Brundage lands with Gwinnett Braves

By STEVE HUMMER

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Consider the minor league itinerary of Dave “The Human Road Atlas” Brundage.

(Inhale deeply here)

As a player, he has been: A Spartanburg (S.C.) Phillie, a Clearwater (Fla.) Phillie, a Reading (Pa.) Phillie, a Vermont Mariner, a Williamsport (Pa.) Bill, a Calgary (Canada) Cannon.

(Grab another gulp of air)

As a manager he has been: A Riverside (Calif.) Pilot, a Lancaster (Calif.) JetHawk, a Memphis Chick, a San Antonio Mission, a Tacoma Rainer, a Richmond Brave and finally, now, a Gwinnett Brave.

Two thoughts come immediately to mind after such an exhausting review.

Brundage surely has one of North America’s great baseball cap collections.

And, oh, yes, he also must have one of the hemisphere’s most forbearing wives.

“I tip all my caps to her,” he said, with a clever grin.

True, Brundage, 44, has been many things in his nomadic search for baseball happiness. What he hasn’t been much is home.

But, since moving with the Braves Triple-A affiliate from Richmond to Lawrenceville, he has found more than just an upgraded manager’s office and a new cul-de-sac-rich environment. He has found the semblance of a normal life.

For the first time in their 13-year marriage, Brundage and his wife, Dameron, are together during a baseball season. Their three children finally are able to see the summer side of Dad. What a concept: Actually living and working in the same area code — heck, the same time zone — as your family.

Always before, the Brundages moved to the peculiar rhythm of a baseball family — maintaining home base in Oregon while Dave went off to some far-flung field for seven months every year trying to earn his manager’s chops.

But last month Dameron packed up the kids and her show quarterhorse, Fancy, and moved cross-country to Georgia, unwilling to abide the separation another year.

“Everyone else is [adjusting] fine, but the horse is having a hard time,” reported Dameron, an amateur western-style rider.

The manager seems to be adjusting exceptionally well.

“For five months out of the year, you get to be a dad; the other seven months, you’re a dad over the phone,” he said of life before the move. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able, for the first time in my life [during baseball season], to go home and sleep in my own bed and wake up and have my kids jumping on top of me in the morning. It’s a great reminder how precious family is and how much it means to me, how much sacrifice my wife has made.”

‘Distance was too much’

It was just time to shift into a more traditional, Norman Rockwell mode. Brundage had seen other people’s children play baseball a thousand times over. Yet he had seen his eldest son Beau, now 12, play just once. And the 5-year-old twins, Baylor and Barrett, were getting old enough to resent their dad’s absence.

“It was getting too hard, the distance was too much,” said Dameron, who like her husband is from Oregon and has all her family back there.

The making of a ballplayer, as he bounces between levels of the minors, often demands a deferral of family life. The making of a manager is no episode of “Leave it to Beaver” either.

Brundage began serving his apprenticeship in 1995 in a little Single-A ballpark in a tough neighborhood in Riverside, Calif. He’d have to climb each slippery step of the Seattle Mariners organization on the way to their Class AAA outpost in Tacoma. In 2007, the Braves hired Brundage as their Class AAA manager.

Insecurity is a part of the trip, with the baggage weighing more the higher you go, Brundage says. Becoming a major league manager is the goal of every man in his position. And, in the process of trying to make that happen, there always had been a reason not to settle in at any of the minor league way stations.

Until one day when he looked back at the great chunks of life transacted over the telephone. Hadn’t Brundage learned long-distance his wife was carrying twins while he was in El Paso awaiting a Class AA game?

There are only so many seasons you can spend alone in an apartment, plopping down on rented furniture after another night of raising prospects.

And, for only so long, could he live with the irony of being a baseball man who couldn’t go out and enjoy the most basic pleasure of fatherhood — having a game of catch with his son. Even when Brundage was home, cold, rainy winters in the Great Northwest weren’t made for tossing around anything other than a football.

By his third year with the Braves organization, Brundage felt either secure enough or frustrated enough to broker this move to Georgia.

“I know we’re taking, in one sense, a gamble, but it’s worth everything in the world if I’m able to watch my kids grow up and be with my wife. It’s something I’ve never had the opportunity to do,” he said.

The man Dameron met at an Oregon State football tailgate party in 1994 was just finishing a 10-year minor league playing career. He hit the grass ceiling at Class AAA Calgary (a Mariners affiliate), an outfielder-turned-pitcher who built the dubious distinction of establishing a team record in games played with the minor league outfit.

Brundage had been a big-time Beaver in his day, a two-sport star at Oregon State — an All America outfielder, as well as the quarterback and punter on the football team. An all-around tough guy who boxed Golden Gloves in Oregon, he never had failed at anything athletic until stalling in the minors.

“I probably was just an average player in my tools,” he said.

“I was always like a fourth outfielder. Then I got converted to pitcher my last couple of years. A left-handed average pitcher who understood the game.”

Spending time with his son

While he was never going to take that last step to the majors as a player, Brundage was building the perfect managerial platform. Here was a guy who could relate to both the position players and the pitchers, because he had sampled both lives. Here was someone who, for a decade, had lived the ambition of the players he’d be tutoring now.

His ascent was slow and steady – and solo much of the time.

Now, these days during home Gwinnett Braves games, Beau comes early with his father to the ballpark to shag a few flies, take a couple cuts in the cage or just hang around soaking up the earthy culture of a clubhouse. Excuse dad if he hovers a bit, or seems overprotective. Seven years ago, when Beau was visiting in Texas, a foul ball caromed off the back of the dugout wall and caught him in the head just as he had momentarily taken off his batting helmet. Beau suffered a brain trauma that troubled him for nearly a year.

Still, during home games, Beau is like another member of the team. You’ll find the rest of the Brundage clan in the seats, skipping only the steamy afternoon dates. More importantly, they are there when the game is done.

There still is the grind of a long season, still some days when it looks like his players never have heard of a cut-off man or a sacrifice bunt. He’d be the smartest manager in creation if only the parent club wouldn’t keep raiding his rotation — if such movement wasn’t the very reason for his team’s existence.

Even if it is a tough night at the park, “knowing I can get in my car and go home and see my family takes the sting out of it,” Brundage said. “They don’t know if dad was a good manager or a bad manager.

“These last few days have been some of the greatest days — I know you can have both [baseball and family].”