Highway a fact of life for players

Baseball’s changed a lot from the days of Lou Gehrig and Satchel Paige. Players don’t wear wool flannel uniforms any more and batters at the plate wear helmets instead of ball caps. Fans in the stands also wear ball caps — instead of fedoras.

One thing hasn’t changed from the sport’s older days, though. Minor-league teams still spend days — not hours, days — on bus trips every season, just as in the minor leagues of yesteryear.

“We have some long bus rides,” Amarillo Dillas manager Brady Bogart said during the team’s most recent road trip, an eight-game tour of South Texas.

The six-team United League includes four franchises in the southern part of the state. Edinburg and Laredo have teams. Rio Grande Valley plays in Harlingen and Coastal Bend plays in Robstown, just inland from Corpus Christi. Halfway between South Texas and the Panhandle, the San Angelo Colts play ball. Amarillo is the league’s northern outpost.

The Dillas will travel across roughly 8,500 miles of Texas highways over the course of their three-month season. By comparison, it’s a mere 6,500-mile drive from Amarillo to Tierra del Fuego, located at the southernmost tip of South America.

When Bogart spoke with The Amarillo Independent, the team was waiting for its motel accommodations in Corpus Christi. The team had just rolled across South Texas from Laredo and — less than three hours before the first pitch of last Sunday’s game — the players’ rooms weren’t ready.

“It can be hard for the players to get their rest,” Bogart said. By the time players complete a game, shower, have a postgame meal and bus back to their lodging, it can be well into the small hours of the morning.

Consider also that the Dillas are scheduled to play 80 games in 82 days this year. There are no days off in August, a month that will include an extended stay in Harlingen and Edinburg.

When asked to describe the best thing about life on the road, Bogart had a one-word answer: “Winning.”

Sometimes, the road can present perils more menacing than long hours or bad gas-station coffee. During a 2006 swing down to South Texas, the Dillas’ team bus had a run-in with a wild turkey. The bird lost the battle, but its impact left a gaping hole in the passenger-side windshield.

“We were on our way to Harlingen and a turkey smashed the front of our bus, the windshield,” Bogart said. “We couldn’t go on the interstate anymore — we had to take the back roads and go 30 mph. It made a 12-hour bus ride into 18 hours.”

The team covered the hole in the windshield with a resourceful combination of a roll-up mattress, some duct tape and the bus driver’s belt. The game started late in Harlingen that night, but the contest was played in its entirety.

“We won that game 4-1. The other manager wasn’t very happy about it,” Bogart said.