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August 14, 2002
Saratoga, California Since 1955 |
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Photograph by George Sakkestad
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San Jose Giants Noah Lowry (left) and Jamie
Athas, talk before their Aug. 7 home game
against the Lancaster JetHawks.
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Ballplayers find a home away from home
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Kate Carter
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In this day and age of corporate sports and
ballplayers' salaries in the millions, the
love of the game is still alive and well down
the road in San Jose.
There, the San Jose Giants, a minor league
baseball team for the San Francisco Giants,
battles against teams like the Modesto A's,
the Lake Elsinore Storm and the Rancho
Cucamonga Quakes throughout the summer in the
quest for September playoff glory. The
players are also hoping that a good
performance, with the right people watching,
will give them the chance of a lifetime—to
play in the major leagues.
Taking that chance, however, comes quite
literally at a price. The average rookie San
Jose Giant makes about $900 a month. Yup,
that's right. And here in Santa Clara Valley,
home of the impossibly high rents.
But the San Jose Giants aren't the local
baseball club for nothing. The team not only
draws a steady crowd of fans looking for
affordable, family-oriented games played by
enthusiastic, talented and genial (read: not
cocky) young men. It also draws some of those
fans into helping make the team possible—by
welcoming those empty-pocketed players to
live in their homes, for free, during the
season.
Saratogans Armen and Laura Varteressian are
among the 20 families housing the team's 28
players this year. The Varteressians have
been housing players for more than 10 years
and are among the most senior of the
program's veteran player hosts. Every April,
after spring training, they go down to the
ballpark to meet their new guests, who live
with them through the summer and, depending
on the team's success, into September.
After the players leave, their presence is
still felt in the Varteressian home, either
through the ways they touched the family when
they were there, the phone calls, emails and
visits they continue to exchange or by just
sitting down on a warm summer night and
watching one of their boys play in a major
league stadium or on national television. The
Varteressians know that they are among those
who helped some former San Jose Giants get to
wherever it is they end up.
"It's not the glamorous life that people
think it is," says Linda Pereira, sales
director for the San Jose Giants for more
than three decades. "People like the
Varteressians are extremely important to us.
Our host family program is the key to our
success and the key to the players' success.
We can't exist without them."
Host families
Pereira has been running the host family
program for 20 years, since its inception.
The program is not unique in the minor
leagues, but she says that it is "famous"
among the players, who sometimes refer their
buddies to a particular family, or vice
versa. But even though the host families are
a necessity, the program is about more than
just providing room and board, she says.
"We're in an area where people can't afford
to rent an apartment," Pereira says. "And
it's just better for the players to be with a
family. It's a great environment, and the
families, I think, really look forward to
it."
Certainly, the prospect of housing a
potential major leaguer is appealing to many
serious fans. But the reality is, most of the
host families are normal people with an
average level of interest in baseball who are
willing to put up with providing a room, food
and companionship to an athlete who eats a
lot, keeps irregular hours and is dealing
with the vagaries of his chosen profession.
"To be a host family, you have to open up
your home, but you also have to open up your
heart," Pereira says.
The families provide support and constancy in
the unpredictable world of minor league
baseball, where any player could be called up
at a moment's notice. The families are also
available to talk to the players about their
game, as well as other aspects of their
lives.
In exchange, the families receive free
admission and parking at all San Jose Giants
home games and are invited to a number of
special events. They are also welcomed into a
special circle—the other host families and
season ticket holders, with whom they watch
the games. And they get to learn about
baseball from one who plays it for
money—such an experience inevitably changes
the families' understanding and appreciation
of the game.
Pereira says it's sometimes hard to find
enough families to house all the players, and
in some years she's had to put two players in
one bedroom. Another challenge is matching
each player with a family, something that,
after 20 years, she says she has a knack for.
Some former players can recommend players for
particular families, assessments that Pereira
almost always follows. She also tries to
honor the requests from some families for
particular types of players, like a pitcher
if they have children interested in pitching,
or a Spanish-speaking player if they have
children in bilingual schools.
She also attends spring training to get a
sense of the players' personalities, and then
tries to match them with the appropriate
families—a player from a large family might
be paired with a family that has small
children.
The other element that she must consider is
transportation. A player who has his own car
is a gold mine and must be placed in such a
way that he can drive other players to and
from the ballpark, Pereira says.
"Transportation is my biggest woe," she says.
But after that, it's pretty much up to the
families and the players to make the
arrangement work.
"It's not easy to walk into a situation and
live with it for five months," she says. "My
job is to make the players' time in San Jose
the best that it can be. We're after a family
environment for everybody, on and off the
field."
New addition
In the Varteressians' experience, hosting
players hasn't been a problem.
"All of them have been perfect gentlemen,"
Armen says of the players he and Laura have
hosted. "Some were neater than
others ... "
The Varteressians hadn't even heard of the
San Jose Giants in 1989 when they won 15 game
tickets from a raffle for Foothill Elementary
School, where their daughter, Roxanne, was a
student.
Armen and their son, Adam, are big baseball
fans, and so they and the rest of the family
went to the games.
"We went and we enjoyed ourselves immensely,"
Armen says. "It was a nice family atmosphere,
great barbecue, and cheap. And the baseball's
not bad at all."
So the next season the family bought season
tickets. At a game near the end of the
season, they heard an announcement about the
team's need for host families. Armen didn't
think Laura would be interested in the idea,
but it was actually she who got the ball
rolling, as it were.
"Laura said, 'That might not be bad,' " Armen
relates. "We thought it'd be a nice thing to
do."
They went ahead and submitted their name as a
potential host family. The season ended and
the family went on with their lives.
Then, six months later, they received a call
from Pereira, telling them that their player
would be arriving the next week.
Pereira asked them a few questions about the
home and what would be required of the
player. The only chore they requested was
that he play catch with Adam and fetch things
from the tall shelves, Armen says.
They frantically got the spare room ready,
and the following Tuesday showed up at the
ballpark to meet their new guest.
"Linda brought this tall, thin ballplayer to
us, Steve Callaghan," Armen says. "That was
the start of it."
Thus began the Varteressians' introduction to
the life of a professional baseball player.
For Laura, at the time a stay-at-home mom,
having a ballplayer in the house increased
some of her responsibilities, required her to
keep two refrigerators well stocked (one of
them is mostly sodas, Armen says). Her
privacy was suddenly limited, having someone
in the house when she was at home. The
players keep irregular schedules, often
sleeping until noon before heading off to
practice in the afternoon, playing an evening
game and not getting home until midnight or
later.
But having a ballplayer in the house
increased her familiarity with the sport and
she came to enjoy watching it more, when
someone she knew and cared about was playing.
She learned that the family's presence in the
stands also made a difference to the players.
"They actually notice when you're in the
stands," she says, recalling a time when
Callaghan ran out on the field, looked up and
tipped his cap directly at them. "And they
notice when you're not there."
She also discovered that having a relief
pitcher like Callaghan depending on them to
be at the games in which he played required
them to attend every game. She has since
requested starting pitchers, who only play
every fifth game or so.
For Armen, having a ballplayer in the house
afforded him the chance to talk shop with an
actual player and even provide some advice
about a player's game. More often, though, he
would offer suggestions of a business nature
about how to field the ins and outs of deals
and trades, agents and salaries.
"They literally would play for nothing,"
Armen says of the minor leaguers. "They are
chasing a dream. But by now we know it's a
business. I have a much better appreciation
of what it takes to succeed."
For Roxanne and Adam, Callaghan became like a
big brother, and when he left at the end of
the season, "we all cried, including
Callaghan," Armen says. "He became a member
of the family very quickly."
They have since stayed in touch, traveling to
watch him play for the minor league Modesto
A's and later traveling to his wedding and
visiting him and his family in Washington.
Crowded, but fun
The experience of that first year was so
positive that the Varteressians decided to do
it again, and have continued ever since.
Until their children were grown and out of
the house, the family housed at least one
player during the summer. In recent years,
they have housed at least two in the empty
bedrooms, and last year actually housed
three. Chad Zerbe, now a pitcher for the San
Francisco Giants, lived with the
Varteressians when he was a San Jose Giant.
Last year, his first in the majors, he was
concerned about being sent back down at any
moment and so asked the Varteressians if they
would consent to house him and occasionally
his wife as well.
"It was crowded, but fun," Armen says.
This year they have two players—San Jose
Giants shortstop Jamie Athas, 22, and pitcher
Noah Lowry, 21.
"It's been unbelievable this year," Athas
says of his time with the Varteressians. "So
quickly, Noah and I were just one of them.
They go to all the games. They try to take an
active part in our lives without being too
overbearing. They're here for us for whatever
we need. We just all take turns making fun of
one another. It's just like a regular family.
I'm very, very thankful that I got put with
them."
"Last year, I had to live in apartment," says
Noah, who played in Oregon. "I slept in the
kitchen on an inflatable mattress. This is a
complete change. It makes playing baseball so
much easier when you don't have to worry
about anything."
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Photograph by George Sakkestad
San Jose Giants pitcher Noah Lowry helps make
dinner with Giants shortstop Jamie Athas
(left) and Armen Varteressian. The two
players are living with Armen and his wife,
Laura, during their season with the Giants.
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The Varteressians have housed more than a
dozen players in all, nearly all of whom they
remain in touch with.
When the players are with them, "it's very
much like having a child who's gone to
college and come home for the summer, and you
want to have dinner with them and spend time
with them, and they want to be with their
friends," Laura says. The players really only
spend about half out of every month in San
Jose, the rest of the time on the road, and
when they are in San Jose they are usually
working.
That time with the family, though, is
valuable. Armen recalls games of catch in the
backyard between certain players and Adam, as
well as a conversation with one of the
players that convinced Adam to stay with
baseball when he wanted to quit. Adam now
pitches for Mission College and hopes to make
it to the professional level himself one day.
Armen also remembers the advantage of having
a big, intimidating man present when Roxanne
would take off on dates.
They have also experienced living with
players who were called up unexpectedly. Last
year the family of one of their players, Joe
Jester, came to visit him from Arkansas. But
when they met up with him, he had to tell
them he had been called up and was flying out
that very night. So the family had to climb
back on a plane and fly home without getting
to see Jester play.
"When the players get called up, they leave
that day," Laura says. The first time a
player left in a hurry was tough for them,
they say, but now they know it's very likely
they will see that person again.
"It's as though they're kids who've grown up
and moved away," Laura says to describe what
it's like when the players leave. "We get an
extended family that's all over the country.
You have to be willing to accept these young
men as you accept your children. You have to
be willing to open your home to them, to
trust them."
Extended families
They continue to follow the players' lives
and careers, knowing the odds are not good
that a minor leaguer will ever play for the
majors—some say that only about one in 25
ever do. The Varteressians have had pretty
good stats, with four of their players
eventually playing in the majors, three for
more than a season.
One of those is Chris Singleton, the starting
center fielder for the Baltimore Orioles, who
lived with the Varteressians in 1995, during
his second season with the San Jose Giants.
He had lived with a family for part of a
season in Washington two years before, as
well as with another family in San Jose the
year before.
"It's nice to have a family to live with,"
Singleton says. "It was just like being at
home. Our relationship has really developed
to this point. It's gone beyond baseball."
Singleton, who grew up in Hercules, near
Walnut Creek, had no younger siblings and
particularly enjoyed playing with and
providing advice to Roxanne and Adam, who
were in high school and middle school at the
time.
"We had a lot of fun," he says. "Armen was at
quite a few of the games, and Adam was like a
little brother. We played games at the house.
I'm the official backgammon champion—I took
the title from Armen while I was there."
Singleton has stayed in touch with both the
families that housed him when he was with the
San Jose Giants and sees them at least once a
year.
"I've been really blessed to have stayed with
a couple of families I really connected
with," he says. "It provided a good
atmosphere for me to play ball in. I look at
those times and think, 'Man, I had a great
year.' That, in itself, is a great memory.
Whether it was helping me to get to the
majors or not, it was still a great time."
The Varteressians, acknowledging that hosting
ballplayers isn't for everyone, say that the
experience has given more to their lives than
they ever gave to the players. It has given
them a much larger family than they otherwise
would have had—the ballplayers they have
hosted, as well as other fans with whom they
share the love of the game.
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