If April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, what do three straight days of hard rain in March bring? Your guess is as good as mine, but I’d like to think that the downpours around the Reading area are just a final clearing up before baseball. Maybe that’s wishful thinking but the forecast is calling for temperatures above 60 (with sun!) all week long. Now that, is baseball weather.

When I wrote on this blog last week, I reflected on my first week here with the R-Phils: the excitement, the tasks at hand, and so forth. As I enter my third full week with the club, there’s a mixture of both comfortability and anticipation. With each passing day and every passing week there is a sense of belonging up here in the press box at FirstEnergy Stadium. It’s a feeling that this is what I love being around and this is what I want to do. Something about going to work everyday at a historic baseball stadium – not some corporate mess of cubicles – puts my mind at ease and certainly makes work much more fun. When baseball is something that you love, and that’s the case with me, it can’t get much better than this.

However, on the flip side there is also a nagging sense of anticipation for Opening Day. When I arrived here there was about 40 days left until our first game against Portland (tickets available for all games at www.readingphillies.com). In fact, when I originally interviewed there must have been over 80 days or so until the season kicked off. That number is now whittled down to 24. With football in the off-season, the Sixers playing so badly I would rather not talk about it, and March Madness just getting underway, baseball is front and center. The field looks ready, the stadium seems ready, and I’m ready. This is my first position in baseball, and perhaps it’s excitement and nerves, but all I want is 7:05 pm on April 8th. I’ll be right here at FirstEnergy Stadium, in the press box, watching my R-Phils take the field for the first time. There’s nothing quite like that first day of baseball.

In the time leading up to Opening Day however, there is absolutely work to be done. One of the funniest things people ask, and I’ve actually heard this a few times, is something to the tune of, “So during the baseball off-season, is that like a vacation? You don’t do anything right?” At the PBEO Job Fair in Indianapolis I attended this past December, GM’s even joked that they too had been asked this kind of question. I suppose it’s just overlooking the obvious, but to once and for all answer anyone who thinks that employees in the baseball world simply take a big break….uh, no. Not even close. As soon as the off-season starts, hard work begins. Sure, it’s different than what you’re doing during the year with games, but you have to prepare for the next season faster and harder than anyone might think. Reading has proved this point very well.

There is a process to everything that has to happen. Our pocket schedule is in the final stages of being completed right now before it’s distributed to the public. You didn’t think that all of a sudden it just appeared at local restaurants and banks, did you? I’ve seen very hard work go into numerous drafts and attempts at making this schedule. Then there’s tickets, sales, marketing, and so on, and so on. Everyone has a role, and my role right now is centered on learning the trade as best I can and helping out with a number of media related tasks.

For a little while I have been working on getting together the layout for our first homestand’s booklet. That’s compiling head shots, statistics, and other information for the R-Phils and the two other teams we’ll play that homestand. I’ve also been busy finding the right pictures for the All-Decade team, which was announced on www.readingphillies.com. There’s a number of other jobs that I’ve either completed or am in the process of completing that might seem trivial or unimportant right now, but are essential to the 2010 season. You won’t see my work on the playing field, that’s for sure. But everyone, myself included, works behind the scenes to make sure that the product and entertainment value off the field is just as great as the product on the field.

So, what now? Back to work! There’s a program to be made, headshots to be sorted through, and articles to be written. Baseballtown is gearing up for this season and so is our staff. As the players continue their spring training down in Florida right now, we’ll brave the elements and make sure that come April 8th, we’re good to go.