Travel Tips

Fantasy Baseball Camp: Training Like a Yankee, Part 5

Locations in this article:  Detroit, MI Nassau, Bahamas Orlando, FL Pittsburgh, PA

Contributor Roy Berger might not be on a winning streak at Yankees’ fantasy baseball camp, but every game is a new start. Check back to see if his luck has changed.  

I’ve been playing organized baseball since I was a 10-year-old in 1962. For some reason I remember my very first team and uniform, something called the Dial-A-Car Comets. It was on Long Island in the Central Nassau Little League. My dad was one of our coaches and I got a lot of playing time.

I continued playing baseball until 1969 when my high school coach told me he didn’t need me anymore. I didn’t touch a baseball or bat again until 2010 when I began this fantasy excursion with the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Thursday morning was simply the greatest baseball experience of my life!

We got to the complex with two games scheduled today. I expected to take our morning “drubbing”  from a Yankee team that beat us once already, but I hoped we could muster enough gusto to beat the Detroit Tiger team we were scheduled to play in the afternoon.

Kangaroo Court was presided by the un-honorable Mickey Rivers. We saw a guy fined for texting during a game. Then, you don’t want to visualize this, but one of the overweight campers was fined $20 for wearing nothing but a Speedo to the training room.

Our team, known as the Pinstripes, got fined $10 each for being the “best 0-4 team in camp.”  The misery just continues as we now have to pay for being bad.

I gotta tell you the Yankees don’t mess around with fines. Pittsburgh and Detroit fined $1 per transgression and maybe $2 if it was really bad. The Yankees, with all money going to the Yankee charitable foundation, do $10 and $20 sanctions and our coach Oscar Gamble got hit with $50 this morning for wearing the wrong color uniform yesterday.

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