March 29, 2024

Living the dream

Ethan Westphal reflects on recent minor league season

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WEST DES MOINES — On a one-hour break from his offseason job at Nike Factory Store in West Des Moines one evening last week, Ethan Westphal sat in a nearby restaurant and said he’s living the dream.

It may not be THE dream of a young baseball player — the life of traveling from city to city in charter jets, staying in luxury hotels and playing in front of crowds of 40,000 fans every night.

Instead, from June through early September this year, the former Lenox and Martensdale-St. Marys standout pitcher toiled at the Class A level of the minor leagues for the Colorado Rockies organization.

Westphal was a relief pitcher for the Boise Hawks, the Rockies’ team in the Class A-Short Season Northwest League. It involved bus trips averaging eight to 10 hours to games in Oregon, Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Average attendance for home games at Memorial Stadium in Boise was 3,196. Per diem on the road was $25 for meals all day.

“When we stay in Portland, you can go through $25 in about one meal,” Westphal said.

Last year, Westphal was signed by the Rockies at a salary of $1,100 per month to play for Grand Junction, a lower Class A team in the organization. This year he got a slight raise, but it wasn’t exactly a major league lifestyle. Hence, the offseason job selling sporting goods at the Nike store near Jordan Creek Mall.

Still, Westphal wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I always said my dream is to play baseball,” said Westphal, now 25. “I didn’t say it was to make a million dollars playing baseball. It’s getting to make a living doing what you want to do, and I want to do it for as long as I can.”

Westphal has tasted success at every stop along his baseball career. He appeared in the state finals for both Lenox, coached by his father Steve, and for state champion Martensdale-St. Marys.

In college, after overcoming elbow surgery, he pitched in a regional championship game for Southwestern Community College and later was victorious in an NCAA Division II World Series game for Central Missouri University.

Westphal was the ace starting pitcher for those teams. As a professional player, he’s learning a new role. For Boise, he closed some games, and in others was brought in for relief stints in the middle of games that were closely contested.

Relief role

Along the way he compiled a 4-3 record with an earned run average of 4.81. (He steadily brought that down from over 7.00 after a rough early-season inning.) In 43 innings he allowed 45 hits and showed his customary strong strikeout-walk ratio of 48 to 10.

“I think it went pretty well,” Westphal said. “I stayed healthy after my shoulder kind of flared up for awhile in extended spring training. I felt like was in a needed role. Every time I was in the game, we were in the game.”

In fact Westphal got the win in the second-to-last game of the Hawks’ season to stay alive for a playoff berth, but a loss the next day in the finale quashed those hopes.

“In both of my professional seasons so far, we’ve missed the playoffs by one game,” he said.

Prior to spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona, Westphal stayed with former Lenox residents Al and Myra Lillie in nearby Mesa.

“They opened their house to me and it worked out great, because it’s so expensive to live down there,” Westphal said. “Once spring training started, we have the option of staying on their property in Scottsdale Plaza. It’s like a resort. It’s $15 a day to live there and they provide all the food and what not that you need. They want to make sure you’re taken care of. It’s a great organization.”

In Boise, Westphal lived with a host family arranged by the team. Despite the long bus rides, he said it was an interesting experience for a midwest native.

“I had never seen the northwest like that,” he said. “It was a nice change of scenery. We stayed in Portland when we played Hillsboro, and that’s a cool city. Eugene, Oregon was cool because we played on the University of Oregon’s field, so we got to tour the football facilities and all that. We all went to a huge Nike employee store in Beaverton, Oregon. Most of our bus trips were through the mountains.”

Wildfire scare

It’s also the territory of periodic wildfires, and Westphal got a little too close for comfort while playing a game in early August in Pasco, Washington. Fires were spreading throughout the northwest that week.

“We were playing Tri-Cities, and that was when the fires were prominent out there,” Westphal said. “We were playing a game and it was getting so thick that we couldn’t really see our center fielder from the dugout. You could kind of see his shape. They finally told us they were stopping the game, like a lightning delay, to see if it would clear up. It just got worse, so we had to cancel it. The air quality was terrible.”

Westphal and his teammates experienced the Aug. 21 solar eclipse in Eugene, Oregon, which was in the prime area of temporary midday total darkness.

“That was pretty cool,” Westphal said. “It got pitch black for awhile, then slowly lightened up again. It was late morning out there, so it didn’t interfere with anything the team was doing.”

The crowd for home games included family members a few times, including his father and former coach.

“His fastball jumped about 3 miles per hour from Grand Junction to Boise, topping at about 92,” said Steve Westphal, who still serves as assistant coach for the Southwestern Spartans. “He tied for the most appearances in the league, so they relied on him a lot. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t move to the next level.”

Ethan said that’s his goal, to keep climbing the organizational ladder. He said pitching coaches have told him he has the right skill set to pitch in the high altitude of Denver, Colorado at the major league level, where fly balls frequently soar over the fence or into the vast outfield gaps at Coors Field.

“They made a big deal about my ground ball to fly ball ratio, about 2.5 to 1.0,” Ethan said. “That’s important if you want to pitch in Denver, because you have to get ground balls to get outs consistently. The pitching coaches work with you and give you constant feedback.”

In about six weeks, Ethan will work his final shift selling sports-related attire at the Nike store and depart for Scottsdale again to prepare for spring training. During the end of that month of training, he will be assigned to a team. If moved from Boise, he could land with the Asheville Tourists (low Class A), Lancaster JetHawks (high Class A), Hartford Yard Goats (Class AA) or Albuquerque Isotopes (Class AAA).

For now, he doesn’t care if the minor league life requires long bus rides and insufficient meal money.

“It sounds like a cliche thing, but I just go out there and not think about where it might end up,” Westphal said. “You have to enjoy the entire journey. My journey has been a long one, with the injuries and what not. But it’s so true, you have to enjoy it along the way. I’ll do it as long as they tell me they want me.”