By Megan Zahneis, For The Miami Student
Megan, a first year student, is a correspondent for Major League Baseball and authors a column on mlb.com. Last weekend, she covered Games 3 and 4 of the World Series, played in New York City between the New York Mets and Kansas City Royals.
I issued an official apology to Miami University on my Twitter account.
It's poor form to skip class, I know, but even my geology professor got on board with this one (my mom was a bit harder to convince).
After all, I figured, covering the World Series was a decent excuse.
I booked an early-morning flight to LaGuardia Airport, and by Friday afternoon, I found myself on the 7 train en route to Citi Field, home of the eventual 2015 World Series-losing New York Mets.
After checking into my Manhattan hotel, I shared an elevator with MLB Network personality Kevin Millar, but was too shy to say anything.
Press credential in hand, I headed into the stadium with my boss.
I love walking around in the annals of a baseball stadium. You never know what you'll see on the way to the press conference room: the commissioner of Major League Baseball flanked by his security detail, players and coaches ducking out of the clubhouse to make phone calls, 90 feet of paparazzi lined up against the wall and huge camera lenses ready to flash at whatever remotely famous person walks by. (I snapped a blurry photo of Bartolo Colon on my cell.)
My workday started around 3:30 p.m. for an 8 p.m. game.
I attended media sessions, as is the tradition, with the manager of both teams and the next day's starting pitchers. In my case, that meant I sat in on press conferences with Royals manager Ned Yost and starter Chris Young and the Mets' Terry Collins, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz.
My job was to snatch hold of any interesting story that came up during these conferences and write about it, in addition to live-tweeting quotes from the players and coaches.
One of my favorite moments was attending the presentation of the Hank Aaron Award, which is given to the best hitter in each league and voted on by a panel of Hall of Famers.
This year, Josh Donaldson of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Nationals' Bryce Harper won the honor. Harper couldn't make it, but Donaldson was presented with his hardware by Commissioner Rob Manfred and Hank Aaron himself.
When the press conferences were over for the afternoon - usually around 5 p.m. - I headed onto the field.
Watching batting practice is always a spectacle, but World Series batting practice is on another level. It's a who's who of media types baseball faces - there's Ken Rosenthal! Is that David Eckstein? Sam Ryan! Erin Andrews! - and it's packed to the gills.
Along the warning track was - surprise! - another media scrum, with TV anchors, reporters and photographers three or four deep. The players pushed their way through the gauntlet of voice recorders and video cameras in order to get onto the field or back into the safety of the dugout, a simultaneously amusing and pathetic sight.
It's my duty as an American teenager to take a couple of selfies while on the field, which I did - somewhat embarrassedly, as I was the youngest person there by at least ten years. I needed a new Twitter profile picture, so what else was I to do?
I spent the rest of the night watching the game from an auxiliary press box set up near the right-field foul pole and writing live in-game updates.
The normal press box was chock-full - there were seating charts allotting a few spots to each news organization - and this auxiliary box, normally an exclusive fan club area, was no different. We sat at rows of tables draped with tablecloths and power strips running the periphery.
It was a better set-up than other games, though - I've been to a few World Series games that were so crowded, media members were relegated to a cordoned-off area to watch the game on a TV.
As I monitored the game, my Twitter feed and the MLB.com Gameday app on my laptop, I did feel a little guilty for skipping out on geology class, so I opened Miami Canvas in one browser tab and occasionally pretended to look at it.
As one of my colleagues put it on Twitter, I was enrolled for the weekend not at Miami, but in "World Series U".