COMMENTARY : Game Can Disappoint Any Old Joe, Even Hopeful New Yankee

He will go to work the week after next, two nights a week as a volleyball referee in a recreational league in Kingston, N.Y. Joe Ausanio will make $100 a night. When the basketball leagues start up for the Parks and Recreation Department in Kingston, he may work some basketball.

He was supposed to be helping pitch the Yankees to the championship of the American League East right now. But he is on strike.

Joe Ausanio will begin working nights next week, but these were not the kinds of September nights he imagined when he finally made it to the big leagues a couple of months ago. And October will not be the way he imagined it at all.

If there had been no strike, Ausanio would have made $18,000 a month for the last half of the regular season. It is the minimum salary for a big-league ballplayer, but nearly twice as much as Ausanio had ever made for a full season in the minors. Instead of a pennant race, he gets volleyball games. His wife, Tammy, works three days a week in the Human Resources office of a water purification company. They have two children and live in a three-bedroom trailer in Kingston, and this week the baseball winter had already begun for them.

“I don’t miss the money, because I never expected to have it in the first place,� Joe Ausanio was saying, baby-sitting his two boys. “Between Tammy’s job and me being able to ref, we should be fine. If everything goes OK, we shouldn’t have to dip into our savings.�

There was a pause and then Ausanio, who kicked around the minors for a long time and finally ended up on the mound at Yankee Stadium wearing Goose Gossage’s No. 54, said, “But I’m not going to lie to you, it’s going to be a long winter around here. I just hope it doesn’t turn into an even longer spring.�

Ausanio was asked what will happen next spring if the owners open up training camps and wait to see how many players will effectively cross a baseball picket line.

“Maybe I’m the kind of guy they think will come in, because I’m low man on the totem pole,� Ausanio said. “But I won’t go. I’m in the big leagues now, strike or no strike. I’m a member of the club.�

If he had worked a whole season for the Columbus Clippers, he would have made $30,000. It works out to $6,000 a month, starting in April. Then the Yankees called him up after the All-Star break and his salary tripled. It was like winning the lottery. When the strike came, the Yankees sent him back to Columbus, so he could keep pitching. But at the end of August, they called him back up; if the season resumed, they wanted him eligible for the postseason. If the Yankees went to the playoffs, Ausanio, who came out of a trailer in Kingston and would not quit, would go with them.

“I had my dream for a little while,� he said. There was a laugh with no fun in it anywhere. Ausanio said, “Now I’ve got to go out and get a job.�

He pitched in 13 games for the Yankees and had a 2-1 record. The earned-run average was 5.17, but the Yankees never worried about that for one minute. There were a couple of times before the season ended when Ausanio left some runners on and the guys who pitched after him let them all score. The Yankees were more interested in 15 strikeouts in 15 innings and a fastball that moved even more than Ausanio wanted it to sometimes. The manager, Buck Showalter, liked him a lot. Everyone around the Yankees did.

Ausanio had come to the Yankees from the Montreal Expos’ organization. The Expos had claimed him from the Pittsburgh Pirates. Ausanio was pitcher of the year in the Pirate organization once. Then he injured ligaments in his pitching arm, and there was one Pirates executive who told him he’d never pitch in the big leagues. But Showalter saw something this spring. So did Yankees general manager Gene Michael. It was not only fastballs that moved. It had to do something with Ausanio’s heart. On July 27, at the age of 28, Joe Ausanio pitched at Yankee Stadium for the first time. They needed three buses to bring everybody down from Kingston.

“Even if the whole thing gets shut down for a long time and there’s some reason why I never get to pitch in the big leagues again,� he said at the time, “at least I had some innings. It was finally my turn.�

Now it has all been taken away from him. He has given some thought to winter ball. He pitched in Venezuela once before and did pretty well there. He says you can make $3,000 a month at least in Venezuela, and sometimes a lot more than that. But he would have to be away from his family. Their oldest son, Joseph III, 3, was born with bacterial meningitis and is deaf. They have him in a special school and the whole family moving to Venezuela for a few months of baseball is out of the question.

Ausanio said, “My wife says I’ve been away enough.�

He was asked what he will do next spring, if there is still no baseball, still no paychecks.

“At that point I’d have to think about doing something else,� he said. “Find something. . . . “ His voice disappeared. He didn’t want to know where the thought ended up.

Ausanio does not want anybody to feel sorry for him. He knows that people who will never make $30,000 in a year have gone out on strike over issues far more important than a baseball salary cap.

He knows how many people are out of work. He believes he has a future now with the Yankees, and that is more than he had at the start of the season. It is just that his season at Yankee Stadium was much too short. Ausanio, you must understand, had decided he was going to the World Series.

“It was never about the money with me,� Ausanio said. “All the years in the minors, it wasn’t about money. I just figure I ended up with $12,000 more this season than I thought I was going to make. That’s a lot of money in this house.�

It wasn’t about the money, it was about making it into the club. It was finally Joe Ausanio’s turn. But, on Sept. 26, first night on the job as a ref, he will be at the Billy Costello Gym, Midtown Neighborhood Center, in Kingston, not in Cleveland to start a three-game series against the Indians.