Damian Miller has helped keep a lot of great pitchers in the zone, but he’s had to venture far from his comfort zone to do it.
In the last few years, Miller has been on the receiving end of brilliance from Kerry Wood and Mark Prior of the Cubs and Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He is a regular on a playoff team for the third year in a row.
Although he makes his living in the spotlight and in the close company of several dozen other men, Miller remains an essentially private person. Big cities get on his nerves, and his favorite view is one that includes more trees than people.
“I’m a small-town guy,” said Miller, who will turn 34 Monday. “Always have been, always will be.
“Hunting is my therapy. Not necessarily going out and harvesting animals, just going out and sitting in a tree stand, getting away from baseball and the lifestyle, relaxing and thinking about nothing. It’s basically heaven to me.”
October’s low, bright full moon is called the hunter’s moon. Perhaps it has helped Miller bag his quarry: a chance to play baseball right up until deer season. This year Miller’s youngest brother, Cory, aware of his track record, scheduled his wedding after the World Series just to be safe.
“I’ve been lucky,” Damian Miller said. “That’s all it is. Good pitchers like that make catchers look good. I’ve been fortunate to be able to handle those guys and get some respect from them.
“I got to see how future Hall of Famers go about their business, how they handle certain situations on the mound. The key to pitching is poise and how you handle yourself. Kerry and Mark had a lot of that to begin with, but I like to think I had something to do with it.”
Weary of gambling on the erratic, underachieving Todd Hundley, the Cubs traded for Miller last November. One might say he fit like a big, durable glove.
“Having caught some of the best pitchers in baseball over the years–and with Schilling, a pretty deep thinker–there was an acceptance level,” pitching coach Larry Rothschild said. “Trust was built pretty quickly.
“He cares about getting the pitchers through the game as much as anything.”
The unpretentious, undemonstrative Miller doesn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve, but he displayed his loyalties on his chest Saturday by donning a Green Bay Packers T-shirt before the game.
He comes by the allegiance honestly, having grown up in West Salem, Wis., adjacent to LaCrosse. There were 80 people in his high school graduating class. Everyone knows everyone, but you have to be very good for someone from the outside to come find you.
Miller, the oldest of three boys, was slight for his age when he played high school baseball and didn’t mature physically until he went to nearby Viterbo College to be part of a start-up baseball program.
He might not have had the body quite yet, but he had the passion and the analytical ability. His father, Tom, vividly remembers Damian absorbed in televised games, calling the game pitch by pitch.
“He was a late developer,” said Miller’s high school coach, Chuck Ihle. “There were times he second-guessed whether he should play baseball.
“He wasn’t a rah-rah guy; he was a blue-collar type of kid. He still is. He doesn’t want to be treated any differently than when he came through.”
Miller excelled at Viterbo, an NAIA school. He attracted enough attention in his junior year to be drafted by Minnesota in the 20th round but played only 25 games for the Twins before he was plucked by expansion Arizona.
The catcher’s gear has been good to Miller, a lifetime .262 hitter who is spelled by Paul Bako behind the plate. Cubs pitchers had a 3.88 ERA in his 103 starts and 114 appearances this season, and he made just three errors while throwing out more than a third of the runners who tried to steal off him.
Among Miller’s career highlights are two doubles in the 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee and a ninth-inning bunt against the Yankees in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. He is one of the few Cubs who has had that kind of baptism.
“I played in one of the most exciting Game 7s in World Series history,” he said. “But it’s nothing you can pass on to anybody. You just have to experience it for yourself.”
During a six-year-plus trek through the minors, including two seasons at Class A Kenosha, Miller always came home, working odd jobs in the off-season, including moving furniture.
“His best friends from high school are his best friends now,” said his father, Tom, a retired ad manager for the LaCrosse Tribune.
Damian Miller and his wife, Jeanne, go back a way … to 1st grade, to be precise.
“It would have been kindergarten, but she was afternoon and I was morning,” Miller joked.
“She was a two-time state champion in the 110-meter hurdles. I always kid her that she couldn’t beat me in that race, but I know she could wipe me.”
Their 5-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son would seem to have good athletic bloodlines, but Miller was specific about one thing.
“My son’s not going to catch,” he said. “He’s going to play shortstop and hit left-handed. I’m not going to put the gear on him.”
Miller may be the most famous native of West Salem, and certainly one of its most appreciated.
“The community has really taken to him that way,” said his college friend, Wayne Wagner, now Viterbo’s assistant athletic director and basketball coach, who said Miller often is spotted in the batting cages around town when he’s home.
Miller also co-sponsors a bowling fundraiser for local youth programs with former Cubs catcher Scott Servais, who hails from nearby Coon Valley, and works with the town’s Boys and Girls Club.
“His work ethic is very similar to a lot of guys in the Midwest, in that you have to earn everything you get,” said Servais, now the Cubs’ roving catching instructor.
“You don’t play as much as other people [because of weather], so you mature later, and you hope you can stick around long enough for your talent to come out.”
But generous as he is that way, Miller is still intent on reserving a little corner of the world where he can draw his family tight and shut out the ambient noise that can envelop athletes.
“We just bought a 320-acre farm of our own that nobody else can go on, and we’re building a small hunting cabin,” Miller said. “There’s a big pond out there, and when it freezes over, the kids can skate on it.”
The grand stadiums he has played in have all been a means to an end, a way to ensure himself a permanent place in that landscape.
“I don’t think we had any hopes that he would [play professionally],” Tom Miller said. “We enjoyed seeing him play, and that was enough for us. He never was a world-beater, but he persevered.”
