Outside the Lines - Broken Promises

Harry Caray's Bleacher Bumz Rotisserie League
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2011 Media Guide

New Orleans, Louisiana – Even now, five months later, he still looks down at his computer screen. But not exactly. Instead, it’s as if his eyes are looking past the screen, past the walls of his living room, looking back at that moment in time when he knew that the title – and with it all his hopes of hoisting the trophy and all the glory that would come with it – were brutally swiped away from his grasp.

“It’s not losing the title that bothers me,” Adam says, his voice trailing off, his eyes still on the glowing screen. “It’s not that losing the title is what hurts. It’s …:” His voice trails off, and his eyes shift over to the autographed photo on the end table next to him.

The picture of Andruw.

“Have you talked to him since it happened?” this reporter asks.

Adam doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. His silence is an answer in itself.

Adam and Andruw in the beginning

They had been synonymous with one another since the beginning, from the day Adam and Gracie Caveney walked into the draft room back in 2005. Their relationship began that day as Half Cajun rostered Andruw Jones for $35, but the truth be told, there was no price tag that could be put on what Jones’ presence was worth to the fledgling franchise – or to Adam.

Looking back, it had been the only result that could have happened. Adam hadn’t just followed Jones’ career with the Braves from the beginning, he had literally idolized Andruw. There had been the Andruw Jones autographed bats and jerseys, the Andruw Jones baseball cards and framed photos. There was even the Andruw Jones mask Adam would sometimes wear to bed when he was having trouble “performing”. It was almost as if it wasn’t enough to idolize Andruw – it was as if Adam wanted sometimes to be Andruw.

All-Star Andruw Jones was a valuable contributor for the Half Cajun franchise in their early days.

And why not? Jones was at the top of his game that magical 2005 season. Even as Half Cajun’s fortunes floundered, Jones’s numbers soared, as he blasted 51 home runs – even while the Caveney’s squad barely escaped a plunger while finishing 15th. But Adam never blamed Andruw – not once – for the team’s dismal performance. And Andruw never forgot that. And though the team struggled, it was the friendship between the two that would blossom.

"True friendship is like sound health, the value is seldom appreciated until it is lost."
Charles Caleb Colton (1780 - 1832)

After that first year, the pair were virtually inseparable during each passing season. Jones and Caveney would meet up every spring, shortly after Adam would do anything and everything to bring Andruw back to the Half Cajun roster at each and every draft. The streak of consecutive seasons Jones would begin the year on the Cajun roster would eventually grow to seven, the longest relationship between one player and an HCBB franchise that the league had even known.

Eventually, the lives of the two men would intertwine themselves even more. Adam made certain that everything for Jones was made as comfortable as possible – giving Jones the same locker in the Half Cajun clubhouse every year, making sure Jones had a personal clubhouse assistant to service all of his needs, and finally hiring a personal chef to cook the gargantuan meals that Andruw required in the later years with the franchise – even as the outfielder’s weight ballooned

Caveney and Jones in happier times.

higher, his bat began to slow, and his numbers began to fall.

Not that Andruw didn’t appreciate the loyalty – and not that he didn’t give as good as he got. Jones would always spend an extra week in New Orleans following the end of the season – and following the obligatory elimination from the money race that befell Half Cajun every year – playing catch in the street with Caveney until the sun went down. At Adam’s request, Jones would pretend to be Joe Buck and shout, “Half Cajun is your new HCBB Champion!” while Adam would dance around in his underwear in the living room with a salad bowl hoisted above his head as a stand-in for the championship trophy. Andruw didn’t mind, though, no matter how unusual the request from his fantasy owner was. There was that word again – loyalty – and Andruw believed in it.

And he believed in Half Cajun. And as much as his own success was important to him, he wanted to bring a title home to Adam and the franchise for real. He could visualize the day that hoisting the trophy wouldn’t be with a $4.99 plastic bowl bought at the local Wal-Mart – but with the real thing. It was something that Jones believed would happen, eventually, if for no other reason than he knew how badly he and Adam both wanted it.

Jones bought into the Half Cajun concept 100%. He sang the team song in the locker room before every game. He wore the special Half Cajun underroos that Adam had commissioned for him every night and slept with the Half Cajun teddy bear from the team’s gift shop when he went to bed, dreaming of the day a title would be theirs.

That was so recent, yet it feels like an eternity ago. When this reporter caught up with Jones in November at the all-you-can-eat buffet at a Golden Corral in Orlando, the outfielder was asked about Half Cajun and their late-season collapse.

“I wanted to help him win so badly,” was Jones’ reply. “But …”

“But?”

Jones shook his head. “But he never gave me the chance,” he finished. The former All-Star looked down at his half-eaten plate of jumbo shrimp and barbecued ribs. While there may have been a question about how many time Jones had hit the buffet that day, there was no mistaking the hurt in voice.

The Chase For The Title – And The End Of The Line For Andruw

Fast forward to the summer of 2010, and a scrappy Half Cajun squad was firmly in 1st place as the season unfolded. Caveney looked like he had finally assembled a winner after several frustrating seasons, and the HCBB Championship that he had dreamt about for so many years, that he had thought about while holding that salad bowl over his head, was within his grasp. Nothing, it seemed, could have been better. And yet …

Andruw was struggling, and everyone in the organization knew it. Even Adam, though he didn’t want to talk to the reporters about it. It was as if Caveney thought that, by ignoring the problem, it would go away. But Jones’ problems at the plate didn’t go away – after a hot start to the season in April, Andruw began to fall completely apart. After Andruw hit only .086 in June, Adam was completely despondent – he took Jones out for all-you-can-eat pancakes one night following yet another 0-fer in a failed attempt to lift both their spirits, but nothing seemed to work. It was then that Adam began to hear the whispers in his own organization, and no amount of covering his ears could shut them out.

Andruw had to go.

But how could he do it? That was what others in the organization wondered. Andruw was the

A shadow of his former self, Jones ironically was at his worst when Half Cajun was at its best.

face of the franchise, the heart and soul of the team in the clubhouse, even if he wasn’t the same on the field. And Jones knew he sucked, he knew he wasn’t the same player anymore, but he was willing to take a reduced role on the squad. When Caveney had deactivated him earlier in the year, Jones had said nothing. He was a good soldier, willing to do whatever it took to help his beloved team – and his beloved owner – win it all.

The news he got in September hit him like a line drive to the back of Josh Beckett’s head.

“Andruw – you’re being released,” his agent told him.

Jones was stunned. It had to be a nightmare. But it wasn’t – Half Cajun had placed the face of its franchise, unceremoniously, on waivers. The reaction around the league was swift – and unanimous -- in its surprise.

“I can see not wanting to play him regularly, but c’mon, man – there wasn’t room on the team’s 34-man roster for him anywhere?” one incredulous HCBB owner asked. “Did you see some of the crap he had on his reserve squad at the end? There were guys he was never going to be playing – how could you not keep Andruw over some of them?”

“It was bad karma, pure and simple,” another owner added. “Andruw gave his heart and soul for that team for seven long years. He carried a bunch of those crappy Half Cajun teams for years on his back. And after all that, Adam cuts him a couple of weeks before the team was ready to win the title? That was just fucking cold, man.”

It wasn’t just the fact that Jones was released, but it was in the way Adam and Half Cajun had handled it. There had been no face-to-face meeting, no warning at all for Jones. He had arrived at the park on Tuesday, only to have security stop him at the gate and refuse him entrance. They directed Jones to a pile of his belongings lying on the sidewalk, where Caveney had directed team personnel to dump them.

“I was humiliated,” Jones would admit later. “He even had my car towed before I could my stuff back to it.”

Jones was gone, and word of his release passed quickly through the Half Cajun clubhouse. The remaining members of the squad were stunned – Anduw had been popular with his teammates, and no one was happy to see him go. But at least he was being replaced with a big acquisition – someone to help push the beleaguered franchise over the top – right?

“Aaron Cunningham and Wilson Betemit? What the fuck? How were we supposed to win with those guys?” Adam Dunn says today. Dunn is no longer with the team, having been traded this spring to Clueless??? – and he’s happy to be gone. “Andruw didn’t have much left in the tank, but he was still a better option than those two clowns.”

Without warning, Jones was unceremoniously dumped by the person he had grown closest to over the years.

The aggravation is evident in Dunn’s voice. “Andruw cared – he wanted to win,” says the first baseman. “The new guys didn’t give a damn about anything, so long as they were getting paid. It was sickening.”

All of the clubhouse chemistry issues that had cropped up only got worse as the last weeks unfolded. It all came to a head in a clubhouse fight between the two new acquisitions, Betemit and Cunningham, over their choice of pre-game music – a situation made only worse when Caveney decreed that only Justin Bieber music would be allowed before games.

The off-the-field drama would have been worth it if the players involved had delivered solid production. Instead, the duo combined for an atrocious 3 hits for the Half Cajun lineup – a backbreaking performance for a team that would lose the 2010 title by a mere couple of hits or a solitary home run. A home run that Andruw Jones had waited for seven years to deliver – but when it counted, wouldn’t be in a position to make good on.

“He never gave me a chance,” Andruw repeats. There is no hint of forgiveness in Jones’ voice. It’s obvious that time in this case has healed no wounds.

The Curse of Andruw?

So what happens now?

Andruw will be available at the HCBB draft, and presumably, his number of suitors will be limited. There’s never been a question before of who was going to leave the draft room with Jones on their squad – until now. After all of the hard feelings, all of the bitterness and disappointment, there’s no way to imagine Jones and Caveney rebuilding their shattered relationship now. Or is there?

“I don’t know, man … I don’t know,” Jones says. “After what he did … man, I just don’t know.”

For his part, Caveney doesn’t talk about Jones. Instead, he focuses on building on his team’s near-miss last year. He talks about getting a new stadium built, or he talks about possibly inking

Even Jones has no idea if a reunion is possible in 2011.

Jason Heyward to the longest contract ever in the HCBB.

But even as he talks, you can sense his eyes shifting their focus away from you. Over to the picture of Andruw he keeps, even now, on his desk.

You can sense he desperately wants to make things right. But you also sense he doesn’t quite know how. And that is the final, greatest agony of a season past that was so close to fulfilling a dream two men had eight years ago together – but that went so horribly, horribly wrong.