Different types of baseball careers have different kinds of shapes. Many, most, don't have any shape at all; they unfold entirely out of sight, under the waterline and in the minor leagues, and generally very quickly. Those are lives in the game, too, and even the most minor of Major League careers is a triumph simply for having existed. I remember a lot of ballplayers solely as baseball cards, one moment where a photographer caught them squinting at spring training or grimacing in bad sunglasses during a day game, and not at all as players. I never actually saw them, or if I did it was as a figure far out on a shifting sand bar, disappearing from the first moment they came into sight.
Other careers are longer and more legible; you can see a sort of story happening or almost happening over the course of years, and find a framework that puts it into a broader context. "Ah," you might say after a look at the back of a baseball card or a Baseball-Reference page, "this is kind of a Matt Lawton type of career" or "I'm getting some Terry Mulholland notes here." You might not want to say this around anyone you want to impress, but it will help you understand it—this is a type of life in baseball, one of the ways that the story can go. It is possible, in this way, to say that a ballplayer could have a career that looks sort of like that of Octavio Dotel, who died on Tuesday after the roof of a nightclub in Santo Domingo collapsed during a performance on Monday night. But it would also be untrue, both because of the specific things that made Dotel's life in baseball what it was, and because no other career in baseball history ever has looked like his.
Dotel played for 13 teams in 15 big-league seasons; only Ron Villone, Matt Stairs, and Mike Morgan had ever played for 12 when Dotel broke that record back in 2012. Dotel held it for seven years, until Edwin Jackson played for his 14th team in 2019. This is a type of player, too, and a type of career—good enough and agreeable enough and healthy enough to play for a long time, sufficiently fungible and sufficiently valuable that they are both always in demand and always available. Very few players with this kind of career start out this way—Jackson was a mega-prospect, Morgan was the fourth pick of the 1978 draft and pitched in the bigs that same year at the age of 18, even Villone was a first-round pick. Stairs, a Canadian non-prospect who was never drafted and didn't break through in the bigs in earnest until he was 27, is the most similar to Dotel, who was 25 when he debuted with the Mets as a starter back in 1999. Similar in the sense that he was a guy with a limited but extremely valuable set of skills—Stairs hit homers and took walks; Dotel, in the 2,280 plate appearances they made against him over 15 years, turned every right-handed hitter he faced (.203/.272/.363) into a slightly less imposing version of Ron Karkovice.
No one progresses linearly into this type of career, but you can read a sort of story onto or over it after the fact for each of the players that were good enough and fungible enough to play for that many teams—an initial half-busted brush with early stardom gives way to a series of well-managed downshifts into increasingly specific roles. This is not just a baseball thing. Baseball is an unusual and rarefied job, but it is still a job, and sometimes that is easier to see than others. So many of the things that seem lyrical about it from one angle—Dotel, like so many relief pitchers, was a busted starter whose stuff played up when featured in a more specific and intentional context and over shorter stints—are actually just practical. It's a matter of finding the thing you do best and doing only that, as well and for as long as you can make it work.
For the back two-thirds of his career, baseball teams called Dotel more or less in the same way that people call a plumber: because they needed his services, sometimes urgently, and because they knew he'd do a good job at a specific and demanding task, and because they knew that he had the tools necessary to do it. There were four seasons in which Dotel pitched for at least two teams, and one in which he pitched for three; he was traded six times, in deals that involved Mike Hampton and Carlos Beltran and Colby Rasmus. Sometimes he was hurt, but not until the last season of his career was he anything but highly effective. It's a living, and over a long enough time it becomes a life.
I'm guessing at that, to some extent. This sort of story would necessarily look and feel very different from the inside, and while it is happening. From there, it is just a struggle, and every story is about a talented person trying to do something very hard, and which they have dreamed about doing since they were kids, in defiance of outrageous odds and against a bunch of other people, all of them roughly as talented, who are trying to do the same thing in the opposite direction. Dotel, as far as I can tell, wore that struggle lightly. He was very good at his job and always in demand; he was a good teammate in the sense that he was good at his difficult job, and because he made himself pleasant to be around. "You know how it is," Dotel told ESPN's Jayson Stark in 2012. "When you don't know nobody, you're kind of shy. With me, it's different. I walk in and go, 'Hey, what's up guys?' Like I know everybody forever. I make it easy for myself. You have to. After you've been traded so many times you've gotta be a nice guy. If not, nobody wants you."
Even long baseball careers are short, and short enough that fans will experience the player at the center of it in different ways—as someone who might become someone, and then as the player they become, and then whatever they wind up being as the tidal forces that move people into and out of the game do their thing. I remember Dotel as a live-armed pitching prospect for the 1999 Mets, who struggled as a starter and excelled in relief and was crucially not brought into the NLCS game that ended with an exhausted Kenny Rogers issuing a bases-loaded walk. I remember him as the centerpiece of the deal that brought Mike Hampton and Derek Bell to the Mets, and then I remember him doing something like the same role in a procession of different uniforms over the course of a decade. All of this just seemed to accumulate, to the point where the duration of his career came as something of a shock when I looked back at it. He pitched in the postseason in three decades; he won a World Series with the Cardinals in 2011. I knew all this, but I don't know that I really noticed it piling up the way it did.
We got older in parallel, like everyone does, but I saw him aging in a way that I didn't recognize quite as readily in the mirror. I was watching his story unfold in a way that I understood more, or just differently, than I understood my own. I think this is part of what that internal taxonomy of different baseball types is for, to help you understand where you are and what you're seeing, and to have a sense of how close you are to the end. Of course you don't actually know, but it is nice to feel like you do. And of course you don't know what the story is like to the person for whom it is simply their life. "All records are good," Dotel told Tyler Kepner of the New York Times in 2012, in another story about the record he was about to break. "Even if it’s bad, it’s good, because nobody had it before, only you."
