Friday, June 24, 2011

I Should've Seen it Coming - Part One

Andy played professional baseball for eleven seasons. We've lived in ten-plus cities, nearly fifty states, and two countries.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration.

It's probably 53 states.

My math skills are a little fuzzy.

I blame the children.

We move at least twice a year, and that's when things are slow. Kentucky is our home base (pun totally intended) which we return to every fall. When we were building our house there we told the guy who was helping us pick our appliances that we just like to be close to the family for the holidays.

Starting with Halloween and working our way through Valentines Day.

Then we are outta there!

I'm pretty sure that poor man is still trying to figure out what we do.

Anyhoo, as a player, when spring training is coming to an end you don't always know for sure where you are going. Then once you get there you don't know how long your stay will be. You could get sent up, sent down, released or traded. This uncertainty is an every day reality of the life of a minor league ball player.

And his wife.

So when I was chatting with a friend this winter about Andy's retirement from playing and his subsequent decision to stay in the game by coaching she said,

Aren't you tired of all the traveling and packing and whatnot?

To which I replied,

Well, at least with coaching we'll know exactly where we are going and how long we'll be there.

Had I been paying attention there's good chance I'd have heard a snorting sound from heaven. There are many times when the words that come out of my mouth crack the good Lord up.

This was one of them.

Andy was hired to be the Missoula Osprey hitting coach, one of three rookie league teams within the Arizona Diamondbacks organization. The rookie ball season doesn't start until after the MLB Draft which occurs in June. We came to Phoenix the first of March and knew we were staying there until mid June when we would make the trek up to Montana to start the season.

With both cars, the car top carrier, three children and the dog.

You know, the usual parade of craziness.

Well.

Two days before we were scheduled to leave for Montana there was what we shall call some organizational restructuring. The manager for the AZL Diamondbacks (the rookie ball team in Phoenix) was involuntarily removed from his position.

Okay, he was fired.

When Andy came home with that news I was knee deep in suitcases and cleaning supplies trying to pack and clean enough to get our deposit back. I said to him

should I keep packing?

Because I've been doing this a long time. I know how this works. If you think you're going somewhere in this game,

you don't.

And if you aren't planning on change,

it will.

He said

Of course you should keep packing. I've not even been a hitting coach in a real game yet, they aren't gonna make me a manager. Besides our lease is up on this house anyway.

Oh yeah. Forgot about that.

So I continued procrastinating packing for the next 48 hours right up to the point that I had Lainey with me at the car wash, cleaning out the car so we could make another huge mess in it on our drive up to Missoula the next day.

Then Andy called me and said

Stop cleaning.

Ha! I knew it!

I said,

Congratulations! That's amazing! You're a manager! Where the heck are we gonna live?

And he said,

I don't know. Can you call someone?

Now here's where the spit hits the fan. Because in eleven years of doing this thing we call baseball life I have NEVER been in charge of procuring the housing.

EVER.

He always takes care of finding apartments, townhouses, basements, vans down by the river for us to call home.

ALWAYS.

But now he is buried to his neck in emails and phones calls and impromptu meetings and I get to finish packing, loading the cars and getting us out of our (help me Jesus, CLEAN!) rental by nine the next morning.

If only I knew where we we going......

To be continued

1 comment:

  1. Wow. Amazing. I did not know much about what you have been up to. It is fun catching up on the blog. Do you home school with all of your traveling?

    ReplyDelete