Ramos: The reality of bus travel in the minors

From Jen Mac Ramos at Baseball Prospectus on October 25, 2019:

Often, lower levels in the minor leagues — especially where the teams are all clustered in one region — are called the “bus leagues.” Before the luxury of taking planes from city to city for the next game in the majors, players travel by bus and spend long hours on the road.

“Travel’s one of the biggest parts of baseball that people don’t understand and that’s something we have to deal with every day being ballplayers,” said Josh Lowe, a player in the Tampa Bay Rays organization.

Buses can break down, get stuck in traffic, or even get broken into. Sometimes you don’t know what time you’ll get to the field or even the next hotel.

Cleveland Indians prospect Nolan Jones discussed how this can create complications for the players as he said, “The bus trips that get you into the hotel at 5 a.m….It’s kinda finding that gap of how much I need to sleep before I get to the field. Because, obviously, you don’t want to oversleep, but you don’t want to be tired. Kinda just learning how many hours of sleep you need a night and evaluating your quality of sleep on the bus and kinda going from there. Some days, we have to show up later to the field because maybe we needed that extra hour nap.”

Read the full article here: https://www.baseballprospectus.com/prospects/article/54766/prospectus-feature-the-reality-of-bus-travel-in-the-minors/



Originally published: October 25, 2019. Last Updated: October 25, 2019.