Article reposted from The Virginian-Pilot
Authoer: David Hall
Mark Shires was in a golf cart on the eighth hole during a leisurely Tuesday morning round in Bethlehem, Pa., with Norfolk Tides third base coach Jose Hernandez and radio play-by-play man Pete Michaud.
Shires, the team’s athletic trainer, felt his phone vibrate. It was Tides manager Ron Johnson calling with the news that catcher Francisco Pena had been summoned to the major leagues by the parent Baltimore Orioles.
The call set into motion a series of carefully orchestrated events. Expecting a roster move after Orioles catcher Caleb Joseph took a gruesome foul ball below the zipper a day earlier, Shires attached Pena’s name to the town car he had reserved minutes earlier.
A driver picked up Pena at the team hotel and drove him to Baltimore as the threesome resumed their round.
“I got really bad on the back nine,” Shires said. “But that’s normal.”
It’s easy to forgive Shires for his distracted play. It’s common knowledge that a person in his position handles minor scrapes and cuts, sprained ankles and sore elbows. What most people don’t know is that in minor league baseball, athletic trainers also are de facto team travel agents.
In addition to arranging trips to Baltimore or Double-A Bowie, Md., Shires and his peers also put together the list of players and staff for flights and road hotels, arrange hotel rooms for short-term players at home and generally shuffle personnel from team to team within the organization.
If a roster move occurs on the road, as it did in Pena’s case, Shires has to figure out how to get the player from Point A to Point B. And it’s not always as easy as calling for a car.
“Initially, when you first get into it, I think it’s all hard,” Pawtucket athletic trainer Jon Jochim said. “But then once you get going, it’s just old hat. You have a routine just like anybody else.”
That routine requires thinking on the fly, as Shires, a 39-year-old native of New Orleans, did a few seasons ago when infielder Jemile Weeks was recalled as the team bused home from Scranton, Pa.
The bus stopped at a train station in Wilmington, Del., where Weeks bought a ticket to Baltimore. It was 11 p.m., in a pouring rain, when Weeks’ equipment was dug out of the bus and sent along with him as the rest of the team continued toward Norfolk.
There was the occasion early this season when an unnamed outfielder left his passport in a rental car in Allentown, Pa. Shires spent much of the next night’s game, in Norfolk, with “one eye on the field and one eye looking at my phone, trying to get the phone numbers to try and get ahold of Thrifty Rental Car.”
Then there was the now legendary time the team was leaving Lawrenceville, Ga.,for Buffalo after a day game that ran long. The team bus sped through the Atlanta airport complex, arriving 25 minutes before takeoff on a direct commercial flight.
Shires called the gate and was told the flight would leave on time. “Sir, we’re going to have to re-book you for tomorrow,” the agent told him.
“That’s fine,” Shires said, “but you’re going to have to reroute 32 people to Buffalo tonight. Or you’ve got an option to hold that plane about a half-hour. Your call.”
The Tides made the flight.
“Best I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said of Shires’ manipulation of that trip. “I couldn’t believe it.
“He’s invaluable to me,” the skipper continued. “I think that’s the right word. Because he’s not only good at what he does medically, but he’s a phenomenal traveling secretary. I know he doesn’t want to be remembered as that, but if you need somebody to get something done, Mark gets it done.”
So how is it that travel arrangements fell to people who are classically trained to treat and prevent injuries?
Tides pitching coach Mike Griffin recalls that when he broke into pro ball, in 1976 as a 19-year-old pitcher at Class-A Asheville, N.C., the coaching staff consisted of a manager and a“trainer” who possessed, Griffin likes to say, “aspirin and Atomic Balm” and little to no medical knowledge.
“(After a game), you went to the trainer’s room and dropped off your uni and all your personals for baseball, and then he’d go to the Laundromat and wash until about 4 a.m.,” Griffin said. “And then at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, we’d all go to the trainer’s room and pick up our uni and our personals.”
Added Johnson, whose career as a catcher began two years after Griffin’s: “So either the manager did it all or the trainer. The manager handled all the on-field stuff, and the trainer did everything else.”
That changed in the 1990s, when organizations began to see the value of having a trained medical eye on hand.
In 1993, when Johnson was managing at high Class-A Wilmington, Del., he had a pitching coach and a trainer. The following season, the trainer was replaced because he wasn’t certified.
Before then, Shires said, trainers coordinated team travel because “we had to legitimize ourselves.” They handled travel, in other words, to justify their spot on the team bus.
“It was worse back then,” said Durham athletic trainer Mike Sandoval, who has watched the job evolve over his 30 years in the game. “You had to do everything. You had to book hotels on your own. You had to do bus times on your own. I mean, everything was on your own. At least now, you have help.”
That help comes in the form of someone in the front office who books flights and hotel rooms up to a year in advance. In Norfolk’s case, that’s longtime executive Dave Rosenfield.
It still falls to the trainers to match names with plane tickets and hotel rooms on a roster that’s rarely unchanged for even a week at a time.
When teams at all levels of the minors reach a road hotel in the middle of the night, it’s the trainer who’s handing out room keys to bleary-eyed players.
“For me, it’s just part of the job,” Jochim said. “Do I like it? I wouldn’t say I like it, but it’s part of the job, so I do it.”
The most important part of a trainer’s job is often executed behind the scenes. At its core, the position is dedicated to injury prevention and recovery.
When a pitcher leaves a game, for example, Shires puts him through a series of weight exercises designed to strengthen the rotator cuff, charting each rep.
If a player takes a foul ball off the foot, Shires emerges from the dugout with Johnson to check on him. Shires is the only man in the dugout the umpires can’t run off the field, so he takes as much time as the player needs to regroup.
“So I’m the human rain delay when I go on the field,” he said.
It is but one crafty way trainers do their jobs.
Shires, like Jochim and Sandoval and all other trainers now in baseball, has the educational credentials to do the job. Now in his 10th season as Norfolk’s athletic trainer, Shires earned a bachelor’s degree from West Chester (Pa.) University and a master’s in exercise science from California University of Pennsylvania.
He worked his way up through Baltimore’s farm system, starting with the Rookie-level Gulf Coast League Orioles in 1999. In the offseason, Shires lives in West Chester with his athletic trainer wife, Alison, and their nearly 2-year-old son A.J.
Shires originally planned to study computers in college but saw a sports medicine class in a course book and thought, “Wow, that looks cool.” From there, he was hooked.
“It was either sitting behind a desk and staring at a computer or working in baseball,” Shires said. “I still sit behind a desk and stare at a computer, but I also get to sit on the front row. I’ve got the best season tickets in the world – except I’ve gotta be there.
“I wouldn’t want to do anything different.”
Norfolk reliever Pedro Beato recalled a recent day when Shires entered the clubhouse with an electric acupuncture pen that Beato had never seen. The device was used on trigger points to help Beato’s muscles relax.
They needed it; the 29-year-old right-hander entered the weekend leading International League pitchers in appearances.
“It’s actually huge to have a trainer that knows what he’s doing, and getting the right stuff done,” Beato said. “Not just getting work done, because just getting work done doesn’t do it. It’s getting the right stuff done – working smart, not working hard.
“He’s awesome. He has a lot of tricks. He always pulls something new out of his pocket.”
Shires did it again Friday, when the Tides’ 6 a.m. flight from Norfolk to Washington’s Dulles International – and ultimately Columbus, Ohio – was abruptly canceled the night before. He arranged for a 3 a.m. bus to take some players to Dulles to board a plane while others waited for later flights out of Norfolk.
Eventually, they convened piecemeal in Columbus for a 7:15 p.m. game. Shires, as he does on all trips, let players know when the bus was leaving the hotel for the ballpark via Twitter.
Through injuries, recovery treatments, on-field delay tactics and travel nightmares that force creativity, Shires and his colleagues help keep the game running.
Jochim, perhaps, summed it up best.
“We just make it work,” he said.
Even on the golf course.