Last Updated on July 3, 2021 by
Planes and sometimes buses! Most baseball teams travel on chartered planes. Sometimes, they use public airlines. They make use of buses on shorter trips, like a trip that is within or just outside the city. That is for cities close to each other. Presently, most major league baseball teams buy planes and buses for trips because most regular-season games are played on the road. As the teams travel for different games, most teams employ a traveling manager who has to take care of their lodging reservations and the movements from the airports to the hotels and facilities where the games are played. A transportation team normally overseen by the equipment manager would also be needed for the movement of their equipment while on the road.
This Is A Table To Showing What MLB Travel Assistants Have To Make The Travel Successful.
| Necessities In MLB (Major League Baseball) Travels | Description |
| A schedule | The schedule is what makes each player know what and what not to do after or before a game, the schedule is being posted in the clubhouse for players to know departure and game time. |
| Getaway day | The getaway day is just the last game of a series of games. This is when the road team leaves and the starting players rest. |
| Planes | The plane here is just a normal plane. The traveling manager takes care of their necessary documents while the team prepares for travels. |
| Secretary | This is just a peek at their jobs. The team’s secretary here renders his service by making reservations for about 60 players, coaches, media personnel, and sometimes family members to go on a road trip with the players. |
Traveling As A Team In The Major Leagues
As a high A or AA baseball player, traveling is both nice and tedious, we will tell you how. Firstly as a rookie and A baller, the road trips, and hotels are not pleasant but road trips are exciting and short. When you go higher into the major leagues, you would notice the hotels are nicer, you are taken to different high-class inns and the hotels are very close to the field. The major league teams are given the best and closest hotels so it causes no inconveniences to them. This is the bad part of these travels. As you move higher, the road trips get a lot farther than usual because the game schedules are spread out. Let me put this more easily, we all know the teams far north are Portland (Maine) and New Hemisphere, and the teams far south are Richmond and Akron (Ohio). The leagues even after knowing this would schedule matches with Portland and Richmond next to each other so you can travel down to the other side. Most MLB league teams spend one, two, or three on the road.
Necessities In MLB Travels
These four major necessities can’t be overlooked while taking MLB teams to travel.
• The schedule
• Getaway days
• Planes
• Secretary
The Schedule
Most MLB games start with three to four games with opponents to reduce travels. They usually play six to ten games in their homes before moving on to another six to ten games. After these rounds, they start moving with planes, according to a historian by the name of Alex Reisner, teams once used trains to get to their destination. In modern baseball, teams rarely use buses to travel.
Getaway Day
The name here comes from the train days as we said before. Every team used trains to travel and spend an entire day on the road to their opponent. The game before the teams took off would be scheduled for the afternoon, so the teams had enough time to travel. Nowadays, with planes teams can start a new series in another city the next day even when traveling to the opposite sides of the country. Traditionally baseball games are mostly scheduled for the afternoon.
Planes
MLB teams are known for traveling with chartered planes with major airlines. Like the Los Angeles Angels, charter their flight and make the flight attendance dress up in Angel colors. Some other teams charter planes to cut delays at airports.
Secretary
Every MLB team has traveling secretaries who take care of accommodation, payments, food, movement from airport to hotel and hotel to the facility. The Secretary collects the hotel keys and hands them over to the players. He or she takes care of the per-day basis of meals and other necessities.
Do Batboys Travel With The Team?
Batboys only on rare circumstances travel with the team. Normally, the batboys don’t travel with the team. What happens is, the home and visiting batboys are employed by the home team. For the uniform situation, it’s pretty simple, the home base boys wear the visiting teams uniform all season, and the same for the visitor’s batboys, they wear the home uniform all season.
How Did Baseball Players Travel Before Planes?
The Dodgers were the first to own a plane. Before that, baseball teams traveled with trains, a train traveling for baseball teams reduced with moving to the west coast. Most team’s stopped moving with trains and started using planes within 1957-1960. The reds were the first team to move by plane for a game in 1934. Teams flew occasionally with planes before the 1950s. Before then it was mostly trained because most teams were closer to each other back then.
Does Every Major League In Baseball Have Their Planes?
Most professional sports teams use charter, they use the same plane, team, and crew throughout the year. Most sports are not like baseball, even when teams have their private jets, they still need to land at an airport and take off from an airport.
How Are MLB Team’s Travels?
As soon as the MLB seasons begin, traveling gets a lot better for the teams. This is so because then most of the travels are by plane and sometimes bus when the distance between the two cities is 200 miles or less. This is where it gets better when the players travel with their coach, on any flight, they get three seats per pair of players and first-class meals.
Closing Thoughts
Most of these travels are seen as good times where players spend time with their team and chill before any big tournament. We’ve reached the end of this informative article. We hope that this article helped you find resources in your quest to know how baseball teams travel. Do not hesitate to contact us with any questions or comments. Thanks!
