Noel Coward wrote a famous song for a cabaret revue that had the recurring line, "Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun." Better make that "Mad dogs, Englishmen and Gulf Coast League players go out in the noonday sun."
I tell aspiring professional ballplayers the main difference between a season in the GCL and a 3-month sentence in a Florida Correctional Institution is you don't have to wear an orange vest while playing ball. But the guys you see along Florida highways pick up litter with armed guards watching. GCL players pick up baseballs with coaches watching. And throw them. By the hour. When the morning fundamentals work is finished, you drag yourself to the locker room, change your sopping wet shirt, eat a light lunch and go out to play a noon game. Both the GCL opposition and the Florida road gangs arrive by bus. There is usually 1 day off a week. No game. That does not mean there is no practice. Yesterday was June 21. The regular season ends Aug. 28. There is no time off for good behavior. But there are best-of-three playoffs to decide who will go home most tired.
Actually, the noon starts are a good idea. The rainy season is under way, which means you can have 3 straight weeks without a drop while a town 5 miles away is underwater. In a typical morning, thunderstorms slowly move off the Gulf of Mexico, Mother Nature reacting to the interaction of the cooling land with moist air off the 90-degree Gulf. In late afternoon, the opposite occurs, a sea breeze front off the Atlantic collides with air dried by the intense inland heat and these storms rumble across Tampa Bay. But between noon and around 3 p.m., there is an uneasy truce between the conflicting bodies of water, a window for a game of ball.
It was 95 degrees when Jesse Biddle started his professional debut.
