WASHINGTON – It was already a long and grim day in Cincinnati for the Philadelphia Phillies: Their series finale against the Reds was delayed an hour by rain, they got steamrolled 8-0 and faced a quick turnaround to get to the nation’s capital for a four-game series.
So as manager Rob Thomson settled into his seat on the Phillies’ charter flight to Dulles International Airport, he nodded off easily. Twice. And both times he woke up, he thought they had landed in the D.C. area.
Turns out they hadn’t budged an inch – and the team’s travel nightmare was just beginning.
The Phillies sat on the tarmac in northern Kentucky for more than five hours as maintenance and repairs were performed on their plane. But as Wednesday turned to Thursday and the issues remained, the Phillies got the order that so many commercial travelers dread after time spent idling:
Deplane. Find a place to sleep. Those are the breaks.
And thus began a significant disruption to the delicate rhythm that gets ballplayers, staff and a truckload of equipment from City A to City B overnight and ready to roll the next evening.
Instead, it set off a wild scramble in both Cincinnati and Washington.
“That’s baseball. These things happen sometimes,” says Thomson, a proverbial baseball lifer. “You can’t control it so you just keep moving forward.
“Really, the MVPs last night were Jameson Hall and Sean Bowers and Michael Roche. They did a heck of a job taking care of us.”
That would be the Phillies’ traveling secretary, clubhouse assistant and manager of team travel, respectively. With the team already checked out of its Cincinnati-area hotel, the travel gurus managed to finagle more than 50 rooms at a Marriott overlooking the Ohio River.
Ever peer out your hotel window, ponder the sights yet realize you’ll only be there a hot second? That was the Phillies.
“It was actually pretty nice. On the water, nice view,” says Phillies closer Jordan Romano. “That was kind of cool. They were accommodating, getting 50, 60 people in there.”
Yet that was just half the equation.
In an ideal world, the Phillies would be hitting their pillows in D.C. around 1:30 a.m., just about the same time a truckload of dirty laundry, baseball gear and supplies rolled up to Nationals Park for the visiting clubhouse crew to attack.
Instead, the clubbies at Nationals Park waited in vain, well past the estimated arrival time before calling it a night. And that created a fire drill of logistics for Thursday.
The Phillies snagged a few hours of sleep in their very temporary digs, got the word around 11 a.m. that their replacement plane was secured and were on a bus back to the airport by noon.
Two hours later, they landed at Dulles and actually beat their equipment to the ballpark.
Around 3:30, the truck arrived and clubhouse workers furiously laundered and dried and distributed their gear, piecemeal. Perhaps a preferred warm-up shirt was ready, but sliding pants were in another load of laundry. That kind of thing.
Meanwhile, room keys for their D.C. hotel were dropped on chairs at locker stalls. Checking in would come much later, after their 6:45 p.m. tilt with the Nationals.
Sure, big leaguers travel in the lap of luxury and avoid 95% of the hassles the hoi polloi endure for business or pleasure. Yet when things go awry, they’re at the mercy of the power of teamwork.
Finally, just a couple hours before first pitch, the Phillies and their gear were whole, everything in its place, thanks to an all-hands effort from Nationals staff.
“They’re grinders already, working hard,” Romano says as an attendant hung items in his locker. “And they’re grinding hard today.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Phillies overcome travel debacle thanks to help in two cities
