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People and Pop Culture

Weekend Plans With MLB Network's Dan Plesac: Taking The Cactus League By Storm

MLB Network on Friday kicks off its Spring Training series, “30 Clubs in 30 Days,” to be featured as part of the 8:00pm ET edition of “MLB Tonight.” DAN PLESAC will be one of six analysts who get to leave the snow and chill of New Jersey behind in exchange for the warmth and sunshine of Cactus League ballparks. Plesac will be stationed at the Hotel Valley Ho resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., for 12 straight days as he spends one day each embedding himself within a specific team’s Spring Training camp. Plesac left town on Thursday for a weekend that includes a stop Friday with the D-Backs, Saturday with the Reds and Sunday with the Rockies. It is rather fitting the weekend begins and ends at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick -- the facility Plesac calls the Taj Mahal of baseball. But before he hopped on the plane Thursday, Plesac made sure he had his three Spring Training essentials: sunscreen, a GPS and research notes.

CRASH COURSE: My day for Friday really starts Thursday night. The one thing that you can’t go without when you’re doing the “30 Teams in 30 Days” is the research packet. We get a detailed packet every day on every team that we’re about to cover. It has everything from the stats for 2013 to the additions and subtractions for 2014, where the baseball prospectus predicts them to finish, what kind of moves they were able to make via trades or via the free agent market. So Thursday night I will definitely go over the Diamondbacks research packet and the Diamondbacks media guide. I’ll spend between an hour and a half and two hours familiarizing myself with the roster, recapping 2013 and foreseeing what I think may happen this year. I’ll have a highlighter and I’ll highlight things in blue and yellow. The ones in blue are questions I know I want to ask and the yellow are things that are important or that I find interesting about a player or a particular stat about a team.

'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE...: I’ll get up every day at 6:00am (MT) -- and I’m not a morning person. I work mostly during the season the late shift of 10:00pm-1:00am (ET). I’m not a very good person as far as getting to bed early. I find myself the first night a little anxious. For every team you’re excited, you want to ask the right questions, you want to make sure you’re up on the players, you want to make sure you know guys' first names and last names. The last thing I want to do is go there and embarrass myself. So I’ll get up at 6:00am (MT) and before I leave the hotel at 6:30am I’ll take about 15 minutes and I’ll get my iPad out and go over the roster of the Diamondbacks, the research packet and the media guide.

EARLY BIRD GETS THE WORM: When I get to the ballpark I’ll meet with my producer, JASON ROY, at about 7:00am and he’ll have the schedule of the coaches and players that I’m to interview that day. The players will start filing in for their workout around 7:30, maybe 8:00 at the latest, and you have about a five-minute window to catch these players, so you have to be ready and know what questions you want to ask. When I get there at 7:00 to start interviews, I have pretty much access to the entire facility. I’ll go stand by the batting cage and talk to the hitting coach, I’ll go watch guys throw in the bullpen, I’ll get a chance to talk to the pitching coach and ask him about players. There’s a trust factor that players have with us at MLB Network because they know that we all played and we’ve been a part of the game for so long.

RUN THIS TOWN: By about 11:00am, I’ll be done with interviews. Once the workout starts at 9:30 or 10:00, obviously we can’t go on the field or take guys off the field to get interviews so you have about a two-hour window between 7:30-9:30 where it’s really important to get those interviews done. Then I hang around until 1:00pm when we’ll tape the show of record that day. Usually what I do is once we get that done, if I’m out of there by about 2:00 and if I’m not too tired, I’ll speed back to the hotel and grab my golf clubs and try to sneak in nine holes. I’ll either golf or workout and then go get a bite to eat somewhere in the Scottsdale area. I’m pretty religious about trying to work out six days a week. I’ll go for a four-mile run or if the weather’s bad I’ll go to the gym at the resort and do 45 minutes to an hour of cardio work either on the treadmill or one of the elliptical machines. Not that I’m trying to make a comeback, but every once in a while I’ll be out there and see these guys doing this stuff and think, “Hey I used to be able to do that, I wonder if I could still do that.” Well, I can’t. That boat left the dock.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: I had numerous Spring Trainings out (in Arizona) and have a lot of former teammates that are coaches or work for teams, so I’m never short for trying to find someone to go to dinner with. Mastro's City Hall in Scottsdale is fabulous, and then right behind the Valley Ho there's a restaurant called the Tortilla Factory. I have a really bad knack for crushing too many chips and salsa before I have tacos. I like to treat myself at Spring Training. My workouts are different now. I worked out before to be in great shape, but now I workout so I can crush the chips and salsa at the Tortilla Factory. I am also a connoisseur of the In-N-Out Burger. I will frequent one every day when I’m done taping the show of record at 2:00pm. In-N-Out Burger is a must.

HERE WE GO AGAIN: I usually get back to the hotel room around 9:30-10:00pm. Friday night I’ll be looking at the Reds research packet and going over the Reds for about an hour-and-a-half, two hours. And you just keep doing the same thing for 12 days. It’s the same routine but different teams and different camps. But the good thing about the Cactus League is all the ballparks are within a half hour, 40 minutes of the hotel in Scottsdale.

BACK IN THE DAY: It’s funny -- when I land at the airport in Phoenix, the first thing that goes through my mind is my first time I was ever in Arizona. It was 1981 when I went to my first minor league Spring Training. I had never been to Arizona and I remember landing and seeing palm trees and mountains and going, “Wow I made it to Arizona.” And every time I land I will have flashbacks to 1981. But (Spring Training) is more fun as an analyst because you don’t have to worry about getting cut.

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