Being Sleep Deprived As An MLB Player

What's up fellas, how you doing? Manettinelli here. Hey, what's going on guys? How we doing? And girls, sorry, I keep doing that. I say, Hey, what's going on guys. I just do that. And then people always say in the comment section, not just guys watch your channel and you're right. So, Hey, what's going on? Everyone? How are we doing today? We're answering your questions. And again, today we're actually going to answer Jim Callis's question. Okay. From MLB the show road to the show video game, Matt, if you haven't watched me play on there, the greatest player ever play. I'm not really that good, but check it out. Anyways, Jim was talking about being in the minor leagues. And one thing he talked about is being sleep deprived. Uh, yes, you are sleep deprived. If you've watched my channel before, you know that I've talked about how sleep deprived players can be. Most players I learned as a minor league player, basically how to play while it's like sleepwalking. Okay. You have to learn how to play being exhausted at no other level had, had I ever experienced this. Now I've seen other players experience this, because I remember in college, like we'd have a workout or something and a guy would show up or maybe like six guys would show up and literally they had been drinking all night long and sorry, young kids, but they're old enough to, okay. They're over 21. We'll talk about seniors right now. Okay. And they'd show up half in the bag and like, they were probably sleepwalking too, but I'm, but like, that was their own, that was their choice. That wasn't just because they couldn't get any sleep. That's because they chose not to go to bed. Okay. We're talking about being sleep deprived because you can't go to sleep. All right. Unless you try to take a nap in the dugout, which you can't do because in the minor leagues, the schedule and everything that goes into being a minor league baseball player doesn't allow you to sleep. And we're going to go into those things today. So what's it like being sleep deprived? If you've seen my channel before, I've talked about some of these things before, but many of you have not seen that video. And so let's go into it. And I made a couple of notes right here and let's see, because there's so many parts of the minors that make you sleep deprived that I needed to actually sit down and write a whole list out. So here's the first one, long bus rides. Okay. In the minor leagues, you're going to take long bus rides. It's not uncommon to take eight, 10, even 12 hour bus rides. Okay. And the buses stink. I've told you guys this before. Sometimes there's no AC. Sometimes the bus breaks down. Sometimes they're playing music, super loud. The TV's on, you know, you've got, you, you got to cram in. It's not like you've got like this big, huge area to sit down. You've got these little seats and you've got someone right next to you. And you better hope that it's not like the starting catcher or even the backup catcher. The backup catcher is probably even bigger than the starting catcher because hell he doesn't play a lot. So he's probably just crushing the snacks in the clubhouse, depending on what level you're at. So you get some, you know, backup catcher next to you has 245 pounds and he's shaped like a brick or a softer brick. He's not jacked. He's a little bit, you know, he's got a little extra carrying a little extra body weight more than he probably should. Cause he's a catcher and you got him sitting next to you. And how the hell do you expect to sleep? Okay. How do you expect to sleep? So that's the first thing, the bus rides, the long bus rides. The second thing is you're always going to be taking this bus after the game. So when your game ends at 10 o'clock, right, you play a seven o'clock game. It gets over at 10, you eat, you shower up, you get out of there at like 11, 1130. And now they say, all right guys, we got a 10 hour bus ride. So let's say you leave at honestly, say, let's say you leave at 11. Okay. We'll say you got out of there quick. You leave at 11, you got a 10 hour bus ride. What times that gets you in at nine o'clock in the morning? If I'm, you know, I'm no math magician as my freshman coach made with Sam, no math magician, but nine o'clock in the morning, right? So you get in at nine and you probably haven't really slept at all. You've tried to sleep, but you probably didn't sleep too well. Right? So now you get in at nine and you're exhausted. You get checked into the hotel, right? Then you got to fight off the cockroaches. I'm kidding. There's not cockroaches. Sometimes there are, but you finally get checked in and you get into your hotel room. And now it's probably say like 10 o'clock or so. And you lay down, you try to fall asleep and say you fall asleep at 10 30. Well, you got to get to the ballpark the next day. If you have a seven o'clock game, you got to get to the ballpark around two something. So you're only going to get a couple hours of sleep, right? So you're not going to get that many hours of sleep. And so you start to do this every four days, because in four days you're going to get back on that bus and you're going to travel to a new city. You're going to do the same thing all over again. And there's really no off days in the minor leagues. You get like one, one a month. And so it's hard. It's hard enough just to play baseball every single day, play, play, play, play, like all day long, every day. That's hard enough because you've never done that in your life before in college, you play three to four games a week. You don't play seven games a week. You put the long bus rides and the travel on top of it. This is where it becomes extremely, extremely tiring. So that's the first part of the sleep deprivation. Let me see what I have number two on my list. So after that, Oh, traveling through the night, I already said that. Oh, bus issues. Your bus is going to break down. Sometimes I might've mentioned already. We broke down in Vancouver, right? We're traveling home from Vancouver. We broke down. We had to spend the whole night on the side of the road, but you can't sleep again because you got 245 pound backup catcher next to you. Right. And so it's hard to sleep like this. And you've got everyone screaming in the background and the back, and you've got the reggaeton going on in the back with the super loud speakers. And you know, you've got card games and you get all these things. And so you're not going to be able to sleep when your bus breaks down. Okay. We broke down. It took us all night to get someone to fix the bus. And then we drove home and we got no sleep that night. We just got in how to play a game. All right. So you've got that. What else do you've got? Well, let's go to plane rides. Okay. Cause everyone's like, okay, when you get a little bit older, you get the triple A you're on the plane right now. Now you're traveling big time. You got the plane rides, right? You're not going to be tired anymore. No, it's even worse. It's even worse because you finish a game at 10, you eat up and you get out of there at 11, 1130. You get back to your apartment at 12 o'clock and you got to fly out the next morning, right? First thing is when you fly in the minors, you got to take the earliest flight possible. That's just like a, that's a rule. So you got to take like a 6am flight. So you get home at 12, you got to get a 6am flight. You got to get to the airport at least at five, but probably at four 30 ish because you want to make sure you can't miss the flight. Like a whole team can't miss the flight. So you get in at, you get the airport like four 30 in the morning. Okay. But you don't drive yourself. You got to get on the team bus, which means you got to get to the stadium to get the team bus, which means if you got to get to the airport at four 30, you're probably going to leave at like four to get there depending on how far the hotel is. So you better be ready to get on that team bus at like three something. And if you're going to get on the team bus at three something and you're getting home at 12, you got to get up at three, maybe two 45 and now you're thinking, do I even go to sleep? Is it even worth going to bed? I tried to go to bed a few times, but when you wake up on two hours sleep, you feel worse than if you just stay up the whole night. So there are plenty of times I just go back to my apartment and just watch TV and then go to the down and get the bus at three something in the morning. Okay. So plane rides are worse. And then again, on a plane, you're not flying like this special private plane, not chartering planes. You're flying commercial or you got to go the same way that you would fly right now if you're going to wherever the hell you were going. Okay. So you've got to chuck your luggage and you got to do all that stuff. And now you're sitting next to somebody, you get a middle seat. Oh man. Like how am I going to sleep in the middle seat? Right. And some people, I can't sleep on a plane. I can't sleep anywhere unless it's my bed. All right. But it gets worse because you're almost never going to take a direct flight. You're going to take a connecting place. You're gonna have to get off the plane and wait to get on another plane. And now by the time you get into the city, it's like one o'clock in the afternoon, two o'clock in the afternoon. And you go and you check in the hotel and you go right to the stadium because you got to get ready for the game that night. So it gets even worse. You didn't even get to sleep at all. And in four days, you're going to do the same thing all over again. So plane rides don't really get any better until you get to the big leagues. And that's when you start flying out. Right. When the game ends, you have a chartered flight, you fly. Boom. You go like game ends, bang on the, you get on the bus, you go right to the airport, you get off the air, you get off the bus, you jump right on the plane. You don't go, you're not going through security and like you normally would right on the plane. Boom. You're flying out. You get into the city. Even if you get in late, like I remember when we flew, we flew from Colorado to Washington DC to play the nationals. Like that flight, we got in late at night, but then you, it's not that late. Like you get in at say, let's say you get in at like, you know, three in the morning, you can still go to bed at three in the morning and you can sleep until noon. Get up at noon. If you want it to like, you can get a lot of sleep if you want it to and then go down to the field. So you get the sleep, the big leagues, you get so much more sleep. Okay. Um, let me see if I have anything else on my list that I forgot. Oh, let's talk about sleeper buses. Cause this is actually, it was my favorite part of the minor leagues. When you have a sleeper bus, which is just a bus with a bunch of beds in it. Now that was the best because you could actually sleep on the bus. Like I need to be laying down to sleep. And so you lay down, you have this bed, you can close this curtain and like, yeah, you might be bouncing around a little bit, but, and you're not going to get like the greatest night's sleep, but you're going to get some sleep. So that was my favorite. When I was with the Orioles, we had a sleeper bus. That was actually the only organization that had sleeper buses that I played with. But I always thought that was fantastic. You know, just lay down, you got an eight hour bus ride or whatever, just go to sleep. Okay. So you're sleep deprived in the minor leagues. You learn how to play super, super exhausted. And what I started doing is, um, and this is not suggested, but when I got the AAA, we had Red Bulls in the clubhouse, an unlimited amount of Red Bulls. So, you know, you're so tired. You're like, I need something to wake me up. You're like, let me take a Red Bull and it wakes you up a little bit. But after a while one doesn't do it for you. So then you start like, I need another Red Bull. So you take another Red Bull. And then before you know it, then you've got another Red Bull on the dugout and you're drinking another Red Bull. And before you know it, you've got two Red Bulls and you're drinking one in the first and then in the one in the fourth and then one in the seventh. And then before you know it, none of that's working anymore. And so now you're tired, but you've drink 462 Red Bulls that week, which is probably horrible for your digestive system and probably everything else in your body. And so it's just, it just becomes a mess. All right. You learn how to play while sleepwalking. That is part of being a minor league player. And when you go to the big leagues and you realize how much more sleep you get, you never want to come back to the minor leagues. And so you know what I decided? I said, after my time in the major leagues, I said, you know what, Matt, you know, it's a great idea. Let's go back to the minor league. And let's never come back to the big leagues ever again. Okay. Cause we love the minor leagues so much. Let's do that. And it was fantastic. That's all we have today. Thanks for your question. Subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell, give it a thumbs up. We'll talk to you later. And I was being sarcastic. It wasn't fantastic. If you've got hitters that you're looking to improve before the start of next season, this is essential for you. Matt Antonelli here, former major league player, first round pick and college coach. With this course, we're going to show you exactly step-by-step how to generate power, develop at speed and enhance swing mechanics. Regardless of your hitter's age, this course is going to deliver advanced hitting techniques that will allow any hitter to get better and make an impact at the plate this spring. We have a full catalog of training content that you can access from anywhere at any time. This course is perfect for players, parents, coaches, instructors, and more. It offers a comprehensive package of drills and techniques that you can directly implement. Our course has helped hitters all over the country at different competition levels. And the feedback that we've received has been outstanding. The work you put in now will drive your success at the plate this spring, get the essential knowledge that you need to take your game to the next level. I've put the link in the description. If you want to go check it out.