Road trips in the baseball world can get pretty repetitive. I haven’t always had a blog to kill the time, and even when I have, there are more road trips than blog posts, that’s for sure. Guys will read, write, play games on their phones, watch movies, play cards and of course sleep. Bus rides and plane rides get really boring after the first couple of trips but believe it or not, some can get pretty exciting, although those are few and far between.

          I remember my first road trip for baseball on a coach bus. When I say first, I mean the first one where I didn’t have Mommy or Daddy at the wheel to pull over every time I wanted a couple McChicken’s.

My old travel ball team was bussed from East Hartford to Marietta, GA, for the East Cobb World Wood Bat tournament, which was about 17 hours with asses in every seat of that coach bus.  People were coming up with very creative ways to fall asleep on the bus because staying in that seat upright for that whole time was just about impossible. I employed the method of sliding underneath the seats with my pillow and making a little nest on the floor, which was surprisingly comfortable, as long as you didn’t get kicked in the head and no one farted on you.

          In my freshman year at UConn, I was introduced to plane trips nearly every weekend in the beginning of the season. I had only ever been on a plane once before college for the Power Showcase in Miami that January of my senior year of high school, so I was still very new to the flying thing. People would complain about the flights, some because they were scared to death of flying and others because they were seniors and they had done it nearly 100 times. I on the other hand, because of how our alphabet fell, got a window seat every time for those JetBlue flights, and I would get a good playlist going. It is still captivating to me, thinking about watching us take off and getting to our 35,000 foot altitude among the clouds and soaring along at 600 miles per hour….that’s my father’s pilot instincts I guess. If I didn’t have a window seat for a plane ride and I couldn’t find someone to switch with me, the whole day was pretty much ruined.

          It was on bus trips while playing for the Newark Pilots the summer after my freshman year in upstate New York when I discovered a really fun way to scare the piss out of some of my teammates on the rides home, while also having a comfortable spot to stretch out my legs. I was in the very back of the bus and crawled up into the overhead storage spots, which I could just barely fit into. I would slither up and down the compartment. Some of them had doors that could be pushed open from the inside, and others had just the big rubber bands going across and nothing else. I would reach down with my arm and pick peoples noses and wake them up while they were sleeping and they’d think it was a ghost arm because they didn’t think anyone was crazy enough to do what I was doing. It was too much fun and also after a while I would get bored and fall asleep up there. Being up there seemed to make some of those 4 hour trips go by a little faster.

          Road trips can also get ugly, such as UConn’s first trip my sophomore year when a handful of guys contracted the Bubonic Plague (queue the scary music). At least it felt like the Plague at the time and that’s what we called it, but in reality five or six of us got a really bad stomach bug. We were leaving campus for the University of San Antonio at 3:30am for a 6am flight out of Bradley. Luckily I had packed the night before, because I woke up around 2am before we had to leave and started puking my brains out. I still made the 3:30 bus and about 15 seconds after it started rolling towards the airport, I ran to the back of the bus and puked in the bus bathroom until we got to Windsor Locks. I was feeling a little better and fell asleep right away on our flight towards Baltimore, where we were connecting. Little did I know, while I was in my slumber, the Plague was spreading, as a few other guys puked in their seats, while others had to make a mad dash to the back of the plane to pinch a mean one. It was getting ugly.

          “Willy dude,” said our pitching coach after we landed in Baltimore, “Guys were puking and pooping everywhere on that flight because of you man! You feeling better?” At that very moment, it was like someone had punched me in the stomach, and I myself made a mad dash to the airport bathroom holding my mouth. It was a nightmarish two plane rides but finally we landed in Texas and as we got to our hotel, Coach Penders told me I couldn’t practice that day, which was probably the right move, but I almost lost my marbles. After the less than perfect day of travel, all I wanted to do was go to the field, let baseball take my mind off the last 18 hours, and get ready for the game tomorrow. And after all, it was our first series and we had been working for months and months to get here. But it was for the best that four others and myself were quarantined into one hotel room. I still played that weekend, dry heaving on the field and all in the Texas sun, while losing probably 15 pounds from the Plague and the heat.

          Who could forget the infamous Columbia bus breakdown? We had a game in New York City against Columbia, again in my sophomore year (rough year for travel), and we left for the City around noon for a 5pm game. I’ll never forget the trip on 195 in Storrs on our way to Interstate 84. Randomly, the bus would start fishtailing towards the side of the road, each time prompting a “woooaaaaaaah” from the whole bus. It happened three or four times before our bus driver finally pulled over in Tolland, about a quarter of a mile from the highway. It turns out, at some point, the two back right rear tires blew out.

          “Holy cow!” exclaimed our bus driver in a pretty thick accent. “Good thing I stopped and checked it out, if we went on the highway with that we would have flipped for sure.” Lovely. Hanging out in a random pizza shop, eating some pie, and watching some TV took my mind off of that scary thought. We waited for an hour and a half for a new bus to come and pick us up for NYC. We rolled up to the field around 4:40pm for our 5pm game, and yes we ended up starting at 5pm, to the dismay of our starting pitcher Anthony Kay. Talk about a show-and-go!

          I’ve had limited experiences in the minors, as bus trips in the Gulf Coast League and Extended Spring Training are not too lengthy (an hour and a half at most). I do know one thing, those trips are cramped for two reasons: 1) they get these in between size coach buses with just enough seats for everyone and 2) the Latin guys will sprawl out all over the far back of the bus to get comfortable, so you have to buddy up in the front and make sure you pee before you get on the bus because it’s a maze to get to the back. When I get up to the NY-Penn League this summer to play with Aberdeen, we will have a whole bunch of nice long road trips, including an eight hour trip up to Burlington, VT, with no traffic (ooph).

          The higher one climbs in this game the longer the road trips get, which I’m okay with, no doubt. Although most of them are pretty boring and a lot of the same, it’s fun to see what a ballplayer will experience over the many road trips, or what they will think of to pass the time.