Mike Herman still remembers it like it was yesterday, and can recall it down to the minute.
“June 8, 2012….10:30 a.m.,” he said when we sat down in his satellite office in the Twins clubhouse at Target Field prior to an early-August game.
Prior to that moment, Herman was the team’s No. 1 public relations guy. Dustin Morse — who has that role now — was second in command. But that morning, then-Twins general manager Terry Ryan walked into the team’s communications office on the service level of Target Field, pointed at Herman and said, “Mike, you are the interim director of team travel. Dustin, you are the interim director of baseball communications. Do you have any questions?”
The two exchanged bewildered looks due to the abruptness of the move, but otherwise took on their duties head-on. Now, some six years later, both are still in those roles and thriving.
It wasn’t an unwelcome move for Herman, who had already interviewed for that position with the San Francisco Giants earlier that year. But again, the suddenness sort of made Herman have to spring into action. Fortunately, it was the beginning of a homestand and he had a little time to get ready for the upcoming road trip, but it was still a baptism by fire.
Herman’s wife Brittany was very helpful. As a former hotel rep, she knew a lot of the little details Mike would have to deal with, and helped him rein those in quickly. “Find the hotel contracts for every city,” she instructed him. “Print them off and bring them home.” She went through them with a highlighter and helped him learn about the specific needs and things to ask for when dealing with hotels on the road.
“That was extremely helpful,” he said with a laugh.
The first road trip proved to be a unique challenge as well, as the team was headed to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati — two road cities the Twins play in roughly once every six years. “If it were Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland or Kansas City, I would have had some more familiarity with being in those cities a lot,” Herman said.
But nevertheless, seven baseball seasons later, Herman is still at his post and enjoying it.
But those seven seasons have brought seven MLB trade deadlines, and while fans see the players who are coming and going, they almost certainly don’t know the work going on behind the scenes once things are set in motion.
The 2018 trade deadline was the most active in club history. On a Friday night in Boston, the Twins dealt Eduardo Escobar to the Arizona Diamondbacks before the game, and after the game news broke that Ryan Pressly was headed to the Houston Astros.
“We’ve never had anything like what happened the other day”
Fast forward to Monday — July 30, the eve of the deadline — and reliever Zach Duke was on the move to Seattle and Lance Lynn was traded to the New York Yankees.
On Tuesday, just before the final bell on the non-waiver trade deadline sounded at 3:00 p.m. Central time, the final — and most substantive — domino fell as Brian Dozier was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
“We’ve never had anything like what happened the other day,” Herman said the following Friday at Target Field. Herman noted that Terry’s trade deadlines were a bit quieter, though that didn’t mean it made the job that much easier.
In August 2013, the Twins traded Justin Morneau to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Alex Presley and a player to be named later (Duke Welker). Morneau had been in the big leagues with the Twins since 2003, and in the organization since being taken in the third round of the 1999 MLB draft.
And in an organization built on continuity — like having two field managers over the span of nearly 30 years — these are some of the toughest moves to deal with.
“We were in Texas,” Herman recalled. “Terry called Dustin and me. We were both very close with Morneau and Terry knew that, and we were there in the room when he told him (he had been traded). That was hard; saying goodbye to a friend, someone you had worked with for so many years.
“But yeah,” Herman continued, “I have never seen anything like (this year); not that it is a bad thing, but we have never had that much action at the deadline.”
While players, executives and team employees are aware that it’s a business, that doesn’t mean the human element is just thrown out the window.
That can make Mike’s job especially difficult, since he develops relationships with players in a business where it can very easily be “here today, gone tomorrow.” Herman didn’t have a lot of information about deals likely to be made by the Twins — and he prefers it that way.
“In this job, you are privy to a lot of information,” Herman explained, “and sometimes you don’t want to know these things. I have had players come up to me mid-game asking ‘When is my flight out of here?’ If a guy got pulled from a game or something, and I see him in the clubhouse and he thinks he is on the verge of getting sent out, I’ve had ‘em say, ‘Have you booked my flight yet?’
“Well, if I know and have already done so, it is hard to lie to somebody’s face. So I just try to avoid knowing too much information. I would rather not know until I need to know.”
Herman’s day typically starts around 6:30 or 7:00 a.m., and he’s out the door and to the ballpark by 8:00 most days. On Tuesdays and Thursdays in the summer it’s closer to 9:00 a.m. since he takes his kids to summer school.
“In this job, you are privy to a lot of information. … sometimes you don’t want to know these things”
But the early start is by design. “My day always starts early anyway,” he said. “Just because if any player texts about anything random, you have to kind of be ready for it.”
That’s one thing the trade deadline didn’t alter too much. “It wasn’t unlike any other day,” he said. The end of his day(s) didn’t change too much, either, since he usually heads out right around the start of the game, and monitors it the rest of the evening just in case he’s needed to arrange accommodations for a departing or arriving player.
Sometimes that involves checking his phone during his son’s tee-ball games, as he looks to see if maybe a young pitcher gives up some runs early or *knock on wood* the team gets through the game without any injuries.
But if that happens, Herman has to be ready.
“If I look at a box score early in the game and I see a starting pitcher got yanked early, whether it is ineffectiveness or injury, my brain immediately clicks to ‘We are going to need another pitcher,’” Herman said. “So then I am by my phone because usually the decision is not made until after the game. So I stay up until after the game and then get a call or a text from Derek or Thad with ‘OK we have to get so and so in motion from wherever Rochester is.’”
The logistics of that are not simple, since Triple-A cities rarely have major airports — and that includes Rochester, which has just one non-stop flight to Minneapolis each day.
….at 6:32 a.m.
“It isn’t the worst thing,” Herman said, “but keep in mind when we find out about this, it is 11 p.m. Central (midnight Eastern). So if they are in Rochester, then people upstairs have to get a hold of the Triple-A manager (Joel Skinner) and the team trainer. Skinner has to get a hold of the player. The trainer is the one who helps the guy get into the clubhouse so he can get his bag.
“After that, I will get a text saying something like ‘Player X is aware.’ So then I will call the player and explain their options. If we play a night game, they can hop on the early-morning flight. Do they want that? If not, they are going to be on a connector on a puddle jumper through Philly, Charlotte, Detroit or some other airport.
“And a lot of times, I have like every city in my weather app. I’ll scroll through cities that have a connecting flight, and if one of the cities has a lightning bolt icon, I will not send a guy through that city that day. The last thing we need is some guy’s flight to get delayed, so I try to push guys toward the non-stop flight. Yeah, they are going to be tired, but we can get them to the hotel. Go to sleep if we have a night game. If we have a day game, whatever, they just come straight here.”
But those are the logistics Herman deals with every day. Trades are a totally different story.
The Escobar one was difficult for a number of reasons. For one, the Twins were on the road in Boston. Secondly, the trade broke before Escobar was even aware of it — as he saw it on the TV in the clubhouse before he was called into manager Paul Molitor’s office. Finally, he was traded to the Diamondbacks, who were clear across the country in San Diego — an airport with some weird restrictions about flights.
It’s better to let Mike explain it all. The first deal was Escobar, and news broke about his move around 3:30 p.m. Central that Friday.
“When we trade a player, it is on the (acquiring) team to get that player to wherever they are,” Herman explained. “I called my counterpart with the Diamondbacks and just said, ‘Hey, I got Escobar here.’ They were in San Diego, which has an airport curfew. No flights can land or take off after 11 p.m. So I asked what their plans were, and they said they wanted him there in time for Saturday’s game.”
Herman said he gets to know the other travel directors fairly well due to the nature of the business, but also because they meet each other at the winter meetings as well.
“There is a nonstop from Boston to Los Angeles (LAX) if you can set up a car service to get him to San Diego,” Herman told Roger Riley, his Arizona counterpart. “It’s about an hour drive.”
Riley said he had a travel agent looking into options, but Herman said he had it pulled up with Escobar standing right next to him. This was at 5:30 p.m. Eastern — about an hour after the trade news broke — and Herman told Riley he saw an 8:35 p.m. flight from Boston to LAX. It made more sense for Herman to book the flight so Escobar could get to the team hotel by midnight than to have everything go through the Diamondbacks and Escobar, whose first language isn’t English and who doesn’t know many, if any, people on the acquiring team.
“I said I’ll book it, email you the invoice and the Diamondbacks will pay the Twins,” Herman said. “It was just easier that way versus having Escobar talk with a translator to a new travel guy who doesn’t know him. I already have his date of birth and everything in there and you guys just reimburse us. So that one was done. So then we go play the game and then after the game is when Pressly happened.”
The Pressly trade couldn’t have worked out much better for the righty, who is from Texas and engaged to a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.
Dan Hayes of The Athletic reported that the Pressly trade went down in about the fourth inning of the Friday night game in Boston, though Herman said he didn’t find out right then.
“I didn’t find out until a little bit later,” Herman said. “I put their travel guy in touch with Ryan — the Astros were playing at home — and I told Ryan, ‘Look if you need anything, let me know.’ Houston handled that one. I put him in touch with Derek Vigoa, my counterpart on the Astros.”
At this point, Herman briefly reflected on how he has to separate the personal from the professional part of the job.
Spoiler alert: It isn’t easy.
Escobar was one of the most popular Twins in recent memory, and Pressly had a quiet demeanor, but had been with the team since they took him in the Rule 5 draft prior to the 2013 season.
“Yeah it is hard, especially with Escobar,” Herman said. “As fun-loving as he is with the clubhouse he is the same way with me, and I get along really well with him. He provides entertainment. I’ve known Pressly a long time too, going back to when we Rule 5’d him. It’s always hard seeing familiar faces go.”
The rest of the weekend was fairly quiet — although Derek Falvey and Thad Levine made a quick trip to Boston for some face time/accountability on Saturday — but as former WWE announcer Jim Ross would say, business picked up again on Monday.
Duke was the first domino to fall on the eve of the deadline. In fact, the clubhouse — which opens at 3:30 p.m. for a 7:10 first pitch — was open when the trade became known, right around 4:00.
The Twins had just come off the road, so Herman was catching up on paperwork. “The first day after a road trip is kind of like an administrative day for me,” he said. “Just making sure everything is handled on that end. So when the Duke thing went down, I was down here. I knew he had gotten called in, and I just talked to him outside his locker prior to that.”
Herman’s satellite office — which is what he means when he says “down here” — is a makeshift space directly across the hall from Molitor’s office, which makes it a very convenient spot. His main office is also conveniently situated on the fourth floor underneath the Budweiser Roof Deck at Target Field — right near the offices of Falvey and Levine.
Herman says there’s really no way to prepare ahead of time for player movement.
“You can’t,” he said. “When I hear about something like this and get the go-ahead, the first thing I do is contact my counterpart (on the other team) and say here is his contact information. If you need any help with getting him out to you, call me and I will be able to get a hold of him. With a lot of these guys, their phone starts blowing up. They get a random call or text from someone in Washington or whatever that they aren’t going to answer, so then immediately what is happening is it turns into apartments and cars.”
Apartments and cars? Ahh, yes. What happens to the player’s things when they’re traded? It’s not like they can simply pack everything up and leave in the dark of the night at the drop of a hat.
“The old CBA stated that acquiring club was on the hook for the person’s lease here,” Herman said, “which made no sense at all. When we acquired Sam Fuld years ago, we were paying $5,700 a month for a four-bedroom house in Walnut Creek, Calif. where he was living when he played for the A’s. What are we going to with that? Nothing. If the A’s took it on, they could put another player there or whatever.
“All of the sudden, Zach Duke tells me I’d like to turn my apartment over to you. They have to verbally tell you that they are going to turn their apartment over. Then Lance Lynn tells me the same thing. Then the conversation turns to cars; ‘Can you help us set up shipping?’ Then we have to find out where they want these cars to go.
Now potentially three cities are involved — where they player is, where he’s headed and where he lives the rest of the year.
“Duke is sending both of his cars to Nashville,” Herman said. “Lynn is sending one car to Nashville and one car to New York. (Writer’s note: they both happen to live outside of Nashville.)
“Then it becomes a puzzle. When is the car going to be in the lot? I have to make sure they leave the keys at the loading dock, then I have to get in touch with an auto hauler. Some guys in my position might say it is on the new team, but I am not going to say that. We want to help the guys, it is already a whirlwind for them. Whatever I can do to help make this transition easier, it is no skin off my back. I just call the guy we ship cars through. There is one guy in particular that is very responsive and very helpful, so I usually just give him the business. He’s a local guy.”
“Some guys in my position might say it is on the new team, but I am not going to say that. We want to help the guys, it is already a whirlwind for them”
Then there’s the business of accommodating the incoming player(s). In a lot of deals, teams will get minor leaguers and the affiliate’s staff will take care of that. But in this case, the Twins received infielder Logan Forsythe, a 31-year-old with eight years of big-league time as well as a wife and child.
“When we got Logan, I called him and set up his flight to get out here,” Herman said. “It was a redeye. He was going to wait to fly the next day, but then you lose two hours and he would have been up all night anyway. In an ideal world, we should have given him that, but we didn’t want to play with a short roster, because then Molitor would only have two bench moves.”
By rule, a player has 48 hours to report, though in-season, that can and often is fast-tracked.
“So Forsythe decides to get on the redeye,” Herman said. “His wife stayed out there, packed up the apartment.”
Now, this is where things can get a bit confusing. Herman says the job isn’t necessarily difficult, but requires extreme organization.
“The club pays for the first seven nights of a hotel for anyone either called up or acquired in a trade,” he said. “So I put him up in a hotel. I told him, ‘Hey, let me know if there is anything else to help with the transition.’ Immediately the agent sends me his old lease, and I told him the lease has to go to the Dodgers. In the CBA, it is mandated as to what they get once they are traded in terms of a stipend for moving costs and shipping vehicles and all his stuff getting moved. If the ballparks are 0-1,000 miles apart you get $1,250. If it is over 1,000 miles you get more. Then they’ll get reimbursed for moving or shipping the vehicles. He is going to move all of his stuff from L.A. to Memphis because he’s not going to need it all here.”
Players spend their offseasons in Tennessee because it’s a non-tax state. Noted.
Herman added that Forsythe isn’t likely to stay in a hotel for the duration — even if it might be just two months — due to the fact that he has a wife and child. The Twins will ask if he wants to look at one of the vacated apartments, and also let him know where the other players are staying.
Now for a younger player — like Gabriel Moya, hypothetically — who is single and/or doesn’t have much in the way of outside obligations, living in the hotel will almost certainly be the way to go.
Anyway, the Lynn trade came about an hour before Monday’s game — or about two hours after the Duke trade broke.
“That was like a 6 o’clock thing,” Herman said. “He kind of turned things over to his girlfriend because she was still here. I worked with her to close out the apartment, get the furniture picked up. I don’t have to set that up, but I have to tell her to get that stuff out of there. I’d rather just reimburse the rent versus furniture sitting there. The furniture is rental furniture.
“I met her yesterday (Thursday) to get the keys at the loading dock, and then now here we are. It is two days past (the deadline), and it is amazing. These guys go, but the world doesn’t come to an end. Everything just keeps going.”
OK, so the returning players on most of these deals were prospects, except for Forsythe. How might things be different if say, Tyler Austin had come to the big leagues right away?
“It wouldn’t be much different, because once they are called up they have all those full rights from the CBA,” Herman said. “Major league to minor league is a little different and I don’t deal with that, that’s a whole different side of the baseball department.
“That happened back with Escobar. He was with the White Sox when we acquired him, and Terry sent him to Triple-A. He went from the majors to the minors. He didn’t like that phone call too much. Terry still talks about that,” Herman said with a laugh. “There is a lot of language to go through, as far as what these guys get, and what they are owed and what they have rights to. You have to be careful, you never want to be one of those guys that has the union going to MLB, and MLB coming to me and saying you didn’t do this and this.”
“These guys go, but the world doesn’t come to an end. Everything just keeps going”
A situation like that came up with Twins reliever Tyler Duffey. No, it wasn’t a particularly contentious situation, like perhaps when Glen Perkins filed a grievance about service time back at the beginning of his career.
In this case, it was just an honest mistake.
“A couple of years ago, Duffey got called up on August 31,” Herman said. “So he wasn’t a September call-up, because he came up in August. He was owed seven days meal money instead of however it worked, I don’t remember exactly. I paid all the September callups their seven days meal money but I didn’t pay him. For some reason I forgot and I just spaced on it because of when he joined us.
“Right before Thanksgiving. I got an email from MLB saying, ‘Hey Mike, the union is disputing that you didn’t pay Tyler Duffey his seven days meal money for this recall.’ I went through my paperwork and realized I didn’t pay him. So I called Duffey and I said, ‘Hey man how are you doing?’ He said ‘I’m just getting ready for Thanksgiving.’ I said, ‘I want to wish you a happy thanksgiving and I want to send you a check for $713.50’ and he said ‘For what?!?’
“I said I forgot to mail you meal money back in August, and he said ‘I’ll take it!’ Herman said with a laugh.
Anyway, after Duke was traded but before Lynn was moved on Monday, Herman said his day wasn’t too far out of the ordinary. Three hours before game time, you might find him wandering through the clubhouse saying “Tickets?” to anyone who might listen. What he’s doing is finding out from the players who need seats for guests to the game — another part of his wide-ranging duties.
And once Lynn was moved, it was only about another half hour before Herman was able to head home for the night. “It was about 6:30,” Herman said. “Once the game starts, I know nothing will happen until postgame.”
Part of the reason Herman was able to leave at that time was also that when things become finalized, the time is a whirlwind for players and they aren’t even going to think of the things they need him to do. They’ll call and ask him later — and that’s when he springs into action, whether he’s at home or at the park.
Nothing happened the rest of the night, but there was still Tuesday to get through.
Tuesday was a wild day in Major League Baseball:
- Jonathan Schoop was traded to the Brewers
- Chris Archer was traded to the Pirates
- Kevin Gausman and Darren O’Day were traded to the Braves
- Wilson Ramos was traded to the Phillies
- Tommy Pham was traded to the Rays
- Brad Ziegler was traded to the Diamondbacks
And finally, about a quarter-hour before the trade deadline the final Twins bombshell was dropped. After flirting with the idea nearly two years ago, the Dodgers finally acquired Dozier.
…for the player they acquired instead of him two winters ago (and a couple more pieces).
Isn’t baseball strange?
The day started all the same for Herman, who got to the park around 9:00 after dropping his kids off. He’s got his phone on him and close — though this isn’t exactly atypical in his role — but he’s at the ready. “I know that in my role, when I need to know something they are going to tell me,” he said.
Now personally, I was tipped off that the Dozier derby was down to two teams at about 1:30 p.m. I probably shouldn’t say who the other team was, but it was an NL team. I’ll only say that much.
The news broke about an hour later. Dozier. Dodgers. Finally.
Herman didn’t have any concrete proof, but his spidey sense was tingling in the sense that something might happen. “I thought something was going to happen because of the way the couple days prior happened,” he said somewhat cryptically.
“I kind of got the sense something was going on around lunchtime (noonish) just from where my office is up on the fourth floor in the tower area,” he said. “In the same hallway, down the hall from Derek and Thad.”
Despite making the trip to Boston right after the initial trades, both men were working diligently in their Target Field offices in the lead-up to the deadline — even though the team was on the road.
There’s no real rhyme or reason to that, Herman says.
“It depends,” he said. “Derek was supposed to be on the whole trip, but he stayed back for various reasons, one of them probably being the trade deadline, but then they both flew out Saturday and stayed for one night and went to two games.”
From his lunchtime until the Dozier news broke, Herman stuck with his daily routine. He can’t do much in terms of preparation if a deal happens anyway, but he was checking his phone frequently — much like any baseball-loving person might have been that afternoon.
“I kind of got the sense something was going on around lunchtime just from where my office is up on the fourth floor in the tower area”
“Yeah, watching Twitter to see what else is going on,” Herman said. “Especially since Escobar found out about his trade on the TV. It was so bad, but it happens.”
Once the Dozier news broke, Herman snapped into action not only preparing for work purposes, but also the emotional angle. “Dozier is the best,” Herman said. “That’s when it starts to hit you.”
The Twins drafted Dozier as a senior-sign out of Southern Miss in 2009, and prior to the trade had never played a day in any other organization. That’s nearly a decade — an eternity in professional sports.
And yet there the Dodgers were, wanting Dozier to try to get to Los Angeles for their game that night.
“What I need to think about first is who is coming here,” Herman said, steering the conversation back to business, if only briefly. “I knew Forsythe was coming here once the trade was announced, but then I have to figure out are any of these other guys — Chase De Jong, Luke Raley — coming here? So that immediately what I have to do; go through flight manifests and rooming lists, and all the documents that I have that list who is with us and document changes.”
Once all his professional obligations were fulfilled, Herman had a moment to wish Dozier well before he hopped on a 6:04 p.m. flight to LAX.
“It was hard, but I mean he chuckled, he laughed it off,” Herman said. “How long has he been tied to the Dodgers, two years almost?
“We came in here and hugged and talked. When I was saying bye to him my wife FaceTimed with me. Well, I thought it was my wife, but instead, it was my 5 1/2-year-old son. He is a huge Dozier fan — just loves him. So Dozier says, ‘Hey buddy, you be good I’ll see you around.’ So when I get home I have to explain to him what it means to be traded.”
Not many dads can say they’ve had to do that — at least not in this manner — though ironically enough, Kyle Gibson said in his postgame comments that he was going to have to explain it to his daughter and that she was going to be heartbroken.
Dozier made it to Dodger Stadium just in time for the end of the game — Herman couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that Los Angeles played a two-hour, 17-minute game that night — and was captured on camera introducing himself to manager Dave Roberts and other members of the team.
“It was just so weird,” Herman said of seeing Dozier on television that night. “I even took a screenshot and texted him and just said the same. We even saw him three hours ago, and now he is on a different team with a different jersey on. I get why they wanted him out there so quickly, but still.”
Herman said he’d spoken to Dozier since the trade, and that he was acclimating well to an entirely new environment.
“We even saw (DOZIER) three hours ago, and now he is on a different team with a different jersey on”
“Yeah, he is fine,” he said. “He is a natural at this. I was telling someone that I can see what is happening right now. I was a day early with my prediction. I thought he was going to pull a (Kirk) Gibson and come in that first night off the bench and hit a homer. Instead, he hit a home run the next two games. It is hard to see, but I’ve been around long enough, with all these guys, Cristian Guzman, Luis Rivas, J.C Romero, those are the guys I came up with.”
Bringing up those names was especially apt, since they were all in town for Johan Santana’s Twins Hall of Fame induction at that time.
“Those guys taught me a lot about working in this game, and it wasn’t always easy,” Herman remembered. “They were hard on me. I was the PR guy, and I had to ask them to go to the State Fair, and go do commercials and go to the Twins pro shops in Apple Valley, Roseville or Minnetonka and sign for a thousand bucks in merchandise.
For a second, the conversation shifts to Guzman, and you can tell Herman remembers this like it was yesterday.
“With Guzman, I had to take him to English classes,” Herman said. “He took English classes 1-on-1 every day we were in town, Monday through Friday. Off day, didn’t matter. Game day, didn’t matter. I would go pick him up, we went to Berlitz Language School in Edina across from the Southdale from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. I would just sit in the lobby and wait for him, then we would probably go to Bobby and Steve’s and get an international phone card, because he didn’t have an international plan on his cell phone.”
The conversation drifts back to the deadline now that it’s over — and what that means when the 3:00 p.m. bell sounds on July 31.
“It is always nice when it is over,” Herman said. “Unfortunately, I would rather be way more stressed about getting guys in here than watching them go. I would welcome the extra work if it meant we were buying, because that means the team is in a better position, instead of the opposite which is what we did. I mean, I get it; I fully understand why we traded guys. Below .500 — regardless of how many games we are back — is still below .500.”
So was this deadline easier because Herman has been doing the job for closing in on a decade?
“No,” he said. “I am familiar enough now with the procedures in place, and I know what needs to happen when you acquire or trade someone. This one was tough because of the people involved. But on the flip side, you see the guys here today and you remember the game goes on.”
In a way, that’s part of the beauty of the game. The game the next day can help assuage the grieving process for fans. That’s also — in addition to the obvious weather caveats — what makes the cold winter after the season so difficult for baseball fans.
“Torii left. Cuddyer left. Morneau left, and there was a game the next day,” Herman said. “That is the strangest part about it. After we traded Dozier we played that day, without him there at second base.”
“This one was tough because of the people involved. But on the flip side, you see the guys here today and you remember the game goes on”
I asked him if it’s good for the soul for the game to go on, and he agreed.
“I think it is good,” he said. “You don’t have to sulk about it; not me but the players. I mean, I do think about it. But I also think that the fact that Escobar and Dozier, even Lynn are guys I have talked to every day since Tuesday, either via text or on the phone. I take pride in building relationships with those guys.
“There are a lot of people in my position that it may not be that important to them. But for me, when you are dealing with these people on a daily basis, you spend more time with them than with your families, or together, every road trip. I am fortunate to go home with home games, that is the only time I can see my family, during the course of the season. I am on the road every trip.”
As our chat came to a close, I asked a question that probably just as easily could have served as the opener.
“Is the job hard?”
“I wouldn’t say it is hard, but you have to be organized,” Herman said. “There are a lot of different aspects to it. Let’s say, we make one roster move. We are on the road and we make one roster move. Let’s say Alan Busenitz out and Moya in. I have to get a flight for Busenitz for wherever Rochester is, then I have to get a flight for Moya wherever Rochester is to get to us. Then I have to call the hotel, because Busenitz is going to check out but I need another room for Moya because they are going to overlap. Busenitz’s flight is going to be later on, and I can’t just change the name because they have to clean (that room).
“So what if the hotel is sold out? That means I have to find another hotel. Then I have to go on the computer on our Delta flight manifest system. I have to remove Busenitz from our remaining flights on our trip and add Moya to the ones that are left. If we are going to another city I have to email the hotel and name change Busenitz to Moya. Then I have to email Loews — the hotel in Minneapolis — as I have already set up Busenitz for the homestand. I have to name change that, too.
“So it isn’t hard, but there is a lot of detail.”
A lot of detail, you say? Well if you’ve made it this far, you probably aren’t too surprised.
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