighed up his options and decided to head out to Japan over the following offseason to play for Chiba Lotte Marines, “thinking my opportunity (in the majors) was pretty much done”, as he put it recently.

Ever since then, I would occasionally find myself wondering ‘whatever happened to Matt Watson?’.  Google searches showed him coming back to North America on a Minor League deal with the Toronto Blue Jays, heading out to South Korea for a few months and then lasting just a few weeks with the New York Mets’ Triple-A team before being released.  From a nostalgic point of view, I was happy to read of the A’s signing him to a Minor League deal earlier this season and even more pleased for him when he got the call back up to the Majors (in truth that reaction was of the ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ variety, being the latest indictment against the toothless outfield options the A’s have). 

We tend to gravitate towards the stars and the brightest young players.  Major League call-ups for Minor League veterans don’t stir the imagination in the same way as Buster Posey finally being promoted by the San Francisco Giants, Mike Leake making the Reds’ starting rotation out of Spring Training without playing a single game in the Minors or Stephen Strasburg’s stratospheric rise from being the number one overall draft pick in June 2009 to a one-man Major League headline act in less than a year. 

And that’s fair enough: those players deserve the attention because they are immensely talented, whereas Watson might not stick with the A’s for long.  Yet it’s always worth remembering that when assessed on any normal level, a solid Triple-A player who makes an occasional Major League appearance is a very good ballplayer.  Furthermore, anyone can appreciate and respect a person who has chased his dream for so long and finally saw it come true.

I, for one, am glad that I was watching live on Wednesday when that Triple-A outfielder I read about five and a half years ago finally was able to say, and will be able to say forever more, ‘I hit a home run in the Major Leagues’.

* You can still read those Matt Watson interviews if you use the EIO Post Archive menu.