There is a consistency to Joseph Carpenter’s approach, one that is reflected in the results and appreciated by those who know him best. Ask anyone about the Lancaster Stormers’ first baseman – whether his former coaches, his current manager or his dad, who attends his home games, come heart attack or high water – and it doesn’t take them long to mention his work ethic.
“Nobody,” said Jim Sherman, who coached Carpenter at the University of Delaware, “is gonna outwork Joe.”
His industriousness is “what got him where he is,” according to Josh Brown, his coach at Cedar Crest. It is such that at the end of last season, which saw the Stormers win their second consecutive Atlantic League championship, manager Ross Peeples urged Carpenter to take five or six weeks off.
It was not the first time Peeples had made such a request, and as before the manager isn’t sure it was heeded.
“He listened to me for a little while,” Peeples, seated behind the desk in his cluttered office, said before a recent game. “I don’t know if he got to five or six weeks, but he did do a little bit.”
The results are inarguable. Carpenter hit .379 during his varsity career at Cedar Crest, .297 during his four years at Delaware, and has flirted with the .300 mark each of his three seasons with the Stormers. This year the 24-year-old was at .289 through the Fourth of July, and leading the league in doubles with 20. He was also atop the team in hits (68) and second in RBIs (44).
So all that is a given: Joseph will work, and he will rake. (And yes, he always goes by Joseph, as did his maternal grandfather.)
But here is another given, one true of not only Carpenter but all his current teammates – and indeed, every player in independent ball.
“Everyone wants to get out of here,” he said. “If you ask everyone on the team, they all want to get out.”
He was seated in Clipper Magazine Stadium’s home dugout on a sultry Wednesday afternoon as he said that, with first pitch still nearly two hours off. And certainly he intended no offense to the team, league or anyone else. He was merely stating the obvious: Everyone in indy ball has dreams and aspirations. Everyone wants to play for an affiliated team.
“But,” Carpenter said, “I try not to think of that, to be honest with you.”
Rather, he grinds away every day, sticks to a routine that to him comes as naturally as breathing.
“Because if you’re trying to think, ‘Oh, I gotta get out, I gotta get out of here,’ then you start trying to put pressure on yourself and you play for the wrong reasons,” he said. “So I personally try not to think of that. But yeah, it’s obviously something that I would like to do.”
Peeples understands that as well as anyone. A 44-year-old native of Albany, Georgia, he was once a left-handed pitcher in the Mets’ chain, never rising above A-ball over four summers. He landed in Lancaster in 2005 and hasn’t left, his decade as a player followed by two years as the team’s bench coach. Now in his eighth season as manager, the guy once dubbed “The Mayor” by a teammate has even made Lancaster County his offseason home.
So he knows the territory, in more ways than one.
“I tell every one of my guys, especially at the beginning of spring training and a couple of times throughout the year, that you’re so close, but you’re so far away,” he said in a drawl betraying his Southern roots. “You got a jersey on, you got a chance. But you’re still in indy ball. We ain’t in affiliated yet. Next thing you know, there could be a phone call.”
What is it Crash Davis said in Bull Durham? How everyone in the minors is one more dying quail a week from Yankee Stadium? Davis might have been fictional, but that rings all too true for Carpenter and Co. Timing is everything. Attitude, too.
As Peeples said, “I drill in these guys’s heads all the time, ‘You never know who’s watching. You never know who’s in the stands. You never know who that opposing manager might know, who that opposing pitching coach might know. You never know.’ That’s why you go out there and you play the game the right way all the time.”
So Carpenter will put in the time, same as always. He will stack good days, and continue to sock line drives. And he will maintain his tunnel vision, even as others grow impatient.
“Everybody keeps asking me, ‘When does Joe get his chance?’” said his dad, Arty. “I say, ‘I don’t know what they’re waiting for.’”
Joseph is the older of two children born to Arty and his wife Nancy; there is also a daughter, Meygan, a student at IUP. Father and son bonded early over baseball. Arty, once a Little League coach and now an umpire, was throwing batting practice to Joseph when he was 2. At 8, he hit a BP homer over the fence of the field at Cornwall; Arty still has the ball.
The younger Carpenter’s focus on the summer game was such that in high school he gave up football and basketball – sports he had played at lower levels – even as his friends and the Falcons coaches urged him to continue to diversify.
“It was baseball, and baseball only,” said Brown, who stepped down as Crest’s coach after the ‘20 season. “He was working on baseball all year ‘round.”
Carpenter bookended his four-year varsity career with .422 and .478 seasons, then headed off to Delaware. And early in his freshman season he served notice of what kind of player he would become in a game at Elon. On the mound was right-hander George Kirby, who was destined to be drafted by Seattle (and further destined to become an All-Star with the Mariners in 2023).
Nasty pitcher – high 90s fastball, the whole bit.
First time up, Carpenter, a righty hitter, launched a ball just foul over the fence in right, then took a 3-2 fastball on the outside edge for strike three. Second time up, he again worked the count to 3-2.
“And I knew he was going to give me a fastball, and I think it was like 97,” Carpenter said. “And I blasted one to left center field (for a homer). That was a cool memory. That was a great feeling, certainly.”
Made an impression on Sherman, that’s for sure.
“When he turned on one of George Kirby’s fastballs, we thought, ‘Uh-oh, Joe can handle some cheese,’” said the coach, who retired after the ‘22 season, Carpenter’s last in Newark.
Carpenter was Colonial Athletic Association Rookie of the Year as a freshman, and made second-team All-CAA his last two years in college. But he went undrafted after his junior year (2021), at least in part because the draft had been cut from 40 rounds to 20 the summer before.
“I thought somebody would take a chance on drafting him,” Sherman said. “I’m surprised nobody did, because he’s a big, strong power guy. I thought between (rounds) 14 and 20, somebody would grab him.”
Peeples has worked out Carpenter (not to mention Lancaster Catholic product Travis Jankowski, a veteran major league outfielder now with the Texas Rangers) the last several offseasons, and had his ear to the ground before that ‘21 draft. The way he remembers it, the scouts liked Carpenter.
“They had him (in the) top five rounds,” he said. “That’s when he had his worst year in college (batting .260). So to a point it’s kind of the timing of it, too.”
In large part because of his relationship with Peeples, Carpenter landed with the Stormers in the summer of 2022, immediately after his final college season. He slashed .297/.352/.500 in 21 games, then enjoyed similar success over the long haul in ‘23: a .297/.345/.505 slash line, with 16 homers and 52 RBIs. This year’s highlights include a 19-game hitting streak, but good luck getting him to talk about that.
“Honestly, I don’t really try to think of that stuff,” he said. “I try not to look at statistics very much at all.”
When asked what Carpenter needs to improve upon, Peeples said he’s “gotta get a little bit more athletic,” and added, “Talking with different people, it’s like you gotta be athletic, have some speed to play in the middle. You gotta have some power to play on the corners. He’s kind of that tweener.”
Point taken. Carpenter goes 6-2, 220, but had homered just six times in 58 games through July 4. He also has just three steals.
Peeples also said that Carpenter has “got to get better at … slowing the game down in his head.”
“Sometimes he’s out there, he’s scared to make that mistake,” the manager added. “And mistakes are gonna happen. As long as you’re doing it at 100 percent effort, hey, we can live with it. But just being able to slow the game down (is crucial), and don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”
The season grinds on. Carpenter controls what he can control – his preparation, his approach, his mindset. Maybe the phone rings, maybe it doesn’t.
Meantime Arty keeps showing up, too. He attends every home game he can, as well as those the Stormers play in York. The most notable exception came last August, though it was for an understandable reason: He had a heart attack.
Arty, 64 at the time, began experiencing chest pains as he sat in the stands during an Aug. 29 game between Lancaster and Charleston, an eventual 9-4 Stormers victory.
“I thought I was having acid reflux,” he said. “I got some Tums and a bottle of water, and that usually cures it.”
Not this time, so he approached the EMTs working the game. They took his blood pressure, saw that it was abnormally high, and gave him four baby aspirin. They also called an ambulance, which ferried him to Lancaster General Hospital, two blocks away.
Once there, he was given some sobering news.
“My widowmaker,” he said, referring to the left anterior descending artery, “was like 90 percent blocked.”
He had a stent surgically implanted, and was released from the hospital the following day. The day after that, he was back at the yard – though he had to promise his doctors that someone else would drive him there.
“I don’t like to miss baseball games,” he said.
Same for his son, who declined to address his father’s episode. Said it was “kinda personal.” Certainly we can guess that among other things he is glad that he continues to receive Arty’s pregame texts, the ones that always say the same thing: See it, hit it.
Far more often than not, Joseph Carpenter does just that. It’s just that he would rather be doing it somewhere else, just like everybody else in his shoes. He would rather be living his dream, rocketing through the minors like a George Kirby fastball. One day at a time, though. One day at a time.
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