Once a tormented rookie, Mark Buehrle is now the go-to veteran for kids trying to find their feet with the big club

By Shi Davidi in Dunedin, Fla.

They call it the hotbox, and it’s one of the more dreadful initiation rites any athlete might face. There’s hardly enough room for one person, let alone multiple bodies, inside the bathrooms found in the back corner of the large coach buses teams regularly use for travel. Yet on the 2000 Chicago White Sox, “there were five or six rookies just stuffed into the bus bathroom,” Mark Buehrle recalls, describing the worst parts of the hazing he faced as a21-year-old. “Every road trip, every bus trip, it was like, ‘All right, what’s going to happen to us now?’ I hated it. I hated getting picked on.”

No matter, as a newcomer to baseball’s hidebound culture of hierarchy, all Buehrle could do was quietly take it. But he didn’t forgive, he definitely didn’t forget, and eventually an opportunity to deliver some payback came when White Sox players and alumni gathered at U.S. Cellular Field in 2010 to retire Frank Thomas’s No. 35. At 31, with a decade of service time to his name, Buehrle entered the trainer’s room inside the clubhouse and locked eyes with James Baldwin, the retired right-hander who once tormented him. “Hey Buehrle,” came the all-too-familiar command, “go get me a Jack and Coke!” Instead, Buehrle unloaded after a decade’s worth of grudging silence. “I walked up to him and said, ‘F–k you,’ right to his face, and then shouted, ‘God, that felt so good,’” the left-hander recalls, grinning happily at the memory. “Before, he was above me, and I couldn’t mouth off to him, but here he is out of the game and I finally got to.”

Those early big-league experiences very much colour how Buehrle approaches his role as clubhouse pillar with the Toronto Blue Jays, and his pivotal mentorship role with the next generation of players. There is room for jokes, there is room for hierarchy and there is room for fun—but there’s also a line that won’t be crossed. “I understand we were rookies and we had to do some stuff, but some of it [Baldwin] took too far,” he explains. “Ever since, I’ve told young guys when they come up, ‘Hey, if you have a question about what you need to wear on the road, where you need to be, what you need to carry, come ask me. I’m going to lead you in the right direction.’” That willingness to show youngsters the ropes has led the 35-year-old to be dubbed “Dad” by his teammates. His formula is simple.

Lead By Example

Drew Hutchison found himself a next-door neighbour to Buehrle in the Blue Jays clubhouse in 2014. The young right-hander, 23 at the time, was entering his first full season in the big leagues, and was coming off ligament-replacement surgery. His daily exchanges with Buehrle were gold to him. “There wasn’t a big sit-down,” says Hutchison. “It was a combination of little conversations. I was lucky enough to be next to him. Things he sees he’ll talk to you about in his own little way.”

As much as he listened, Hutchison also watched. On the mound, he observed a relentless competitor who seemed to get calmer whenever trouble started. “I used to joke with [pitching coach] Pete Walker that watching Buehrle pitch is frustrating because he makes baseball look so easy,” says Hutchison. In the clubhouse and the dugout, Buehrle is a model pro, responsible for getting himself ready to pitch. He takes care of his teammates, but in his typical low-key Missouri way, showing the kids respect and getting respect back. “He gives you space,” says Marcus Stroman, who developed a strong bond with Buehrle in his rookie year. “He’s not a rah-rah guy.”

Far from it, actually. Buehrle believes in showing, not telling, unless the circumstances demand it. “I try to lead by example,” he explains. “I don’t like to deal with controversy. I like to mind my own business and do the stuff I have to do. If there’s stuff that needs to be said, I’ll mention it.”

Perpetuate The Good

Last July in New York, Buehrle gathered rookies Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez, Todd Redmond, Ryan Goins and Rob Rasmussen, took them shopping and bought them each a brand-new suit. The splurge was a reward for enduring one of the rites of passage many rookies must suffer through—carrying water and drinks onto the bus and onto the plane for their teammates. “It’s like, ‘Thanks for being a good sport, you did everything we asked of you, here’s a suit or two for you,’” says Buehrle, who took his teammates to the same tailor he was taken to. “It’s something I wanted to do.”

In passing along that tradition, Buehrle also shunned the bullied-to-bullier transition many players have undergone over the years. He channelled the lessons he learned from helpful veterans Cal Eldred and Sandy Alomar Jr. “Those are the guys I feel like I am now, that you can go up to and trust,” says Buehrle. “Where do I need to be at six o’clock? They would tell you; they wouldn’t tell you the wrong spot. There were a number of guys who would help you out, but also a number of guys that liked to haze the rookies.”

A simple credo he works with: Treat others the way you want to be treated. “They’re human beings, they’re not pieces of crap that you can push around just because you’ve got more time in and they’re younger than you” says Buehrle. “You can have fun with them, but there’s a point where I draw the line.”

Correct Mistakes

Among the things Buehrle discusses with young starters is how to handle themselves between starts, things they should and shouldn’t do. For instance, last season, in the Blue Jays dugout, he could hardly believe what he saw. “A [young] pitcher had a bag of chips on the bench, sitting there eating it,” Buehrle recalls. “I looked at him and said, ‘Are you kidding me? What are you doing?’ He went in [to the clubhouse]: ‘I’ll never do it again.’”

Though the incident may seem innocuous, its impact is significant. It teaches the pitcher to be respectful and appreciative of the efforts of position players who are grinding every day, preventing resentment from building toward the youngster, ill feelings that could poison a relationship, sometimes even a clubhouse.

Buehrle’s influence and presence doesn’t make for a mistake-free existence for youngsters, but it helps them turn their mistakes into learning experiences. “Everybody does some wrong stuff, and I’ll tell them, ‘You can’t do that, you’ve got to do it this way.’ I don’t like doing that stuff, but if it has to be done, it has to be done.”

Consider Stroman’s five-game suspension by MLB for throwing a pitch near Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph’s head. Joseph had angered Jose Reyes by stepping on Reyes’s hand during a play at the plate earlier in the game and was due up. “[Stroman] came out of the dugout,” says Buehrle, “and I said, ‘Come on, let’s go, let’s go get them,’ like go out and finish the game strong. He turned around and looked at me and said, ‘Yeah?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, go finish it out.’ He thought I meant go hit him. I sat down afterward and said, ‘Dude, what are you doing hitting him?’ He’s like, ‘You told me to.’ ‘No, I didn’t tell you to hit him, I don’t know that part of the game.’”

While the rookie didn’t want to elaborate on the miscommunication, letting Buehrle do the talking—“If he explained it to you, he explained it to you,” Stroman says—the way the veteran stood by his side helped him through a difficult time. The Orioles publicly questioned Stroman’s motives, baseball pundits debated whether he was a headhunter and his reputation in the game was threatened. “He let me know everything was going to be fine, just keep quiet, it’s going to die down,” says Stroman. “He was there for me. Normally the young guys are scared to approach the older, more established guys, because there’s that feeling of ‘I’m a rookie, he’s a veteran, I can’t get in his space.’ He’s the complete opposite of that. I’ve learned so much from him already, and I look forward to learning so much more.”

Photography: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports; Mark Blinch