OKC Dodgers Tales from the Road
The OKC Dodgers share their worst road trip stories
369 miles.
That is how far Round Rock, Texas — home of the Round Rock Express — is from Oklahoma City, and that is the Oklahoma City Dodgers’ closest Pacific Coast League foe.
The farthest away? The Tacoma Rainiers in Tacoma, Wash., at 1,996 miles.
Each season, the Dodgers play 140 regular season games — half of which are played on the road, from cities as far west as Tacoma and as far east as Nashville, Tenn.
Planning for an entire professional baseball team and their luggage to travel across the nation weekly from April through September takes a great deal of planning. That is where Billy Maloney, the Oklahoma City Dodgers Baseball Operations Coordinator, or as he calls it, “traveling secretary,” comes in.
“Normally the travel schedule is done in January, so three or four months before the season,” Maloney said. “In December, we decide whether we are going to bus or fly. If it’s eight hours or less, we try to bus, and if it’s over that, we try to fly.”
Of the 15 other Pacific Coast League cities, just six (Albuquerque, Des Moines, Memphis, Omaha, Round Rock and San Antonio) fall under the eight-hour bus mark from Oklahoma City, placing trips to the remaining nine cities (El Paso, Fresno, Las Vegas, Nashville, New Orleans, Reno, Sacramento, Salt Lake and Tacoma) under the flight category.
Maloney explained that placing a whole team in the air is much more complicated than a bus trip, especially because the team does not fly charter.
“With flights, trying to get all of our bags onto the plane can be a challenge because it has to be under a certain weight,” Maloney said. “I have to try and put the luggage in many different boxes and bags to get under the weight limit. When you have 40 people on a flight, you’re looking at about 140 bags.”
The Pacific Coast League requires the Dodgers to take the first flight out following the conclusion of a game, which a lot of times can be as early as 5:30 in the morning — if the weather holds out.
“If the flight the night before never gets in due to delays or weather, it means we’re then scrambling to get on another flight,” Maloney said. “There have been nights where I’ve been up to two or three o’clock in the morning trying to book other flights to get them to their destination.”
No matter how much planning goes into a team’s trips, things can still go awry.
Hear from some 2019 OKC Dodgers players, coaches and staff on their worst road trips of all time.
Outfielder Logan Landon — So, the bus hit a car…
“I was in junior college at the time, and if anyone has been to junior college, you know — you don’t fly anywhere. You have these old buses that are kind of dingy.
“We’re driving and it’s three or four o’clock in the morning and the bus ends up hitting a guy’s car. [Our bus] rolled through a stop sign and we hit him with our bus, rolled into the ditch, and we’re still about 45 miles away from the town we were supposed to go to.
“I don’t even know what happened to the guy that we hit, but they couldn’t even send another bus to come get us. His car started on fire after he got out, so we had to extinguish the fire. They had to send shuttles to get us from the hotel that we were staying at.
“We’ve got 40-plus guys and with all of the bags that we had, we were only able to get four or five guys at a time in these shuttles, back and forth for what had to be about three hours. I don’t think I got back to the hotel until like six or seven o’clock in the morning.”
Outfielder Cameron Perkins — No wheels, no problem
“I was in college and we were in Tennessee for a team dinner after a loss. Our assistant hitting coach found some random lodge in the middle of nowhere out in the mountains that had a restaurant, so we drove out to it.
“After dinner, we couldn’t find the bus because when the bus tried to turn around to get to the parking lot, there was a big hill, like a dip in the road, and the bus leveled out. There were no wheels on the ground. The front of the bus and the back of the bus were just stuck on the ground.
“This was at 11 o’clock at night, so they had to find a tow truck to tow this bus in the middle of nowhere late at night. This was pre-Uber, so there was no way for anyone to get home, so we sat at this lodge where no one stayed at, in the middle of nowhere for about four hours, until a tow truck came and got us for a day game the next day.”
Manager Travis Barbary — Cockroach Waffles
“I’d gone to a (chain restaurant) after a night game with myself and Adrian Beltre. We had just ordered, and I noticed the girl behind the counter was having a tough night. She was on the phone with somebody who ended up being her boyfriend, who had just broken up with her.
“I get the syrup on my waffle with Adrian sitting beside me. I’m getting ready to take a bite and next thing I know, there’s a cockroach belly-up, stuck in the syrup. It had fallen out of the vent above me where I was sitting. I jump up, Adrian sees it, he goes crazy.
“I say to the girl: ‘Ma’am I’ve got a problem.’ She walks over, she sees the roach in the middle of my waffle, and she feels awful. She asked if we were in town for baseball and I said: ‘Yes, we’d be in town for a few nights.’
“She says: ‘I’ll tell you what. Come back each night while you’re here and you’ll eat for free’. So out of the cockroach falling into the waffle, I got three or four nights free at the (restaurant).”
Director of Communications and Broadcasting Alex Freedman —
A Welcome Fit for a King
“In 2013, we were supposed to go to Sacramento. Due to bad weather, the team was split into different flights throughout the day. The flight I was on just happened to contain Sacramento’s mayor at the time, Kevin Johnson, who was coming from a meeting where he solidified the Kings’ NBA future in Sacramento.
“As we’re getting off the plane, there was a huge media hoard there because they knew Johnson would be on that flight. We were joking it was for us.
“We actually started that game with 11 players. The other players were coming in on different flights throughout the day with some coming into Sacramento and others flying into San Francisco or Oakland and busing in — this was before Uber or all that stuff. And of course, I distinctly remember the game, they won against Sonny Gray, who was in Oakland’s system at the time and was pitching for Sacramento. Somehow we won that game.”
All Fired Up
“In 2017, we were busing to Iowa in the middle of I-35. We come upon a van that was completely engulfed in flames. Shockingly, it did not delay us that much. The fire department in the area wherever we were in Kansas got there pretty quickly and put it out, but that was definitely unexpected.”
12 hours later…
“In 2016, we were going out west to Fresno. Fresno has a very small airport. It’s not great. This was before they started intentionally placing off days before travel days going to and coming back from the West Coast in our league.
“We could either leave for L.A. on Sunday following our game and bus to Fresno, or take an early flight in the morning, so we tried to get there that night. So, we fly from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles — it was one of those flights where we stopped in Las Vegas, but didn’t get off the plane.
“We traveled with our equipment. What you have to consider is when you travel with your equipment in most other PCL cities, the home club has their clubhouse staff come to the airport and help pull the gear, but obviously that’s not going to happen at LAX [258 miles away from Fresno]. So there it is, me, the coaches, a couple players kind of helped, trying to load up as much luggage as we could, push it across the crosswalk to the bus a few times.
“Then the bus trip took another four-or-so hours. We did stop at In-N-Out Burger which was nice. I ran a stopwatch from the time we left our ballpark to the time I walked into our hotel room in Fresno. It read 12 hours and 44 minutes. It was just super long.”
Pitcher Rob Zastryzny — Student first, athlete second
“We were scheduled to fly to St. Louis and then we were going to bus from St. Louis to the University of Missouri where I was playing.
“There was a tornado warning in the St. Louis area, and the tornado ended up hitting part of the airport and closing it down for awhile.
“Instead of flying back to St. Louis, they decided to rent one charter bus for about 30 players, 10 staff and three trainers back to Columbia [Missouri], which was about 15 hours long. We got back around 6:45 or 7 a.m. and all of us had 8 a.m. classes that Monday — we had to go straight from the bus to class.”
Coach Jeremy Rodriguez — A Little Short in the Big Easy
“Earlier this year on a trip to New Orleans, I think we had three different planes going on. We had our position players, our starting pitcher and one reliever on the first plane and the rest of our relievers on the last two planes, which both got delayed. They didn’t get in until the second or third inning. We were praying that the starter would actually give us enough time until all of our relievers got there.
“They also didn’t have our rooms ready. We got to the hotel at 9 p.m. and they didn’t have our rooms ready until 2 a.m., so we had to sleep in the little lobby area. Those chairs are definitely not comfortable.”
Infielder Drew Jackson — I Guess We’re Walking
“We woke up at 3:45 in the morning. There was a tornado warning in Oklahoma City that day and there was purple rain on the radar. [Zach] Reks and I drove to the field. It’s pouring rain. We park and get our suitcases to put into the bus and the bus takes off and we’re stuck in the pouring rain. We were drenched and had to change clothes at the airport. I don’t know what the bus was doing — it came right back and it wasn’t even full yet.”
