The Bus

I put a thick red circle around Covington on the calendar the day the schedule came back from the league office. This bus trip is the essence of summer ball in the Valley League.  4:00 is standard departure time for the hour long trips to Front Royal, Winchester or Luray, but 2:30 today - a three hour trek to COV.  The league website publishes only the first three letters of the team names on the home page, so Ted, my assistant coach, best friend and roomate for the summer, decided that we too should only refer to the teams in the league on a three letter basis.  Scanning the league website on his phone he informs me and those players in earshot, "coach, we play COV, WIN plays WAY, HAY plays LUR, WOO plays ROC and STA plays HAR.  Looks like a good night to move up in the standings."
 
The reason this trip is a beast is that most of players are used to modest bus trips only, and many of them fly to their opponents during their four month, 56 game NCAA season.  In the Valley League, as well as the other summer leagues scattered around the country, road life is much different.  There is no arriving a day early for rest, staying in team hotels, or $21 dollar a day per diem for meals.  Instead, we were set to pull into the ballpark around 5:30, jump straight into batting practice, and see the first pitch at 7:30.  This grueling trip makes it hard to win at Covington, and we never win there; I think if we played there every night we still may never win a game.  Three hours on a bus to Covington, get off and play baseball - not a healthy mix.
 
The only saving grace for our club was ownership's commitment to travelling us in style:  air conditioning, DVD player, reclining seats.  Most of our kids felt like big leaguers when we'd arrive aboard our luxury motor coach, easing up along side the opponents' bus - a modified school bus with window-down AC, and a homemade paint job in the appropriate team colors.  Hell, we may not win at Cov tonight, but our trip home after the loss was gonna be a lot more confortable than theirs. In a 44 game summerball schedule some considerations are just more important than winning and losing.
 
Most of the guys would watch DVD movies, talk to their back-home girls on the phone, listen to tunes, play cards or eat.  I always made an early evaluation to see which guys were readers.  If a player was a reader, for some reason, I knew that he would turn out alright in the end.  Not that the other guys wouldn't, but I am always impressed by the guy who breaks the college jock mold.  

During the summer of '08, Anders Oster shattered it.  As coach Currle and I passed an electronic game of Texas Hold ‘Em back and forth and Superbad, or an equally raucous bootlegged movie played overhead, two seats behind us, Anders' mind (and pencil) was churning away.  He read somewhere that Mickey Mantle once hit a home run 735 feet, a feat never approached in the game as we know it today, and Anders was convinced that using physics he could prove the validity or impossibility of such a claim.  He sat with pencil and legal pad, a physics reference book, and a steadily growing audience, "well the Magnus Force...velocity...trajectory...drag, wind shear..."  He calculated, notated and scribbled for the full three hours, and by the end of the bus trip, now with a full cast of intrigued teammates debating him,  he deemed that the Mick's home run was nothing but lore unless he hit in Denver in a 50 mile an hour windstorm.