Can we afford minor league baseball?

This is the question as of late. The question that is plaguing our minds and conversations on almost a daily basis. Can we afford to continue minor league baseball? And we’re not just talking nickels and dimes here, although that is the most obvious seeing the players make $1,300 a month before taxes (and for us before health insurance, which is another $180 per paycheck). There are so many other elements to consider in “affording;” there’s the fact that we are away from our church for half the year, which also means we are also away from friends; delaying starting a family…ect.

On the flip side, it is an amazing opportunity, one that doesn’t come along again in life. It is also so fun traveling around and seeing places you’d never see if you weren’t having to drive up to 10 hours to get to your next home or the next baseball game. I wish I had pictures of the beauty of Pennsylvania, driving along the river right before and after Williamsport will forever be one of my favorite sights and the one I use when I need some serene thoughts among the occasional chaos. Traveling around, working from home, sleeping in our blow up mattress and waking up to coffee and reading in our camping chairs around 9 am…okay sometimes 10 am, is totally the thing of dreams at the moment. We haven’t even reach one year of marriage and we’ve had four different homes, in four different states; and in doing that you kind of enjoy the little gypsy life and want to wait for the 3.5 kids and white fence life until you can name off the best coffee shops in all the small cities of the east coast if ever someone asked.

Looking forward and trying to imagine the next few months is such a funny thing. There are two polar opposite scenarios, we’re either planning for the next six months of off-season life or working towards long term life in Florida!

So anyway, one month left to the season and we’re in the big debate if baseball will happen again next year…if it’s even our decision to make, Cody could easily be released at the end of the year or spring training next year!

Cheers to the unknown!

minor league madness

Update: In the past month we’ve lived in three different states. I’ve driven through eight different states, some of them more than once and we’ve packed and unpacked our car with our belongings twice, once completely by myself. Oh, and we’ve done it all with making less than $500 dollars the whole month. Just your glamorous baseball life!

The craziest part of all of it had to have been the past week and a half. The Batavia team was on a road trip to West Virginia, which I made the road trip to go watch with another wife and her parents, mind you, I drove down with them in her car. So, it’s fourth of July, which made for a fun trip and a fun game, who doesn’t love free baseball and fireworks?? Okay, probably a lot of people, being me about a couple of years ago, but now it’s totally fun! Cody was meant to pitch that day and after waiting the whole game, alas he didn’t. Honestly, we weren’t sure what had been going on the past few days, we joked around him getting released and it being the end of baseball.

After the game we tried to meet up with them to have dinner, but when the game ends around 10:30 and you have to wait for a team meeting and showers and such it ends up being 11 pm and nothing is open, so we all chatted a bit and then decided to head back to the hotel and the boys left on the bus to go eat at a gas station (yep, the typical stop for a bus full of athletes that need to eat is a gas station).

We get back to our hotel around midnight when Cody texts me, “I’m going to Greensboro.” And my first thought is “hah hah you’re hilarious.” Because we talked about guys getting moved up while on road trips and how all their stuff gets left behind and how nuts that would be. And besides, getting moved up this early in short season for us was not really on our minds, maybe towards the end, but we though New York was just going to be our home for the summer.

He was not joking.

He got pulled off the bus and the coach talked to him telling him he was going to Greensboro in the morning and that it could be temporary. Oh, and the flight was at 8 am, an hour away, you need to find a cab to pick you up at 5 am (with an add in of “maybe your wife could take you?”)

So, here I am in West Virginia, a little over six hour drive from our current home, with a family I literally just met and Cody gets shipped off to North Carolina. Immediately, I look into finding ways to get back to New York as fast as possible to be able to start packing up, if not everything, at least Cody’s clothes so he isn’t living off a bag that was only packed for three days. Thanks to my sweetest parents we rent a car and I drive from West Virginia to upstate New York. Mind you, in all this there is still the “could be temporary” in our minds and we have to decide to take the risk and completely move or wait till he is possibly sent back to New York.

Three days later, I have the car all packed up and am making a ten hour drive to Greensboro, NC. We stay in a hotel for four days and in that time beg apartment complexes to let us rent for two months. And now here we are, at the end of a crazy almost two weeks in our new apartment that I’m not sure I actually want to move out of it’s so perfect for us. Praising the Lord for his amazing provision and wisdom during this time. All we can keep talking about is how much we’ve been pushed and grown in trusting Him and not ourselves in this ever changing and unpredictable lifestyle. 

opening day and cody's first outing!

 

friday was opening day for the batavia muckdogs! what is a muckdog? i have no idea….google brings up every team with the mascot of muckdog when you ask too. but I can tell you they are the short a affiliate team of the marlins, located in a small town between rochester and buffalo. the field is the oldest field of the new york penn league, most of the buildings in town are from the 1800’s too, so we’ve done a complete 180 coming from palm beach. 

perks over here getting free tickets every game for the "box seats" (i.e. the seats under the netting) i'm not complaining! i've gotten to meet people who are various host families, season ticket holders, family members of the other players and i even got to meet the pitching coordinator's wife who kindly let me borrow one of her blankets, i wasn't quite prepared for cold nights after the heat and humidity of florida. lesson learned. 

the opening series for the team was against the auburn doubledays, sadly the first two games were lost. but it was so nice to finally watch some baseball after months of rehab and training. there are even fireworks every friday night! it's pretty comical, the music is oldies and slow and the show is pretty intermittent, but none the less, fireworks!

cody’s first outing under the lights went well even though the statistics might paint a little bit of a different story. he entered the game in the 5^th and for the 5^th and 6^th innings he was perfect, six batters up and six batters down. he was getting a lot of groundballs and was throwing all three of his pitches for strikes. then in the 7^th inning he ran into a bit of trouble. after getting a quick out he walked the next guy and then surrendered a double to put runners on second and third. then getting the next batter 0-2 he threw a good curveball down in the zone that the hitter drove up the middle for two runs. cody then retired the next two batters ending the inning on a strikeout. 

his line:

3 IP, 2 Hits, 2 Runs, 1 BB, 1K

if you’re interested in keeping up in real time or want to see past info you can always check out cody’s stats here:

http://www.milb.com/player/index.jsp?sid=t511&player_id=641667#/career/R/pitching/2015/ALL

  pretty excited for our little adventure in all this number 35.

finally, a team....

So, here we are. After five months of spring training, rehab for tommy john, and extended spring training, cody has been placed on an actual team! Finally, were getting into some real baseball people. Like with bleachers and fans and not having to wake up before seven everyday.

We knew for about over a month when those who were in spring training were going to be leaving for teams. But, we only found out less than 24 hours before the players flights took off where we were going. Which meant driving around all weekend with our car packed to the brim yet again with all of our belongings. Okay, not all, we left even more behind. Living with less with every move.

We are excited to announce that cody will be playing for the Batavia muckdogs. Where is Batavia and what is a muckdog, you might ask? It’s a small town in upstate New York and I honestly still have no idea.

I’m starting to think this is more of a roadtrip blog than a baseball blog!

Cody’s mode of transportation was a three hour plane flight, lucky him. Mine is a 20 hour drive up the entire east coast. And today was day one, 9 hours into South Carolina. Only had one fun stop today in Savannah, Georgia. Where I enjoyed probably one of the best cold brews yet at The Coffee Fox and found a tiny organic café for a late lunch. I wish I had more time to walk around and explore, it was so beautiful with old brick buildings and spanish moss hanging from the trees lining the roads. Marking it on my list of places to come back and spend a weekend (or longer) in while we live on the east coast!

Cody’s first game is Friday! Hopefully it doesn’t take me two months to blog about it….

on the mound

has it been over a month since the last post?! i am ashamed....and busy.....

i've had the greatest joy of getting to become closer with the wife of the couple we live with. she is selflessly involved in our church and it has been so fun getting to join her in a lot of it. pair that with my job that work from home and making a lot of new friends, who i am very sad to be leaving soon....i'm making excuses....but that's my short update!

in better news, guess who is throwing in games again?

finally. one whole inning. welcome to rehab.

a little over a week ago, cody pitched in a game for the first time in almost two years and there were two fans to watch, spencer who played with cody in college and myself. extended spring training games apparently aren't making any headlines or worth even selling tickets for ;)

here's how it went:

1 IP, 0 R, 0 H,  0 BB, 1 K

sooooo ready for that in normal people language? me too. i literally just learned how to write that.

he pitched one inning, allowed zero runs, no hits, no "base on balls" aka walks, and one strike out.

his velocity was sitting in the 89-91 mph range. hopefully, it continues to go up.

there have been more innings since, but because minor leagues is just so informative about when you're going to play I keep missing them. but there will be two games this week, so i'll be sure to do my due diligence in cataloging those here.

here's the photo i got! sorry you have to look through the fence....it's a little awkward being the only girl in the stands with like 15 players, let alone getting up to the fence to take a better shot...soon, soon. especially since cody got me a swanky new camera, yay!!!!

let me know if you have any requests for specific baseball (or not) updates :) hoping to have a blog post soon about moving to a team!!! it's going to be either New York or North Carolina....any guesses?

polka dots?

Hello there! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted on here and Ashley wanted me to give you a little update on how baseball is going and how my new arm is holding up.

            Spring Training officially started this week and with that begins the 2015 season. Things are going well as I’m approaching being back to 100% game ready which should be in about a month and half, give or take. For those who know a little bit about the game, I’ve been throwing Live BP’s (batting practice) and will soon advance to simulated games.  Finally after that I will be able to throw in an ACTUAL game, after a very very long year of not playing.

            Now to explain the oddly shaped and colored circles on my right arm… My wife instantly sees them as polka dots, not shocking, its one of her favorite patterns. Unfortunately for her, I’m not sporting a fresh polka dot tattoo but rather the after effects of a treatment on my arm called ‘cupping’. Put simply its like a deep tissue massage. The purpose is to improve circulation to that area and help with the healing process.  A little glass ‘cup’ is placed on the injured area and the skin is sucked up into the cup using a suction pump. Then you leave the cups on for about 10 minutes. It looks like this.. 

Then after you look like this…

As to whether I’m a firm believer in the treatment is hard to say. I did feel better the next day but that could have been due to a number of different things. But I’m willing to try a procedure that the training stuff believes will help my arm feel better and get me back on the field faster. 

let's go "downtown"....

this weekend proved to be a smack in the face "you're not in california anymore duh" weekend. and it all started with planning a date night. each week we trade off planning a date night that costs under 20 bucks (which sounds easy until you realize you've done coffee the past ten weeks!) and this week was my week, and they usually are wednesday but this week it was pushed to saturday. it's kind of funny since it makes it sound like we have to make time to see each other, but in reality cody gets home from the field after only about three to four hours. soooooo date night is really more about getting out of the house and doing something that we have to pay for since we aren't in the position to be doing that daily even though we have enough time too. it's like retirement but backwards and with way less money.

well, this is actually way more challenging when you're placed in a new area, home field advantage is gone! so i googled. yep i'm such a  romantic obviously that i turned to google and typed "cheap things to do in florida." and apparently it's happy hour, that's the exciting and cheap thing to do in florida according to the internet...aren't you supposed to make my life easier?!?! oh well. so i looked up areas to walk around, because that is one of my favorite things to do, walk around and people watch and explore new places and cultures, so what a easy thing being in a completely new home.

exploring is basically the easiest ever back in the golden state, there's a downtown in every county that is actually way fun and you can see the personality of each city in each one. downtown LA for example is world's different from downtown san diego, which if you ask me i'll choose san diego any day over LA, sorry LA, love you sometimes though. seriously, you can walk around for hours and not be bored by looking at new restaurants and stores and people or quaint little city houses. there's always something new to notice too, like that graffiti of a majestic wolf-unicorn-cheetah or that house with a large gnome collection you looked over while instagramming that modern hipster coffee shop you just gave an outrageous amount of money to for the world's smallest yet most delicious latte. 

so, after much research of places closer than miami (saving that for another time, right cody? please?) i landed on the riverwalk of downtown ft lauderdale. sweet right?! you mean like the riverwalk in san antonio?? loved that place!

and so off we went....

and we were met by a scenic ghost town.

what a sad, sad, sad little attempt for a "downtown"....okay i'm being judgey but i've never seen so many empty store fronts in my life! the directory had spaces for about 30 places but only 4 places were written up on the board....it's almost laughable. but we gave it a shot and kept walking around, at least to find some coffee....

i do hope they improve this place because there are so many rundown and abandoned treasures like this!!! i can already picture myself eating breakfast with a coffee on that patio overlooking the river...

it really was a scenic place, but it felt so empty!

a place with buildings and walls like this, it deserves more places than "the tilted kilt"....seriously.....

after a failed attempt on yelp to find what could have been a fun little coffee stop, we gave up and went to our tried and true, west palm beach.

we've been a few times now and it reminds me of pasadena, so we ate and grabbed coffee and dessert at a newer place.

before i talk about that i want to make a disclosure that i'm a fan of the creative and specialty coffee shops, seriously, i'm a sucker for some good latte art, but two or three hearts in there and i'll be back time and time again. but, sometimes a big glob of foam and alternative 90's music does the soul good.

c-street coffee.

that ugly foam cappuccino was amazing, the flour-less chocolate cake that you spelled "flowerless" and served in a styrofoam container, and the large group of older ladies that looked like they loved their mom jeans for their comfort and not the trendiness of them, side by side with their husbands who enjoyed a good sock and sandal with their tommy bahama shirt made it even better.

 
speaking of people who could care less about their style, can we talk about how this guy right here went from wearing nike drifits and baggy jeans to rolled up slim fits and the best socks ever....

he just wanted you all to know he's come a far way.

so there it is folks, sometimes a adventure fail turns into a great night, laughing about ending up in the wrong side of town and walking into the india festival.

thanks for saving our night west palm! you're a little gem to us now.....


but i still miss CA downtowns......