• 19 March
  • By Carolyn LaWell
  • TeamJacksonville Suns
  • LocationJacksonville, FL
  • Tagged packing, uniforms, baseball
Why do managers wear uniforms?

Packing is never easy, especially when you’re about to hit the road, living out of the back of your car for five months. Most of my clothes are in boxes now, with enough for a fresh outfit every day for about a week during A Minor League Season. Now I know how managers feel around the end of every spring training when they trim their rosters. 

While searching for packing tips, I Googled all sorts of random things and, after enough clicks, wound up over at Mental Floss, where I found a post about why managers wear uniforms, even when none of their counterparts in basketball, football, hockey or soccer bother to dress like the players.

According to John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, the tradition goes back to the 19th century, when a manager was up in the offices, keeping the books, and a captain was down in the dugouts, leading the players. Managers filled out business expenses. Captains filled out lineup cards. 

Over time, the terminology shifted a bit as fewer captains played on the field, though their wardrobe never changed. (Fun Fact: Plenty of older teams have won a World Series with a captain -- or a player-manager -- at the helm, but only two teams have won their only championships with one: the Chicago Cubs in 1907 and ’08 and, a few decades later in ’20 and ’48, the Cleveland Indians.) Today, even though their responsibilities have shifted, the modern manager still wears a uniform.

Must make packing for road trips a little easier.

Carolyn@AMinorLeagueSeason.com ♦ @CarolynLaWell ♦ @AMinorLgSeason

Photo courtesy of mdhsphotographs

  • 19 March
  • By Matt LaWell
  • TeamJacksonville Suns
  • LocationJacksonville, FL
  • Tagged schedules, spreadsheets, baseball
The beauty of building a new schedule

Schedules fascinate me. In college, I built at least a dozen of them every quarter before I registered for classes. In the newsroom, I set up times to talk with players and coaches days or weeks before deadline, little blocks of time marked off on my calendar. And for the last four years, I studied minor league baseball schedules -- their similarities, their differences, their quirks.

I wanted to figure out if it was possible to see a game at every minor league stadium in a season and, after plenty of trial and error that first year, I found out that it was -- as long as your personal schedule is limited to the 120 full-season teams. If Carolyn and I were more technologically intelligent, we could have written some program to figure out a schedule for us. 

Instead, we used a massive spreadsheet and a map.

Channeling Henry and Holly Stephenson, who designed Major League Baseball’s schedule every year from 1981 until 2004, we figured out how to cross the country without missing a team. The process took 158 columns, 125 rows, about 40 hours and four trips back to the start when we hit a wall.

The best stretch of our schedule? The last 22 days of July, when we have six travel days and a daily average of barely 90 miles of driving. The most challenging? The first half of May, with 17 straight game days that will take us from Texas through New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada, then back to California and up and down the coast, almost 250 miles a day. But even that schedule is better than the one the (temporarily renamed) Empire State Yankees will play this year. Thanks to renovations on their stadium, every one of their 144 games is on the road.

Matt@AMinorLeagueSeason.com ♦ @MattLaWell ♦ @AMinorLgSeason

Photo courtesy of Melanie Guenther and Daniel Reid

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