The Odd Jobs of an Intern in Minor League Baseball (MiLB)

This is posted as part of our Summer Intern Blog Series. Be sure to come back each week as interns from around the country share their summer experiences with us!

By: Lauren Benda, @LaurenBenda

There are several different myths about doing an internship, but the biggest are the tedious tasks you will have to complete during your time at your internship. From stapling papers to brushing the mascot…nothing will surprise you by the time you finish your internship in MiLB.

Here are just a few of the things that I have had to do in my internship:

1. Staple the stat packs! Before every game our broadcaster, Dan Hasty, sends out an email with basically every updated stat in MiLB for all of the teams in our division, the Midwest League (MWL). It also includes current rosters of both teams, game notes for the specific game and lineups. During the games I work in Guest Services, and guests will come up to ask for these packs we put together that have the lineups, stats and current rosters of each team. We call those stat packs! Now that we are busier, I print about 60 of these packs out. Although the printer does staple we don’t get lineups right away, which means I am stuck stapling 60 lineups to the current stat packs. It takes a minute, but after a while I am afraid I will end up with carpel tunnel.

2. Taking care of the mascots! Here at the West Michigan Whitecaps we have three mascots Franky the Swimming Pig, Roxy and Crash the River Rascal. Every time we have a home stand we need to wash the mascots because of how sweaty they get. Who wants a smelly mascot? The answer is, nobody does. When kids hug them you want them to smell flowers and not sweat. So we wash them, brush them and we recently painted their eyes. To everyone’s surprise it makes a world of a difference when they are brushed.

3. Tarp pull/shovel the field…Opening day 2016 was April 9th. It was a Saturday, and one of our biggest snow storms we had all season. I wasn’t supposed to be in until 11 that day, but I woke up to a few texts and emails saying to bring your shovel and dress warm — be there at 9:30am. We were playing no matter what it took. This was a full on team effort…everybody was there and we shoveled the whole entire field. Our grounds crew spent the night at the field making sure all of the snow was off the tarp so it was easier to get it off in the morning. You can’t put the whole entire experience into words, but you can watch the video here. We also have to tarp the field…a lot. So far this season I think we have pulled tarp about 20 times. Maybe more. We have team A and team B and the interns are usually on call since we all live so close. To figure out what a tarp pull is you can click here. It may seem like a task, but it’s a great team building experience and you learn what a full team effort looks like.

My internship has included a lot of experiences I never thought I would have, but the people I am doing it with make every experience that much better. Here at the Whitecaps the interns are treated like front office members, and I don’t think you will find an intern here that won’t say they aren’t having one of the greatest times of their life and gaining a huge amount of experience.