COLUMN: Cardinals' Taylor Motter puts the 'journey' in journeyman

The term "journeyman" is an outdated one in modern-day baseball.

Quite frankly, it's one that I personally miss the most.

I miss the players who find a way to stretch out a decade in the big leagues collecting enough caps and jerseys to start their own New Era store. There were enough to have a journeyman on every team at least a decade ago, now there are only a few of them left.

The St. Louis Cardinals are playing two teams this week — the Colorado Rockies and Pittsburgh Pirates — who still employ a least one journeyman. Pitchers are still able to pull off this kind of career. Rockies reliever Brad Hand started his career with the Florida Marlins in 2011, and has since pitched for San Diego, Cleveland, Washington, Toronto, New York, and Philadelphia on his way to Colorado. There's a good chance he'll finish this season with another team. On top of pitching at the age of 42, Pirates starter Rich Hill is pitching for his 12th team. The Cardinals miss him this time because his start date is a day before the start of the series, but come July, who knows?

While those examples involve jumping from MLB team to team, Cardinals infielder Taylor Motter is a journeyman with an emphasis on the word "journey."

Motter was drafted by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2011 and made his MLB debut with the team in 2016. He was then part of a five-player trade with Seattle on November 18, 2016, that led to the Rays landing Andrew Kittredge. The 2017 season saw him spend more time in the big leagues with the Mariners than any other time in his career, with a small stint with Triple-A Tacoma included. From 2012-17, Motter played with one minor league team each season.

Since 2018, Motter's career could best be described as a player traveling from place to place with a bindle hanging from the edge of his bat. He started that season enjoying his first career Opening Day with the Mariners before being sent down to Tacoma. He was later claimed off waivers by the Minnesota Twins, where he would spend the rest of the season going from there to Triple-A Rochester and back, with a four-game stint in Chattanooga sandwiched in between.

For those who counted, that's a total of five teams in one season.

"Believe it or not, none of it is baseball," Motter said when asked about the toughest aspect of being a journeyman in both the major and minor leagues. "It's all family-oriented stuff like, how are you gonna get your family to where you are? What's the travel gonna be like for them? How are they gonna get settled in hotel living, things like that? Baseball is baseball no matter where you go. So really, it's kind of like the logistics of moving your family to cities city has been the toughest part."

Motter spent the 2021 minor league season split between Triple-A Albuquerque and Worcester, as well as a cup of coffee with the Rockies and Red Sox, not only making it four total teams but adding the cross-country element to the total travel.

Last year, an early stint in the Mexican League was thrown into the mix for Motter.

"Last year was pretty logistically challenging," Motter said. "I'll tell you what, man, they've all been pretty tough. The move from Seattle to Minnesota wasn't too bad. Last year, I went from Mexico to Louisville, to Cincinnati, to Atlanta, that was a little tougher. Colorado the year before, that wasn't bad, but the move from Colorado to Boston was cross-country, a little tougher. But yeah, it's all been west coast to east coast, things like that.

"Living in some of the cities we're in aren't the best, and trying to find places to live that do six-month leases and things like that is probably the toughest part."

Given the absurdly low pay in minor league baseball, this is more than enough mileage to make a player contemplate hanging up the spikes and entering a more stable career. The thought never occurred to Motter.

"This is the way I provide for my family and this is all I know how to do," Motter said. "This was plan A-Z so getting this done was something that I've put my full heart and head into, so there was no other plan."

This was the second time Motter made a big league team's Opening Day roster. He benefited from having nearly all of the Cardinals' household names leave spring training camp to compete in the World Baseball Classic, giving him more opportunities to make his case.

"Any time you can have a longer look at somebody, it allows you to have a better evaluation of them," Cardinals manager Oli Marmol said. "The WBC allowed him to get a lot of at-bats. We would have figured out a way for him to get those one way or another, but it didn't hurt."

The way he described the Cardinals' Opening Day made it seem like all the journeys it took to get to where he is now were all worth it.

"The electricity in this place, it's incredible," Motter said. Doing Opening Day in Seattle was fun, it was cool, but being here in St. Louis with all the history and the cars and the red jackets and the fans, it's awesome the way this place is set up and it's great to see from the dugout. I can only imagine what it's like from the stands."

That's a sentiment we can all relate to.