Keeping Busy

By Nick Parnell

Special to CollegeBaseballInsider.com

Nick Parnell is a senior lefthander at Pitt who will contribute a journal to CollegeBaseballInsider.com this season. He has made five appearances this season for the Panthers, who dropped two of three to VCU in South Carolina over the weekend – both losses came by a run in extra innings.

Going into this past weekend, we were expecting to make a relatively short six-hour drive to Richmond, Va., for a three-game set with Virginia Commonwealth.

However, snow covered much of Virginia and North Carolina, and we were forced to play elsewhere. We ended up making arrangements to go down to Myrtle Beach to play our three games with the Rams. Unfortunately for us, Myrtle Beach is about twice as far from Pittsburgh as Richmond is.

Free time is certainly a luxury that a lot of people don’t get a lot of, but on bus rides, it’s a whole different story. The best part about traveling in a bus compared to through the air is that you are not confined to your seat and it’s only your team on the bus.

There are a plethora of games that we may play on the bus to try to pass the time. A Pitt favorite – and many other schools I’m sure – is Mafia. It’s a game where certain people are selected to be members of the hidden society of Mafia members, and it is up to all the others playing to try to weed out the Mafia members and vote them out without voting any innocent townspeople out. It ends up being a quite competitive and humorous game hearing different people accuse their friends of being in the mafia and their reasoning behind such accusations. Senior Eric Hess is particularly good at accusing others of being in the mafia, and even though he may not have solid evidence, he seems to get a nice following believing most everything he says.

While I enjoy playing Mafia, a slower and quieter bus lifestyle is also nice. Luckily for me, there are a lot of guys on our team who like playing Spades. Playing Spades on the bus is a little difficult. We don’t have a hard surface to play on, and it’s quite easy to see other people’s cards. (Especially rookie card player and RS sophomore catcher Matt Emge’s) We have found a nice way to avoid this by playing Spades online with our phones. The best part of the phone is that is keeps score for you. We can play game after game on our phones because it deals in a matter of seconds and we can still do other things while playing.

Living a peripatetic lifestyle is quite fun when you are with all your teammates. We travel nearly every week, and it seems like we are always on a bus or plane. It can get monotonous at times, but we find ways to keep everyone busy. We have a big weekend and a six-hour bus ride coming up in a few days when we head down to Charlottesville to face national power Virginia. It should be an exciting way to open up conference play.

Thanks for reading, and Hail to Pitt!

(photo courtesy of Pitt Athletic Media Relations)