The first time Jeff Banister stepped into a big-league clubhouse, it was 9 o’clock.
In the morning.
That night’s game wouldn’t start for another 10 hours, but when you’ve waited your whole life for that moment, there’s no point in putting it off even a second longer.
The first thing Banister saw when he entered the darkened room was a No. 28 Pittsburgh Pirates’ jersey hanging in a locker with his name, in black letters and gold trim, running from shoulder to shoulder. In the lockers on either side hung the jerseys of Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla.
“There was a security light. It was like a beacon on my jersey,” Banister said last month, his voice catching at a memory that is now 34 years old. “It kind of got real at that moment. Like, ‘Hey, I’m in the big leagues.’”
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In the seventh inning of that night’s game, an otherwise uneventful 12-3 win over the Atlanta Braves at Three Rivers Stadium, Banister came to the plate as a pinch-hitter and grounded a 1-1 pitch into the hole at short, beating the throw to first for an infield single. Four days later he was gone, optioned back to the minor leagues. Banister would never appear in a major league game again.
But he’s never forgotten the one he did play in.
“It was a surreal moment to walk out on that field,” he said. “I’d seen it so many times on TV, but just the feeling of all the first moments — the first time in the stadium, the clubhouse — they become a little overwhelming.”
Since the first big-league game in 1876, 20,790 men have played in the majors, according to the Baseball Almanac. More will join that list as spring training gives way to the regular season. Yet it remains a small number; more than twice as many people finished the Chicago Marathon last fall.
And Banister’s name will always be among them.
His name is also among the 1,519 players whose big-league career lasted just one game, according to the Baseball Reference website, a list that runs from Frank Norton, who struck out in his only plate appearance for the Washington Olympians on May 5, 1871, to Giants pitcher Trevor McDonald, who threw three hitless innings on the final day of the 2024 season.
In between, Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston, made an error in two chances at first base and struck out in one at-bat in his only big-league game in 1936. Eighteen years earlier, Brooklyn Robins’ pitcher Harry Heitman faced four batters, giving up four hits and four runs, then fled the stadium before the final pitch to join the Navy.
Larry Yount, brother of Hall of Famer Robin Yount, came out of the bullpen to pitch for the Astros in 1971, but hurt his arm warming up; his career ended before he threw a pitch. Then there’s Archibald Wright “Moonlight” Graham, who twice hit better than .325 in eight minor league seasons but didn’t get an at-bat in the majors, playing two innings in right field for the New York Giants in 1905 without touching the ball. Three years later he gave up for baseball to practice medicine in the small mining town of Chisholm, Minn.
The pathos of Graham’s brief big-league career is romanticized in W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe” and later in the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams.” Graham made it to the majors, but never got to bat. Others, like Banister, got one at-bat, but never played in the field.
Yet there’s a story behind every one of these brief big-league appearances.
For some of those 1,519 one-game wonders, the journey was more frustration than fruition. After expending so much blood, sweat and tears to reach the majors, their reward was a single yellowed newspaper box score with their name in it.
“I’m proud of what I accomplished. And I think that I accomplished something unique,” said catcher Jack Kruger, who played one inning for the Angels in 2021. “But I think I was capable of more.”
For others like Banister, one of 53 players to retire with a 1.000 batting average, there are no regrets.
“Absolutely zero,” he said. “I loved every minute of it.”
“A cup of coffee” is the idiom baseball has created to describe a short stay in the majors. Here are the stories of four men who got to realize the dream of playing in the big leagues, but only stayed long enough to have a cup of Joe.
It’s been 12 years since Brandon Bantz played in his only big-league game. But he hasn’t forgotten how exciting it felt the first time he stepped onto a major league field in a uniform.
“I just remember looking at the third deck being like ‘it’s a lot bigger than I had remembered,’” he said. “That was that first kind of ‘a-ha’ moment. That was the first time I was thinking ‘that’s pretty cool.’”
Bantz was called up from Triple A Tacoma by the Seattle Mariners on June 5, 2013; three days later he would catch eight innings against Andy Pettitte and the New York Yankees, grounding to short and striking out in two at-bats in a 3-1 loss.
Less than a week later he was outrighted back to Tacoma. He would never play in the majors again.
“A lot of times, you get only one chance,” Bantz, 38, says now. “There’s disappointment there, right? Any athlete that goes in has a dream, since you’re a little kid, of playing in the major leagues. Being able to achieve that goal, obviously that’s a big achievement.
“But I think the competitor in me definitely feels like I wasn’t able to really show the ability that I had.”
Yet Bantz overcame long odds just to get those two at-bats. More than four of every five players selected in the Major League Baseball draft never make it to the big leagues.
Bantz, a catcher, wasn’t selected until the 30th round of the 2009 draft; 892 others were taken ahead of him. But he caught a break on the first step of the minor league ladder when John Boles, a special assistant with the Mariners, saw Bantz play for Seattle’s rookie-level team in Pulaski, Va.
“He actually came up to me after the game and said, ‘You’ve got a chance,’” Bantz remembered. “That kind of set the trajectory of changing how people viewed me in the organization."
When an injury opened a spot in Single-A Everett, Wash., a week later, Bantz was promoted. Although Bantz struggled at the plate — he hit just .234 and never had more than four homers in seven minor league seasons — he threw out nearly half the runners who tried to steal on him, so he continued to climb a level each year, reaching Double A in his first full minor league summer and Triple A a season later.
From there it was a short trip — just 33 miles up Interstate 5 — from Triple A Tacoma to Seattle’s Safeco Field and its intimidating third deck.
Bantz’s only big-league game got off to inauspicious start when he went out to center field to warm up pitcher Joe Saunders and threw the ball over his head, plunking a fan in the leg. But when the game started, the butterflies went away.
“Once the game gets going, it’s just a regular game. It’s the same thing you’ve been doing your whole life,” Bantz said. “If you’re just kind of like, ‘Oh, man this is crazy! That’s Andy Pettitte,’ you’re not in a position to compete.”
Five days later, Bantz was sent back down the freeway to Tacoma and over the next 2 ½ seasons he would be signed and released by the Washington Nationals and Miami Marlins, with a 49-game stint in the independent Atlantic League sandwiched in between.
His baseball career was over before his 29th birthday.
“A lot of people around the game are two things,” said Bantz, the founder and CEO of Catchers Central, which develops baseball and softball players. “They’re either bitter or they can’t close the yearbook. My career was what it was. Sure, every one of us wants to reach the big leagues, play for 20 years, go to the Hall of Fame, win the World Series. However, that’s not going to be the case for everybody.
“The reality is, it’s a game and the journey across that game is what should be celebrated. How my playing journey concluded, that’s what it was supposed to be.”
Jeff Banister’s baseball career nearly ended before it had really started. When he was 15, an examination of a painfully swollen ankle ended in a diagnoses of bone cancer. A bacterial infection in the same leg was eating away at the bone marrow. If the leg wasn’t amputated, a doctor told him, he could die.
The night before the operation, Banister hugged his father and said he’d rather die than lose his leg so his doctor tried another approach and after seven surgeries, Banister walked out of the hospital a year later, cancer free.
A couple of years later he was back in the hospital after a baserunner, trying to hurdle Banister on a play at the plate, instead kneed the catcher in the head, breaking three vertebrae.
“I thought I was dead,” he said.
And he would have been had any sudden movement interfered with his breathing. He was temporarily paralyzed, a condition that required three operations and another year of rehab to cure. By the time he left the hospital with the help of a walker, he had lost nearly 100 pounds. So when the Pirates selected him in the 25th round of the 1986 June draft — a round so deep it no longer exists — it was as much a reward for his tenacity as it was for his talent.
That, at least, was the point Pirates scout Buzzy Keller made when he signed Banister for a $1,000 bonus over lunch at a Wendy’s in Baytown, Texas.
“He told me, ‘I’m not going to make you rich. But you’ve earned an opportunity,’” said Banister, who at 61 has the tan, chiseled good looks and plain-spoken manner of a Western movie sheriff. “And so I got to thinking about that and he was right. What I did with the opportunity was make the most out of that.”
He struggled to hit at his first three minor league stops but put together a solid fourth season, hitting .272 in a year split between Double A and Triple A. So four months into the 1991 season, he was called up by the Pirates after backup catcher Don Slaught pulled a muscle in his rib cage.
Banister, then 27, still remembers the date.
“July 23, 1991,” he says without prompting.
The call came so fast, no one in his family could make it to Pittsburgh for his big-league debut. “I didn’t leave a ticket for anybody,” he said.
Manager Jim Leyland, aware the Banister’s family lived in Houston, mapped out a plan to have him start that weekend in the Astrodome, only to see pitcher Bob Walk scramble those plans when he strained a hamstring running the bases. The Pirates sent Banister back down and called up Tom Prince, who went on to spend 17 seasons in the majors. Banister never played a big-league game again.
That winter he blew out his elbow playing winter ball, necessitating more surgery. He would appear in just eight more games in pro ball before becoming a minor league manager, eventually working his way back to the majors as a coach and manager with the Pirates, Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks.
But he’s never forgotten what it means to walk into a big-league clubhouse for the first — and maybe only — time.
“We’re not guaranteed 3,000 at-bats," Banister, beginning his fourth season as the Diamondbacks bench coach, says. "We’re not guaranteed one.”
Jack Kruger’s big-league career was so short if you blinked, you might have missed it. Yet the climb to get there was so challenging, it’s a wonder Kruger made it at all.
On May 6, 2021, Angels manager Joe Maddon sent Kruger on to catch the ninth inning of an otherwise forgettable 8-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, a game that ended with Kruger standing in the on-deck circle. Yet Kruger’s father Tim said he still gets chills thinking about that night.
“It was surreal,” he said. “It was like being in a dream. I’m sitting there with my wife, holding hands and just thinking, ‘My gosh, our son is playing in a major-league game.’”
No players’ path to the majors is easy, but few have had to overcome as many obstacles as Kruger. When he was 5, Kruger was diagnosed with Perthes disease, a rare condition in which the blood supply to the thigh is temporarily disrupted, leading to bone damage and stunting growth.
But there was a silver lining to that black cloud because after spending 18 months on crutches, Kruger was cleared by doctors for just one physical activity: hitting a baseball.
So Tim began pitching to his son and as Jack’s bones healed and he began to grow, that practice began to pay off. As a senior year at Oaks Christian, Kruger hit .343 with seven homers and 37 RBIs. His dream, however, had never been to play in the majors, it was to serve his country. So he enrolled at West Point.
Then came the next setback. On the day he was to put on his cadet uniform for the first time, the school declared him medically ineligible because of his childhood disease. His dream was gone.
“It was devastating,” Tim Kruger said. “He had his life planned.”
So Kruger made new plans, playing one season at Oregon, one at Orange Coast College and one at Mississippi State, where he made the all-conference team and drew the attention of the Angels, who took him in the 20th round of 2016 MLB draft.
Kruger methodically climbed the minor league ladder and was in Salt Lake City for his first season in Triple A when manager Lou Marson called him at the hotel. Angels catcher Max Stassi was going on the injured list with a concussion; Kruger was to get on the next plane to Anaheim.
He was going to The Show — and Albert Pujols, a future Hall of Famer, was one of the players designated for assignment to make room for him on the roster.
The next 30 hours are still a blur, he said. He got to Angel Stadium just an hour before the first pitch, too late for batting practice and with just enough time to pull on a jersey with his name in red block letters and black trim above a dark red number No. 59. For the first eight innings he sat on the bench alongside Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout before Maddon sent him on in the ninth to catch 20 pitches from right-hander Steve Cishek.
When he returned to the ballpark the next day a front-office staffer met him at his locker and told him he had been designated for assignment.
“It came out of nowhere,” Kruger said. “And he didn’t know my name.”
Asked about Kruger four years later Maddon, a catcher who spent four years in the low minors, remembered the ninth inning of that one-sided game. And he remembered why he sent Kruger in for the final inning, making him a major leaguer forever.
“I wanted to get him in that game,” he said. “One more hitter gets on base and he gets to hit. Never happened [but] we did our best to make it a complete experience for him. I know it’s something he’ll never forget and he absolutely deserved it.”
Kruger, 30, went on to play two more seasons with the Texas Rangers’ Triple A affiliate in Round Rock, Texas, hitting .243 in 66 games. But he never entered a big-league clubhouse again. After baseball, Kruger co-founded a company called D1 Scholarship to help athletes in multiple sports negotiate the college recruiting process.
“I did everything I could with the opportunities I was given. So I don’t necessarily have any regrets or think or wish I would have done something differently,” he said. “It was great for what it was. And then I moved on to the next thing.”
For one brief, shining September afternoon, 18-year-old John Paciorek was the best player in major league baseball.
On the final day of the 1963 season, Paciorek, went three for three with two walks, three RBIs, four runs scored and two splendid running catches in right field for Houston’s Colt .45s in a 13-4 win over the New York Mets. In his last at-bat, he got a standing ovation — if the applause from a crowd of 3,899 can be called an ovation.
“It was like a dream,” he said.
It was the only time Paciorek appeared on a big-league field.
The eldest of five brothers who grew up just outside Detroit, playing every sport that involved a ball — and some that didn’t — Paciorek accepted a $45,000 bonus to sign with the Colt .45s, the forerunners of the Astros, in 1962, while he was still in high school.
He was invited to big-league spring training the following year but hit just .219 at Modesto in the Single A California League in his first pro season. He played with verve, hustling to first after walks and sprinting on and off the field every half-inning, but he also injured his back and shoulder and developed a chronically sore throwing arm late in the year.
He was summoned to Houston that September anyway, partly to have his back checked. With the Colt .45s languishing near the bottom of the 10-team National League standings, Houston manager Harry Craft decided to start a lineup of rookies, among them Joe Morgan, Jimmy Wynn and Rusty Staub, on that final Sunday. Paciorek was soon added to that lineup.
“One of the guys asked if I would like to play,” he said. “I jumped at the opportunity. I wasn’t even thinking of my back. So I went to church and communion and everything else and got to the ballpark early.
“I knew I had to be stretched out and ready to go.”
Batting seventh, he drew a walk in the second and scored on John Bateman’s triple; drove in two runs with a single to left in the fourth; drove in another run with a single to left in the sixth; walked and scored in the sixth; then singled again in the seventh.
“The hits I got were kind of like hits on the handle,” he said. “I was physically strong enough to force the ball over the shortstop’s head.”
But it was that strength and what Paciorek did to built it that contributed to the injuries that ended his career.
“I was such a fanatic about exercise and building myself up,” he said. “I was always doing exercises and doing drills. I had no idea about what I was doing."
Whether that contributed to a chronic back condition is hard to say; one doctor called it an abnormality from birth. What’s certain is the pain was to blame for his poor performance in Modesto, especially after he tore muscles in his upper back.
Still, his perfect game on the final day of the 1963 season got him invited back to spring training the following year to compete for the starting job in center field.
Instead, he struggled to do the most basic things.
“I’d be charging a ground ball and bend over, oh my God it’s like a knife going through my back,” he said. A couple of months later, after batting .135 over 49 games at Single A, he underwent surgery to fuse two lumbar vertebrae, then spent 10 months in a back brace.
“If I would have been more intelligently inclined and I would have known something about chiropractic application or practice, I probably would never had had the operation,” he said. “I developed all kinds of injuries because the fusion limited my movement.”
While recovering from the operation, Paciorek enrolled in the University of Houston, eventually earning a degree in physical education he would soon put to good use. After two more seasons in Houston’s minor league system, hitting .172 and striking out in more than a quarter of his at-bats, he was released and signed with Cleveland. He hit a career-best .268 with 20 homers and 73 RBIs in Single A in 1968, but a year later he was released again and retired to become a teacher at the private Clairbourn School in San Gabriel, where he worked for 41 years before he retired again in 2017, months after the school built a batting cage and named it in his honor.
A year after Paciorek quit playing, younger brother Tom made his big-league debut for the Dodgers, beginning an 18-year career that would see him play in an All-Star Game and a World Series. Another brother would play 48 games for the Milwaukee Brewers and two of John’s four sons played minor league baseball. But none of them matched the perfection of Paciorek, who remains the only major league player to retire with a 1.000 batting average in more than two at-bats.
“My record will probably never be broken,” Paciorek said. “I was just so fortunate. I must have been predestined to demonstrate perfection to a certain extent.
“Maybe that’s why I’m carrying this on for 60 years, this whole idea of perfection.”
What, after all, could be more perfect than playing in the big leagues, where the memories of one game can last a lifetime?
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.