The following article is an excerpt from today’s Write Fielder, a weekly newsletter from the Post-Dispatch that delivers behind the seams stories and builds upon the baseball coverage available here at StlToday.com and brings it directly to your inbox every Friday morning.
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When he visited Coors Field for the first time to sign his first professional contract, pose for pictures, meet the big-leaguers, catch a game, and take batting practice, there was one problem for recently drafted high schooler Nolan Arenado.
He didn’t bring any cleats.
Ryan Spillborghs, then an outfielder with the Rockies, pulled a new pair of big-league quality cleats out of his locker and gave them to the teenager. Arenado hit BP in them – and then wore those same cleats as long as they lasted into his minor-league career. Years later, Spillborghs recalled the gift as he described how long he’d known Arenado.
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“I gave him his first show shoes,” Spillborghs said.
The phrase stuck with me as shorthand for the gifts big-leaguers give to young players to welcome them into the big leagues. Sometimes “show shoes” are just the best damn dinner after months of peanut butter sandwiches, and other times even “show shoes” come with strings attached. A common gift given rookies or prospects is a tailor-made suit for the big-league charter. One player told me a veteran recommended he travel everywhere with that suit because “that promotion could happen at any time.”
Adam Wainwright received two suits as a welcome from future Hall of Famer Scott Rolen. Yadier Molina purchased suits for coaches and support staff one spring, bringing Mike Maddux, Skip Schumaker, and clubhouse attendants out for measurements, as described by Ben Frederickson. Sonny Gray left an official Harry Potter-brand wand on Jordan Walker’s chair in the clubhouse as a gift for the fan of Harry Potter movies.
Over the past few weeks, I asked around the Cardinals clubhouse for examples, because almost all of the players have a show-shoes story. The following is a selection of the tales players shared with me.
Zack Thompson: Courtesy of former Cardinals reliever Nick Wittgren, Thompson received a boxed bottle of champagne after his big-league debut in 2022. It was signed by all of the members of the team who had ever pitched out of the bullpen in their careers. Yes, that meant that Wainwright, Molina, and Albert Pujols all signed it.
Thompson was also one of the pitchers who had a tailor-made suit purchased for him as a gift by Wainwright.
“It’s the best-fitting, nicest suit I have,” Thompson said.
So, he wore it for the legal wedding ceremony when he and his wife eloped.
Lars Nootbaar: After hitting his first big-league home run in Pittsburgh on August 12, 2021, the outfielder returned to his locker a few days later to find a bottle of Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades Brut Gold champagne. It just came from an unexpected source. “Congrats on your first show homer,” read the note signed by Jon Lester. He had joined the team 12 days earlier.
Kyle Leahy: The young reliever was part of the group measured for tailored, three-piece suits that were purchased by Wainwright a couple of years ago, and Miles Mikolas did the same thing for several young pitchers. (Leahy also received a chain necklace from Gray.)
Ryan Helsley: The suit that he wore on the red carpet for the 2022 All-Star Game at Dodger Stadium was the one he received as a gift from Wainwright. Helsley has also given gifts of note. After his immaculate inning – three strikeouts, nine pitches – he presented signed and dated bottles of Angel’s Envy bourbon to his catcher Andrew Knizner and coach Dusty Blake.
Erick Fedde: He said the best gift he received upon his arrival to the majors as a September callup was staying at Washington Nationals teammate Gio Gonzalez’s apartment so he didn’t have to continue the hotel life.
Brendan Donovan: When he moved to Jupiter, Florida, Donovan received a text message from teammate Paul Goldschmidt about joining him at a training facility in the area. He did only to discover that Goldschmidt had already paid for all of Donovan’s offseason training there.
“But it came with a stipulation,” Donovan said. “He said it was all covered as long as I did the same someday for another player – to keep it going.”
That’s not the only “show shoe” that Donovan’s kept going.
He organizes the signing and presentation of congratulations champagne given to teammates after their big-league debut – a practice in the Cardinals’ clubhouse that traces back to what Wittgren did for Thompson.
This week’s newsletter also looks level by level at the rising catching prospects in the Cardinals system, the coining of a new verb in the clubhouse, a question for readers about Cardinals cameos in movies, and a dazzling illustration of Stan Musial by a minor-league umpire. Plus there’s a Q & A with pitching prospect Quinn Mathews.
The Write Fielder drops every Friday morning around 9 a.m. St. Louis time, and in addition to a lede story like the one above it includes exclusive interviews, deep dives into statistics, crowdsourcing suggestions for the experience at Busch Stadium, and even some travelogue or other personal tidbits from venturing around the majors on the baseball beat.
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