Interview #39: Rubber-armed Lefty
Justin Bautista, chasing the baseball dream all over the continent
Intro
Born in Hayward in 1985, Justin Bautista is a lifelong Bay Area resident… except for his brief nomad years chasing the baseball dream. The left-handed pitcher played for Monte Vista High all four years, went to junior college at Butte College near Chico, another year at Mendocino College, and turned that into a scholarship at Mississippi Valley State, an HBCU in Itta Bena, Mississippi, then two summer seasons in western Canada and a final “spring training” in Yuma before his arm finally called it quits at the age of 26.
He went to work as a manager at In-N-Out after and still lives in the East Bay. He’s a diehard A’s, Raiders and Sharks fan, so times are tough. I went to high school with Justin and have kept in touch with him ever since, so 20 years about. We played in a men’s wood-bat tournament here in Arizona a few years ago, that was the first and only time we played together on the same team.
Chasing the Dream
So you do you still play baseball?
I think the last time I pitched was three years ago. I did one game. I was like, dude, this hurts my arm. I wasn't playing before that either, for like a year. I think the last tournament that we played in together in Phoenix was really the last time I think I played in a tournament. So I usually just play slow-pitch softball on Monday, that's about it.
I just have so much scar tissue in my shoulder and my elbow. It doesn't hurt or anything, but it hurts after I throw, you know what I mean? Like it takes a lot longer to recover than what it used to.
How long were you a pitcher? You pitched in high school, then college, and then after?
So I actually wasn't even what they call a P.O. (pitcher only) until I got into high school. My primary position was center field and first base in Little League, and then my third position was pitching. So it was actually kind of surprising that I made the freshman squad as a pitcher, as a starting pitcher, too, because there was like 70 people that tried out for the team. I was one of the 28 to 30, whatever it was, people that actually made the team. So that was pretty cool.
I was the first round of cuts. I do remember there being a lot of people there.
We had a pretty good, like our year was really talented. I didn't even make it to varsity until I was a senior because I didn't reach my potential yet. So I was still pretty skinny, I only weighed like 140 lbs. And then even when I made it on varsity, I was basically just a chart guy. I didn't even touch the field. I think I pitched a total of 1 inning my senior year.
It almost made me quit, you know, like, man, this sucks. I hate riding the bench ‘cause I wasn't used to it. I’d never, never done that before. I always started somewhere. I started freshman year, but then I transitioned into a reliever, so, even sophomore, junior year, I was on JV. I was still the number one dude that came out of the bullpen. I was still playing pretty much almost every game, and then senior year was just sitting on the bench charting strikes and balls and pitch counts, like this is stupid.
Were you the least used pitcher then?
Yeah, we had eight guys on our staff and I was the eighth guy. I mean, when you're only playing two games a week, you got your two starters are going to go probably at least five innings. We had (the two starters) and both of those guys were D-I guys. (Starter 1) got full ride for baseball and football to West Point and then (Starter 2) went to Cal.
You finished high school and went to JC, right?
I went to junior college. And then to a four-year after that. My first year out of high school, I went to Butte Community College, which is a feeder for Chico State, and I red-shirted there because I was still underdeveloped, trying to reach my potential, trying to put weight on, stuff like that. I was still at the time only throwing in the high 70s. So I red-shirted, and then in the exit meetings at the end of the year, my coach was like, you know, you're still probably going to be lower on the depth chart, like #9, #10 guy on the staff.
I'm like, I don't want to do that. I'm trying to get a scholarship to university. And he's like, well, I can point you in the right direction to a couple of schools that are looking for starting help. So he had a friend that was the head coach at Mendocino College. So I transferred there and I ended up starting there. The team was absolutely horrible. I went 4-8 my first year with a 2.70 ERA; for most of the year I was actually top 20 in the state of California as far as ERA leaders. I pitched 93 innings in 13 games. I think that averages out to almost 8 innings per start (about 7 1/3 actually).
I ended up going with Mississippi Valley, the D-I school. So I transferred there and ended up being ineligible for my junior year because I never graduated with an AA from junior college. I literally went to college to play baseball, but it did allow me to be a color analyst for the team. I did the color analyst with the play-by-play for the team, so I still got to travel and everything, I still worked out with them, got bigger. My playing weight was about 180 lbs, 185 and I was maxing out at that time around 86, 87mph.
Senior year, I was the first guy out of the bullpen; I was the only lefty on the squad. I wanted to start, but he was like, really need you in the bullpen, so I ended up doing that instead. First guy out of the bullpen, I pitched pretty much every game. I had 35 appearances in 50 games and I averaged over two innings per appearance. I was actually leading the entire nation at one point in appearances.
What was it like going to an HBCU? You'd never even been to Mississippi, had you?
No, I mean, we went on a recruiting trip out there. I can tell you it's much different culture wise. It's like 94% black. Basically, the only people there that were white, Hispanic, or any type of other race was playing a sport. Our baseball team was pretty much half white, half black; softball team was pretty much all Canadian girls.
The football team was pretty much all black. They got all the funding too. Like we had to take a bus everywhere, they got to fly everywhere they needed to fly to. I remember we had a tournament and we were playing Notre Dame, Evanston, and Purdue. And so we had to travel all the way to Indiana. We had to take a train. The train was like 3 hours late and we literally got to the game to play Notre Dame, ‘cause it went into Chicago, so we had another two-hour bus ride from Chicago to South Bend to go play our game that night. So we got there an hour before the game, so we didn't even take BP or anything.
So you had to adjust to that after growing up somewhere that was like 95% white.
Yeah, that was obviously very different; like the culture, I wouldn't say shock, but culture change was just very different. Much slower pace of living down there. Everything's a lot cheaper. I think gas was still under a dollar. They have drive-thru liquor stores. Everybody eats catfish, everything's fried.
The South is definitely a different animal. The room that I stayed in the first year, it looked like it was built in the 50s. It was just so rundown. I was up on the 5th floor, which sucked. They cut off the AC in November, which you would think, huh, that's not too bad, right? But it's still like 90° in November. And so we have no AC and we're on the 5th floor. So we got all that body heat coming up from the first four floors and we couldn't even sleep at night.
So you graduate and then you went on to play pro ball in Canada.
Yeah. So in Canada, my coach (at Mississippi State) had some connections up there. It was at the time the Western Major Baseball League, I think it's now the Western Canadian Baseball League (WCBL). It's more like a summer collegiate league, to be honest with you, but we did get paid so I consider it professional. I played for the Sherwood Park Dukes, who was a one and done team because they folded, they spent too much money. They had $500,000 of startup money and they just over-invested in everything and overpromoted and didn't make enough money. So they had to fold. And that sucked because I really liked playing in Edmonton, it was outside of Edmonton.
That was 2008. In 2009, I played for the Melville Millionaires.
They're gone now, too.
Well, they're on a hiatus because they couldn't get funded.
Melville Mooches.
It was cool. Melville was a lot smaller of a town, so we didn't draw as much. When I was in Sherwood Park, which was outside of Edmonton, we would draw like 2,000 a night. But Melville is a lot smaller, a really close-knit town. There's only like 9,000 people, you could literally walk around the entire town, it was like 9 square blocks. We could draw maybe a couple hundred.
You were in Saskatchewan! Jesus, how did you even get there?
So when the Sherwood Park team folded, I made some calls out to see if I could hook on to another team.
Oh, I meant literally. How do you get there? Start in Regina?
We fly into Regina. And then it was like an hour-and-a-half drive. Literally just farmland, dude.
So you went to Sherwood Park, that's right on the edge of Edmonton, and that's a big city.
Yeah. Edmonton was really fun. Great party town, they have the largest indoor mall in the world, I think (note: I could not confirm this. The mall does have a food court, though😉). And then Melville, we would literally just party every night until like 4:00 AM and then just slept all day and then went to the ballpark at like 4:00 PM.
Canada was fun. we got to play every day. It was a 45-game schedule, but we were playing every day. I thought we were actually going to be playing night games because most of them are at 7:00, but the fun fact about Canada is in the summertime, the sun doesn't completely set till 11:00. So we weren't really playing night games, we were playing dusk games.
Didn't get super hot up there. It would usually top out about like, you know 30°C, they went by Celsius. Obviously in the metric system, but that was another hard thing to do, try to drive a vehicle that's in MPH in Canada. I had no idea how fast I was going. You can go 110 kilometers-per-hour on the freeway. I don't know how fast that is, I'm gonna guess it's 60mph.
What was travel like in that league?
We had a bus. I think Edmonton was probably the furthest drive that we had to do. We had Medicine Hat. We had Lethbridge. Okatoks were right outside of Calgary. And then Edmonton. And then the east side was Moose Jaw, then Melville, then you had the Swift Current 57’s. I think I might be missing one. Saskatoon (Nationals).
Did you play anymore after Canada?
So after those two seasons, I tried to go back down and tryout for the Golden Baseball League when it was still around. I was trying to get hook on to the Chico team and I went down to a tryout. It was like a monthlong tryout type of thing; we were down in Yuma. And it was the old Padres Spring training facility. It was like 250 dudes, it was basically like a spring training for some of those guys because they were either contracted or they were trying to get another contract. So we were playing against other GBL guys. I was on the Arizona Roadrunners.
Our uniforms were gross, they were like peach-orange or something like that. I don't even know if peach is an orange color, but peach. And then white pants. We looked like clowns. I did that for a month and I ended up getting hurt in my last start. I pitched through it. It was a pretty severe neck strain on the left side of my neck. Ended up herniating a couple of discs in my neck, the C2 and C3. I pitched six innings through it. When I released the ball, I couldn't even continue looking at the catcher. That's how bad it was. I had to look away because I had no strength and was just completely sprained. But I ended up pitching 6 innings, I got the win, I gave up three runs. I tried to rehab it and get better, but it just really went back to the way that I could perform at a high level. And at that point, that's when I shut it down and called it a career. I was 26.
You were smaller, right? What did you have to do to try to get stronger
So I had this thing that I would do, since I was working at In-N-Out of time as a senior, I had to make some money to pay off the truck, after every shift, I would drink an extra-large milkshake because it’s 2,500 calories.
Even when I was in college, in order to get big and maintain that weight, because you're in Mississippi and i's hot and it's humid, like we had to get up at 5:00 in the morning just to train because it was already 85° before the sun even came up in August. And so what I had to do to get bigger and maintain that weight was basically eat about 5,500 calories a day. 3,000 of that came in the form of protein shakes, weight-gaining shakes. It was like 3 scoops of powder and then I would do either 12 or 16 ounces of whole milk. Each one of those was like 1,200 calories. It was so thick. It was one of those drinks where if you try to sip it, you're not gonna want to finish it, so I had to just chug it down. 58 grams of protein in it.
And that was barely adding weight to you?
Yeah. Like right now, I'm probably sitting at about 165 not working out or doing anything, just eating two meals a day. In college, I was eating, we had the three meals every day, but I'd be in the cafeteria and I wouldn't leave until I ate at least seven plate of food. Whatever I could get my hands on. It was all you can eat. It was already included in the scholarship.
So you were you were blowing out their food budget. So you never thought about certain performance enhancing aids?
Steroids? No. The closest I guess that I probably came to that was I did spend probably $100 a week at GNC on supplements. There was this one supplement that I took, Gakic, and it was basically like 8 horse pills that you had to take before you go workout and it was for A: energy, but B: it really helps your muscles recover at a much faster pace. The closest thing that you could probably come to like over-the-counter steroids, I guess you could say.
I thought about doing it, but the NCAA is just so strict on everything, like caffeine is illegal. You can't even drink a soda. If you have enough caffeine in your system and test positive for it, it's a year ban. They had 50 pages of banned substances.
Do you know of people who did it?
I actually had a teammate who did, I don't know if he did steroids, but he did something that was illegal and he did lose a year of eligibility, he tested positive.
Did you notice he got better?
Yes, yes. He started throwing a lot faster. His biceps were huge, I was just like, whatever you're doing is not natural, bro. He never said it, but we were like, we know you're doing something.
Besides the shoulder injury, did you ever get hurt?
No, and I never spent one day in the training room. Never iced my arm after pitching, I was one of those guys that just had a Eddie Guardado arm, Everyday Eddie. Remember him? (former Twins reliever in who averaged 68 appearances a year from 1995-2003). There was a span my senior year where we had two double headers on a weekend, so two on Saturday, two on Sunday, and I pitched in three out of the four games. And then I was warming up in the bullpen for the 4th game. Then we had two days off and then we were playing D-II school Delta State, but Delta State was ranked #5 I think at the time, and I started that game on Wednesday. So I had two days of rest after pitching in three out of the four games and then I went and I started and I pitched. That was the only start I had senior year, and I pitched 5 innings.
What did you top out at with velocity?
86.
OK, so you weren't maxing out?
I was middle of the pack. I was probably more on a consistent basis like 83, 84.
Were you trying to max out? Like pitchers today seem to be going 100% every pitch.
The way my role was, it really didn't allow me to really go all out. I had to maintain it because I knew that I wasn't going to be just a one inning guy and then have 3, 4, 5 days of rest. I knew the next day there's another game, and I was going to probably be pitching in that one too.
Why do you so many pitchers now are getting hurt? You didn't get hurt, you threw a ton.
When I was growing up, my dad didn't let me start throwing a curveball until I got into high school. If you watched the Little League World Series now, you’re seeing all these 11 and 12 year olds, they got these huge curveballs and sliders. They're throwing all these breaking pitches, and that's where you're starting to see all these kids that need to get Tommy John in high school or, you know, once they get drafted or go to college, they get Tommy John because by that time, they've been throwing it for so long that their UCL just gives out.
Kids that young, your arm is still developing, your ligaments are still developing, so throwing a curveball is putting a tremendous amount of stress on that region, on your shoulder, on your elbow. So that's why you're seeing a lot of these kids having to get Tommy John surgery.
If you were in high school today, would you be caught up more in trying to throw harder and sharper breaking stuff? With the social media, scouts and showcases everywhere.
Looking at it now, maybe it would’ve made a difference, but I never really threw that hard in the first place. So I was always trying to focus more on developing a good changeup. I actually did have a really good change up. I threw a what was called a phage, a split-finger changeup. I would split it in between my index and my middle finger, now my middle finger is all messed up. I didn't have necessarily like the largest hands either, so I had to really dig down and get it deep in there in order for it to do what I wanted to do. It looked like a two-seam fastball because I held it in between the two seams, so coming at you, it looks like a fastball, but just ducked down about 9 inches about four feet away from the plate.
That was really my bread and butter pitch. And then my curveball was more as like a set up. I had like a Barry Zito curveball where it's actually really good on your elbow. If you're thinking about it, you're gonna pretend like you have a beach ball in between your shoulder and your throwing arm. So you're coming straight down instead of getting the wrist torque that most people try to do with the curveballs. So it's more of a natural motion and less stress on your elbow and shoulder.
Sounds like a guy who refused to quit. Also reminds me of Dylan Higgins’ story, where trying to stay in the game leads you all over this great planet. And Justin won a championship in Canada, like Dylan did in Australia. Also, he got a lot of exposure to new parts of the world thanks to baseball. Our high school was all white and Asian students and most of them wealthy (the amount of German sports cars in the high school parking lot was many). Then to go to the heart of the South to a majority African-American school… but since he goes down there for baseball he already speaks a common language with his new teammates who come from a much, much different background.
And then going from there to Canada and back to the melting pot of the Bay Area. I know Justin is a pretty patient and calm guy, I’ve never seen him get actually mad, and that has to be helpful in his current role managing a diverse group of employees in the region at In-N-Out. I’m sure baseball had a lot to do with developing those skills.
Speaking of development, I almost gagged thinking about that weight-gain shake. I think steroids would’ve been much more enjoyable.
Current Occupation
So you just went to college to play baseball. Did you know you’d go to In-N-Out after?
It didn't really start off that way. The thing that I studied in college was radio broadcasting. So at the time, when I was done, I went and I did two years of baseball, everything that I learned in college with that profession became obsolete. I would have to relearn everything and the starting pay for a broadcaster, it was only like $35, $40k. I was like, well, I'm already at In-N-Out, it's something that I like to do, and it pays well. So I decided to go into management at In-N-Out because you can start out, entry-level management’s $55,000 at that time. I just stuck with it and here I am today.
I like it in the aspect that a lot of these kids that are coming in to work, that's their first job. So it gives me that coaching aspect, I get to teach them the fundamentals and how to work hard. It's their first job, you know, to get them ready for whatever job they decide that they're going to go into the workforce. So I enjoy it.
You helped coach high school for a couple years. Is that something you'd get back into?
I honestly really don't have the time, just with how demanding this job is. I'm putting in about anywhere between 45 and 50 hours a week already. Just the way our schedules are, it makes it pretty impossible to get back into coaching, at least at the high school level, which is pretty much all I can do because I’d have to go back to school and get a degree to do college baseball. I would have to probably do another two years of school. It's something that I haven't ruled out doing. Maybe if I get burned out of this job. But I mean, I'm happy with where I'm at right now so. Yeah.
I've been a manager for almost nine years now. I became a manager for In-N-Out in 2016.
At the one in San Ramon, right?
Yeah. So that's my home store. I've been managing all over, so pretty much all over the division. I’ve been at Livermore, Fremont, I got promoted to Pleasant Hill and then Alameda, San Leandro, Oakland. Pretty much everywhere.
The Oakland one that closed?
Yeah.
Was it as bad as it seemed on the news?
Dude, I spent literally more time out in the parking lot filling out incident reports from people's cars getting broken into than I did managing the store. They have signs everywhere, too, that says don't leave your valuables in the car. And people would come straight from the airport, cause the airport’s right there, you know. Like, oh, it's fine, I'll be in and out, 5-10 minutes, whatever. And then they just leave their bags in the car and these guys would literally just follow them from the airport, like the rental car place or whatever. And they would follow them there to the In-N-Out. They knew exactly which car they would break into. They would do it right in the middle of the day too, because they knew the cops weren’t going to come because it's a misdemeanor in Oakland. It’s not even a felony for breaking and entering.
Yeah and a rental car, you've got computers, wallets, you've got-
I had this one dude that got robbed, he was from Germany and he got his passport stolen like $3,000 in cash, all of his clothes, laptop, like all of his electronic, it was bad. I felt bad for him.
My brother worked at In-N-Out in high school. He enjoyed it, too, and they treat their employees well. Only problem was his car smelled like a hamburger after his shifts. I can only imagine the stories from that Oakland location that haven’t been told. Also, that would mean Justin did it backwards. Most people pay to go to college and come back with a degree and debt and a lousy entry-level job. Justin went to school for free, did enough to stay academically eligible, left with no degree and went right to a management job. Hmmm.
The A’s
So baseball's not a big part of your life these days, then. Especially with a certain team leaving town.
No, I'm not gonna give them anymore money. I'm gonna go to the Battle of the Bay, just cause it’s the last Battle of the Bay.
Were you always an A’s fan?
Yeah, growing up. My dad was always an A’s fan ,so we always went to A’s games growing up. I was old enough to kind of remember the ‘89 World Series. I really got into it was the early 2000s, ‘97 when Chavez came up. Mulder Zito, Hudson.
What was like the most amount of games you ever went to in a season?
We used to have season tickets, but just the weekends. So however many weekends that is in the baseball season, like 15 to 20 games maybe.
Do you still like going to the Coliseum?
I liked it before Mount Davis.
What's your favorite baseball memory of all?
So for watching a game, I was at the game where Scott Hatteberg hit the walk off home run for the 20th win. That was pretty cool. Another one would be when the A’s clinched in 2012 when they came back from like eight games out of first place with. So it came down to the last day, they were playing the Texas Rangers. And they were down like 8-2 in the 5th inning. And all the energy was kind of just sapped out of the stadium. Then they gradually, they came back and they ended up, I think it was a walk off, I can't remember, but they ended up winning. And then we were sitting first row behind the A’s dugout and Coco Crisp comes out celebrating afterwards and he was spraying us with champagne. That's pretty cool.
As far as playing, let's see. I was pitching against Lethbridge. I had a perfect game going and it was a seven-inning game because we were playing a double header, so if we were playing a double header then they would do two sevens. I was in the 7th inning, I had two outs and this dude bloops it right over my third baseman’s head, right on the freaking chalk line. So I lost my perfect game, but that was pretty cool. And then we ended up winning the World Series when I was with Melville, so that was cool. We beat the Okotoks, those jerks. I hate the Okotoks.
Do you have any thoughts on the A's leaving? Or what you've gone through the last few years?
My own personal opinion is that they're going to screw up the Vegas deal and they're going to end up staying in Sacramento and it's gonna become just this huge problem for MLB. I don't know where they go from there, but I know they're definitely not going to let them stay in Sacramento. So they're going to have to figure out what they're going to do because Las Vegas already seems like they're pissed off at them, and they're done with them and all their politics and whatnot.
Personally, I hate seeing them move to Vegas. It sucks, especially growing up, watching the A's in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, up until now. That's my team, and they're just gonna up and leave because the ownership just wants to make more money in a smaller market, which doesn't even make sense to begin with. When they when they came out with that news that they were moving to Vegas just like, why? They were so close to just knocking out that deal at Howard Terminal, at least it seemed like it, they pretty much cleared all the hurdles, but the owner, in my own opinion, just wanted to move to Vegas the whole time. He got the public funding that he wanted that Oakland wouldn't give him. I don't know if you saw this or not, but the Oakland Ballers sold out their first game. They're playing in a park in Oakland.
Are you going to any of those?
I thought about it, to be honest with you, it sounds like it's pretty cool. I think they're in the Frontier League, I don't see how financially they're going to be able to do it, because most of those teams are really far away, so they'll be spending a lot of money on travel. They’re playing at Raimondi Park, they actually put a lot of work into it. They got a scoreboard up and everything, they have a 4,000 seat capacity. From what I've seen pictures wise, it looks like pretty nice little stadium, but in a bad part of Oakland.
My original Lil' Buddy! Love you man. Great interview and great journey bud.
I will add Justin comes from a fantastic family which I deeply adore.
Great interview with Justin!