His humility earns him universal praise from those around him…he speaks passionately about the team and the game’s outcome. He is deeply religious without being public about it. He’s a devoted husband and a homebody.
He’s only going to experience this once, and it will all be over in the blink of a radar gun — two whirlwind months out of a lifetime, likely ending in about a week and a half – so Sephen Strasburg is going to embrace the minor league life. He’s going to absorb the lessons of the grizzled coaches and minor league lifers, feel the bumps of the road on those bus rides, smell the dankness of those cramped clubhouses, know the hunger of being so close to the majors. It’s good for him.
“I’m trying to soak it all in,” he says. “You meet some great people through your career, and it all starts here. We’re all going after the same thing.”
Whether with the Class AA Harrisburg Senators, where he started his pro career in April, or the Class AAA Syracuse Chiefs, where he was promoted in early May and remains now, he will carry his own luggage, pass the time playing cards in the clubhouse, change into his uniform at a chicken-wire locker with his name scrawled on masking tape above it.
He will partake, over and over, of the classic minor league spread — PB&J sandwiches in Class AA, a daily hot dish in Class AAA, growing stale above Bunsen burners in a side room off the clubhouse — but before he leaves Harrisburg he will treat his teammates to a big league feast: Outback Steakhouse. Ribeyes and T-bones. Bloomin’ onions.
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