My lovely wife, and camera woman, came to visit me this past week while I weathered my sentence in extended spring training. Extended, as we in the biz call it, is not exactly the most fun place in the baseball world. For starters, it’s the bottom rung of the professional baseball ladder, and farthest away from the promised land of the Bigs. It’s also typically located in an area of the country that feels like a sauna as the summer months come into their glory. There are rarely more then ten fans at an extended game (because of the heat), no one has earned any veteran privileges, (because there are so many youngsters) and it’s a continuation of the drills done to death in spring training (hence, “extended”). If you can survive the sun and the suck, you still run the risk of your head turning into a bowl of oatmeal as your brain gives way to the monotony.
This is when guys find themselves in trouble. They are prepared for the physical duress, but not the mental. Their mind’s tire of beating video games, playing cards, and learning how to swear in Spanish. They get rowdy, liberal with cheap man soda, and soon, they’re running down the street with nothing but a mascot head on. Hey, we’ve all been there.
The secret is not staying there for long. It’s finding things to occupy your time. Creative stuff that won’t make your mom spit out her coffee when she types your name in the ol’ Google search box. Writing, drawing, watching movies, reading books… something. Just like you have to find a way to make your life on the field a success, you need to find a way to enjoy your life off it lest you go mad. It’s not easy to do when your transportation options are white passenger vans, your buddy’s car, or your own two feet (in many ways, extended is like a prison with no walls), but you’ve got to try to break out… Even if it’s something as simple as going to a bowling alley with a digital camera…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-jYO3GqZDI[/youtube]