With playoffs out of reach,
end of the year is here

Over the past five seasons, I have acquired the ability to gauge the progress of our year by the conversations and banter throughout the clubhouse. Certain periods of the year bring about varying topics of discussion, which date the point in the season.

Early in spring training, clubhouse talk usually sounds a lot like the first week of school, with guys meeting and greeting each other with conversations marked with very cordial "So where are you from?" to "What organization have you played with?" to the "Oh, so did you play with so-and-so."

Over time the clubhouse lines get drawn and the little groups begin to form. While not nearly to the extent of the high school cafeteria separations between the cool kids, the jocks, the not-so-cool kids, the tough kids and so on, there are nonetheless different groups that gravitate to each other somehow.

This year there are a number of discernible groups hanging out throughout the clubhouse. The far corner belongs to the card players, who spend countless hours in the clubhouse, on the bus and in the hotel rooms across the Midwest playing hand after hand of whatever.

The bathroom area is where all of the haircuts occur, with our team barber/closer Nathan Stone running his clippers every day for about a half-hour after batting practice. The inner wall of the clubhouse is where all the "bat aficionados" linger, debating the specific weight, length and balance of each bat model made by each bat manufacturer.

The walking wounded are housed in the training room of course. There's usually not too much talk going on in there -- just a lot of whispering, icing, ultrasound treatment and a whole lot of stretching.

This season, strangely enough, there was even a group of book readers who exchanged titles and discussed books and passed books on to one another when they were done.

During the bulk of the season, clubhouse banter consists of anything from good places to eat, to activities from the previous night, to news from around the league, or hopefully, if you're lucky, the Frontier League pennant race.

Lately, talk around the Springfield-Ozark Ducks has consisted of the offseason, indicating of course, that we're out of playoff contention. While I was hoping we'd be discussing our playoff pitching rotation and our playoff travel plans about this time, we are instead talking about travel plans to return home.

For some, the end of the season today means a 36-hour drive home to California, or a day of flying to return home to Venezuela, as it is for reliever Ricardo Rodriguez. For our slugging all-star Brian Kirby, going home means taking his Camaro south for a three-hour drive back to Little Rock, Ark.

Others will make the drive to a new locale in search of offseason jobs, like left-handed starter Cody Fisher, who will be moving from Olney, Ill., to Indiana, where he will coach at the University of Indianapolis.

The offseason offers uncertainty for others. Lots of our guys will drive home, hoping to find a paying gig that won't take up too much time in the winter, allowing them time to work out and prepare for the next season. Some will make the decision to hang up their spikes and call it a career.

Others will return to finish school, as will our southpaw ace Jamie Bennett, who returns to the University of Tennessee to wrap up his studies after posting the first 10-win, 100-strikeout season of his five-year professional career.

The offseason for me will consist of a mad job search. After six years of having an offseason job to return home to, this year I will be checking out the classifieds, hopefully for a very short period. In the meantime, I'm sure I'll be spending a lot of time babysitting my 3-year-old nephew Davan, and meeting my new nephew Keon, who was born during the season.

This is the life we live in pursuit of the dream. The sacrifices made by minor league coaches and players are not easy ones, but the opportunity we receive to get paid to take part in this game must outweigh it all.

Even though the end result was not quite satisfactory, the lessons and experiences gained over our 96 games in 101 days in the Midwest made it all worth the while. We won more than 50 games and will finish with a winning record, we fielded one of the better pitching staffs in our division, and we got another chance to take part in this great game for one more summer in the sun.

Being able to share my experiences in professional baseball for the fourth summer has been enjoyable as always.

Once again, thanks for coming along for the ride.