Our team was our frame of reference. Growing up in Utah, we didn't know anybody in the big leagues, there were no (MLB) teams close by. We'd play whiffle ball and say, 'This is the World Series,' and that's about it. – Brandon Lyon
ST. GEORGE — Back before they’d gone and done it, before boyhood friends Brandon Lyon and John Buck pulled off their version of hitting the Powerball numbers by playing more than a decade in the major leagues, including one Field of Dreams season as battery mates for the New York Mets, making $26 million in the process, each; back before all that, John Buck was sitting in a little room off to the side of the main office at Taylorsville High School and had this exchange with Joyce Jones, the guidance counselor.
Ms. Jones: “So tell me about your career goals.”
John: “I’m going to play professional baseball.”
Ms. Jones: “That’s nice, but if not baseball, then what?”
John: “Professional football.”
Ms. Jones: “OK. Those are short careers. What about after?”
John: “I don’t know. Be a dad; raise my kids. Have you seen what they make?”
Just what are the odds of two kids who grew up playing baseball together in Utah — with its six months of winter, its relatively small population and its fixation with basketball and football — both making it to the big leagues, anyway?
Baseball is a game of statistics, so consider this: According to the Baseball Almanac, since professional baseball began in 1876, 38 players born in Utah, including Brandon Lyon, have played in the major leagues; and another 14 from Wyoming, where John Buck was born before moving to Utah when he was 4. That’s a grand total of 52 players from both states in 140 years — out of the nearly 20,000 ballplayers who have had, as they say, a cup of coffee at the game’s highest level.
Now consider that of those raised on Utah baseball, only one, Bruce Hurst of St. George, at 15 years, had a longer career than Lyon, who played 12 seasons, and Buck, who played 11.
You could also add a fourth name to the group: Vance Law, who was born in Idaho but played high school baseball for Provo High before enjoying an 11-year career in the majors.
But that’s it. Only Hurst and Law — one raised in the year-round baseball climate of Utah’s Dixie and the other the son of Major League legend Vern Law — went as far and stayed as long as the two guys who grew up without glossy baseball pedigrees in Taylorsville, where they had to deal with, among other things, the inversion.
So how did they do it? What’s their secret? What do they tell Utah kids, and their parents, who also might want to attempt the impossible?
During a recent baseball tournament in southern Utah, where they were watching their boys play, the two recent retirees — Lyon is 36, Buck is 35 — took a stab at an answer.
They talked about the importance of supportive parents, of working hard, of dreaming big, of never saying die — the usual motivational catchphrases.
Then, eventually, both got around to the most important ingredient of all: Taylorsville.
Growing up in the landlocked city in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley in the ‘80s and ‘90s was like enrolling in a baseball academy and still getting to live at home. Taylorsville took its baseball seriously, but not too seriously. Lyon and Buck were able to play all the other sports growing up — ski racing, snowboarding, skateboarding, BMX riding, hockey, football, even gymnastics (Buck credits it for improving his catching). But they also played baseball. A lot of baseball. Taylorsville was ahead of its time in organizing top-level youth baseball leagues, led by Edo Rottini and others who built first-class facilities, taught the kids to play the right way, and made sure they got plenty of opportunities for competition.
“Our Little League was like the super leagues now,” says Buck. “We had two-a-days when we were 11 years old.”
“Taylorsville had such a great history of winning,” says Lyon. “I watched my older brother (Shane) and his friends and we looked up to those guys. All we wanted to do was be them.”
Lyon, nicknamed "Boo" by his friends, is 11 months older than Buck, but because their birthdays fall on either side of the July 31 cutoff, they played on the same age-group teams from the time they were 8 years old through high school. Over the years the roster hardly changed, breeding a squad that won, in addition to countless state trophies, national AAU championships as 10- and 11-year-olds, a trip to the Little League Western Regional final as 12-year-olds, and a Babe Ruth League national championship as 13-year-olds.
By the time this group got to Taylorsville High, where the school had already won six state baseball championships in 10 years, the only surprise was that the Warriors added only two more titles in the Lyon/Buck era instead of three. (Jordan High knocked them out of the playoffs in 1997.)
Steve Cramblitt, who coached Taylorsville to the 1996 and 1998 state titles, along with five others, remembers Lyon’s mental toughness — “Loosy-goosy off the field; tough, tough, tough on the field,” and Buck’s uncommon drive to excel — “John had to work at it a little harder and he did; he had a tremendous work ethic.”
But it was never just those two and everybody else. They weren’t the show. The team was.
“Almost the whole team went on to play in college,” says Buck. “It was never like, ‘Hey, it’s going to be me and you, Boo.’”
Adds Lyon, “Our team was our frame of reference. Growing up in Utah, we didn’t know anybody in the big leagues, there were no (MLB) teams close by. We’d play whiffle ball and say, ‘This is the World Series,’ and that’s about it.”
Lyon was drafted by the Mets out of high school in 1997, but not until the 37th round, the 1,110th player chosen, leading him to decide to play baseball at Dixie State instead of turning pro.
In 1998, Buck's senior season of high school, the Houston Astros drafted the catcher, already 6-foot-3 and nearing his big-league playing weight of 225 pounds, in the seventh round, the 212th player chosen. He turned pro right after he graduated, all of 17 years old, and joined the rookie league Gulf League Astros in Kissimmee, Florida.
While Buck started clawing his way through the bush leagues, Lyon was away at college separating his shoulder; the right one — his throwing arm.
He hurt the shoulder snowboarding during Christmas break midway through his freshman year. His teammates ribbed him about a million-dollar injury, not realizing how wrong they were — and right. Instead of costing him his career, the injury helped, because after sitting out the 1998 season to let the shoulder heal, he gained another two to three miles an hour on his fastball, putting him in the 93 mph big-league range.
He won 24 games and lost three pitching for Dixie in 1999 and 2000. The Toronto Blue Jays selected him in the 14th round of the 1999 amateur draft and signed him in 2000. He spent less than a season and a half in the minors before the Blue Jays called him up in 2001. He went 5-4 that first season to launch a 12-year MLB run that would also include stops with the Boston Red Sox, Arizona Diamondbacks, Detroit Tigers, Houston Astros and New York Mets. A reliever for most of his career, he compiled a 42-47 won-loss record and recorded 79 saves (ranking him 198th all time in MLB history entering the 2016 season and eighth in the Diamondbacks' record book with 42).
Lyon topped seven figures in salary when he signed a $1.5-million deal with the Diamondbacks in 2007. In 2011-12, the Astros gave him a $10.75 million two-year deal. For his career, the Baseball Register tallies his earnings at $26.6 million.
Despite turning professional three years earlier, Buck didn’t make it to the major leagues until three years after Lyon, but he was still just 23 when he joined the Kansas City Royals in 2004. He spent six seasons in K.C. then played for six franchises in the next five years, with stops at Toronto, Miami, the New York Mets, Pittsburgh, Seattle and the Los Angeles Angels.
Known as a clubhouse leader — he was the player rep on all his teams — and an excellent handler of pitchers, Buck hit for power on offense. He had 134 home runs in his career (563rd on the all-time list) and batted .234. Of his 844 hits, nearly 40 percent were for extra bases.
He peaked at Toronto in 2010 when he hit .281 with 20 home runs and a slugging percentage of .489, all career bests. That July he played in the All-Star Game in Anaheim and hit a double for the American League.
John Buck | PointAfterHe parlayed that success into a $17 million, three-year deal with the Marlins in 2011. The Baseball Register records his career earnings at $26.2 million.
Between them, the boys from Taylorsville made $52.8 million playing baseball for 11 of the 30 MLB franchises.
Finally, in 2013, they were teammates again after the Mets acquired Buck in an offseason trade and signed Lyon as a free agent. They rented apartments within walking distance in Manhattan and appeared in numerous games together that summer at Citi Field, just like the old days at Taylorsville’s Rottini Field. The first came in the season opener in New York where Lyon came in for relief in the seventh inning and Buck was behind the plate. Lyon got a groundout to end the inning in an 11-2 Mets win that saw Buck go 2-for-4 at the plate.
“It’s kind of cool to have one-sixth of my Little League team here in New York,” Brandon told Jay Drew of The Salt Lake Tribune after that game.
Throughout their big-league careers, and beyond, Lyon and Buck never failed to give credit to the village that got them there.
“I would sometimes go and watch them play (in the major leagues),” says their high school coach Steve Cramblitt, “and I’ll tell you what, they treated me great. They were no different than they were in high school; just respectful, great family guys, great human beings and great teammates.”
Brandon Lyon | PointAfterLyon’s last season in the big leagues was 2013, Buck’s in 2014. Lyon has settled in the St. George area, his wife Sara’s hometown (they met at Dixie State). They have three children, Isaac, 12, Andrew, 9, and Lucy, 6. Buck and his wife, Brooke, who met their sophomore year at Taylorsville High (Brooke taught him how to drive a stick shift), live in Bluffdale, just a little south of where they grew up, with their twin boys, Brody and Cody, 7, and their son, Bentley, 2.
Much of Lyon and Buck’s time is still spent on a baseball field, coaching their sons, driving them to their games, watching them play, adhering to their schedules — instead of the other way around.
“I’m a stay-at-home dad now. My wife did that for a long time, now I try to let her do as much as I can,” says Lyon. “It’s like an offseason for me, just a little bit longer.”
“I’m in retirement,” says Buck, “meaning I’m doing things I want to do.” Besides coaching Brody and Cody, among other things, he’s a motivational speaker, a personal trainer, an entrepreneur (see buckathletics.com) and an inventor (he’s designed a bag to hold a baseball glove and keep it soft).
He also skis. A lot. “I made sure I got out when I still had plenty of skiing left,” he says.
To see if there might still be something in the tank, both Lyon and Buck played briefly for the minor league Salt Lake Bees in 2014 before officially retiring from baseball. One night, after a home game at Smith’s Ballpark, Buck was taking off his catcher’s gear when a woman called out his name from the stands behind home plate.
It was Joyce Jones, the Taylorsville High guidance counselor.
As Buck walked toward her, he wondered if she was going to tell him she was right, because here he was, not yet 35 years old and headed into retirement without a Plan B.
But she didn’t say that at all.
“She wanted to tell me that she’d kept track of my career and how much she enjoyed following me in the box scores through the years,” he says.
Before she turned to walk out of the stadium, Ms. Jones added, “I’m so glad you didn’t listen to me.”