Driving home with his wife from the airport in Los Angeles, less than 24 hours after hoisting the World Series trophy, the name Mitch Longo still resonated in the mind of Dodgers outfielder Alex Call.
The COVID-19 pandemic wiped out an entire minor league baseball season in 2020 and left organizations with fewer spots to fill a year later. Longo was a casualty of the cutdowns. He was released by Cleveland coming out of spring training in 2021.
The last minor league game of his baseball career came just a year later.
That could’ve been Call.
Call – a third-round pick in 2016 by the White Sox – had a disastrous 2019 campaign in which he hit .205 in Double-A Akron. Then came the lost season. He was 26 years old by the spring of 2021.
Cleveland’s decision came down to Call and Longo. The Guardians kept Call.
That was the good news. The bad? The organization’s plan was for Call to play just two games a week, effectively as a fourth outfielder.
Call phoned the farm director. Was he now an organizational filler?
“To tell you the truth, all your dreams are still in front of you,” Call remembers being told. “It’s just right now, we’re going to give at-bats to other guys, but that doesn’t mean it won’t change.”
It did on Day 2 of the season, when Steven Kwan, now a four-year starter for Cleveland, strained his hamstring. Opportunity opened up. Call seized it.
He batted .310 over the first two months of the season. When Kwan returned to action, Cleveland moved Call up to Triple-A, and he never looked back.
Call made his Major League debut with the Guardians in 2022. At least 10 teams claimed him when he was designated for assignment, and the outfielder was awarded to the Nationals.
Three years later, the River Falls native was traded to the Dodgers, the team he won a title with Saturday in Toronto.
“It’s been such a long road,” the 31-year-old Call said by phone Sunday. “Everybody in the locker room has a different path to where they are right now. I wouldn’t say mine is any more special than anybody else’s, but it’s definitely special to me.”
By a thread
Cleveland told Call the organization kept him over Longo because the Guardians believed he had “a higher upside.”
Perhaps.
“It’s probably because I gave myself the most chances,” Call said.
What, exactly, does that mean? Call believes minor league baseball is all about opportunities. Keep your name in the lineup with semi-regularity, and you maintain the chance to prove yourself as a player.
“It only really takes two months of great baseball to move yourself up the map. Then you move up to the next level, you do it again, and then you move up to the next level,” he said. “And it can happen really quick, because that’s just the way the game is. I always knew that.”
It’s one of the reasons he never gave up on himself and his dream. Call, a man strongly rooted in faith, is adamant he never needed baseball to make him happy. But he always believed he was meant to be in the sport.
“If I thought I couldn’t hit the ball, I probably would’ve been done. It wasn’t that I was still playing to hold on,” Call said. “I still believed that I could be a Major League Baseball player, I still believed I could do the little things right, I still believed that I could be a player that people would want on their team. I still believed all that, and I just knew I needed to put it together.”
So, when things were bad, he went to work.
His swing was clearly an issue in 2019. In 2020, Call traveled around the country with a pitching machine he purchased to take swing after swing against high-velocity fastballs up in the zone. He sent videos of his swing to coaches in the pursuit of feedback.
Call writes everything down. He has journals filled with his communications with God, which he leaned heavily upon during his low points in baseball. He has notebooks flush with hitting advice he’s received throughout his career.
He leaves no potential stone for improvement left unturned. Teams notice. It’s why he believes he’s gotten so many of those precious opportunities.
“At the end of your day, your talent is your talent. This is a game that’s based on the numbers, but it’s also people making decisions about people,” Call said. “Yeah, we’re athletes, but there’s so much more into being an athlete. You are a person first. It’s other people that are making these decisions. So, for me, it’s how do I give myself the most chances as possible?”
He laid out a laundry list of objectives.
-Be a great teammate.
-Work hard.
-Show them you care.
-Show them you’re prepared.
“I’ve got to make sure that they know that I’m doing everything that I can to put myself in the best position to put the team in the best position to win,” Call said. “That I’ll do whatever it takes.”
That meant doing every little thing right and paying attention to even the most minute details.
Rochester Red Wings hitting coach Brian Daubach once called Call “one of most prepared players I’ve ever been around.”
“Whether it’s watching virtual reality with the goggles or his cage routine, watching video of the pitchers,” he told the Democrat & Chronicle. “Just a very hard worker.”
Those types of players are more likely to be given one last crack. Sometimes, that’s all it takes. Call was aware those two months with Cleveland’s Double-A club represented his “last chance.”
“I was right at the end of my thread,” he said, “and it turned out to be something pretty special.”
The opportunity was likely only afforded to him because of who he was and how he carried himself.
“If you’re a jerk … your leash is so much shorter than what it is if you give yourself chances – if people understand what you are about, who you are,” he said. “Because you’re going to fail. And when you give yourself a chance to get hot for long enough, or show them that you can get hot, that you might get hot again at some point, so keep giving me another chance to be in the lineup. Don’t leave any stone unturned. Take advantage of all the technology, take advantage of the things that are out there that I’ve done in order to improve myself, know myself as a player and know that the type of player that I can be is still valuable to a franchise.”
Call noted there are tiny decisions people make every day – most of which they likely think zero about or even view as choices. But they form your routine and approach.
“I feel like I’ve come to a place where I’ve become so routine in making the right decision as far as what to do next, how to train, how to eat, how to sleep, how to prepare, how to do this stuff,” he said. “Those are habits that have been formed over the years by engraining early that, ‘Hey, this is what it takes to be a champion.’ And it’s not something that’s just outrageous. It’s not something that’s undoable. It’s literally just by being diligent and doing it every day.”
The Dodgers?!
The Nationals loved Call. He was their veteran example which their upcoming outfielders could follow. He prepared and played the right way,
But Washington was going nowhere fast this season, and at-bats needed to be made available for the prospects who will determine the team’s long-term outlook.
As the trade deadline approached, Call knew he might be on the move. He told his wife, Samantha, he felt there was roughly a 20% chance he’d get traded. She knew it was far higher. That likelihood increased with each passing interaction. The Phillies reached out to gain intel. As did the Yankees. It was all getting very real.
Finally, the call came in from Washington interim general manager Mike DeBartolo.
“It was like, ‘Hey, you’re going to the Dodgers.’ It’s literally like, ‘I’m going to the Dodgers? The Dodgers want me?” Call recalled. “You know, like I’m just trying to keep my spot on the Nats. We’ve got (prospects like) Daylel Lile and Robert Hassle III coming up. I’m just trying to stay on the Nats, and now I’m going to the World Series champs.”
Call’s first thought: “I’m going to the World Series.”
The next thought?
“‘OK, if they traded for me, surely they want me to be on the team. I hope they don’t send me down. I still have options,’” Call said. “You still don’t know for sure.”
A conversation with Dodgers manager Dave Roberts put him at ease. He was indeed in the Major League club’s plans.
“They validate all that you’ve been doing by going, ‘Hey, we want Alex Call on our team. We want a guy who’s going to take great at-bats and do the little things and just continue to extend our lineup and see pitches,’” he said. “It was really validating for me.”
And he validated their decision in the months that followed. Call was on the active roster in all four playoff rounds, getting the nod over the likes of Michael Conforto, a former all-star who made $17 million this season.
It was the right decision, as Call logged a .533 on-base percentage in 15 postseason plate appearances. He was responsible for the Dodgers’ only regulation run of their 2-1 walk-off victory in Game 4 of the National League Divisional series to send the Phillies home, drawing a walk in the seventh inning that Justin Dean got around to score on as a pinch runner.
“Alex, he’s a winner. He’s sort of on the periphery, but the guys love him,” Roberts told reporters after the game. “He’s a baseball player. He’s prepared. Whatever situation I ask of him, he’s ready. … He’s always doing something to help you win baseball games.”
It won’t always go your way. Call had a chance to be the hero in the bottom of the ninth frame in Game 3 of the World Series, when he stepped to the plate in a tie game with a runner at third base and just one out.
He popped out to the shortstop. The Dodgers didn’t score in that frame, and had to wait nine more innings – and approximately three more hours – to secure the victory on a Freddie Freeman home run.
“I’m not perfect,” Call said, “but I was still free in that moment, and I gave myself the best chance to have success in that situation.”
That ability, he said, is derived from his faith.
“There’s a lot of pressure in life, there’s a lot of pressure in baseball. If you have your dream that you hold onto with all your heart, and that’s the only thing that matters, well that’s a really tough place to perform, because that creates a lot of pressure,” Call said. “But when you have faith, and you know that your life is in God’s hands and you know that you have your eternity steel, then you actually have peace, because you know that this is all just bonus. … It’s really a pathway to better performance. Not that you should use that as that, but if you truly arrive at that place and believe it in your heart, I am a firm believer that it allows me to go out there and compete. This is a psychological game. Your brain has got all these things that it’s trying to always hold on and protect you from failure. You have to be able to let go of that in order to perform at your best.”
The Dodgers championship parade was Monday in Los Angeles. Now, it’s onto the offseason. Call admitted he’s looking forward to the chance to decompress.
The last three months post-trade have been a whirlwind he’ll remember for the rest of his life.
“It’s been an amazing ride. It’s super fun. It was really, really fun,” said Call, who is under contract with the Dodgers next season amid their pursuit for a three-peat. “But now it’s time to take a big, deep breath, relax at our house and just soak it all in.”
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