ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Francisco Cervelli has a big knife in his hand, and you could not blame any of his teammates on the Empire State Yankees if they are a bit frightened.

Tensions are running high among the ranks of this Triple-A team. It’s 96 degrees outside. Players are packed shoulder to shoulder in a tiny clubhouse, all but bumping into one another as they eat pizza and turkey burgers off Styrofoam plates. And Yankees GM Brian Cashman keeps claiming guys on waivers instead of calling up his own farmhands. If someone like Cervelli snapped, it would not come as a big surprise.

So the repeated sound of a machete-style knife on a cutting board is alarming.

Thankfully, Cervelli is only using the knife to cut apples, oranges and peaches, which he then feeds into a juicer. Still, each time the blade hits the board, heads turn.

“This is what I do every day,” says Cervelli, the 26-year-old catcher who spent parts of the last five seasons as the Yankees backup.

Then, as he looks around the clubhouse at the array of food that’s scattered about, he says, “Fruit before the game and vegetables after the game. Because I need the right vitamins if I’m going to stay healthy this year.”

Things like eating healthy have become part of the challenge for the team that would normally be called the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The team that, on this night, is about to play what feels like the 97th away game this season, because, even though the Yankees are the home team on the scoreboard at Frontier Field, they are not really home.

While their stadium, PNC Park, in Moosic, Pa., receives a $43.4 million renovation, the Triple-A Yankees have become a modern-day barnstorming team. They traverse the International League map, which stretches as far north as Buffalo, as far west as Indianapolis, and as far south as Gwinnett County, Ga., on buses and airplanes. But they never have a place to unpack their suitcases.

This game in Rochester, against the Chicago White Sox’s Triple-A affiliate from Charlotte, is their 54th “home” game of the season. The breakdown of the 72 games they will play as the non-road team is as follows: 37 in Rochester; 10 in Syracuse; eight in Allentown, Pa.; seven in Batavia, N.Y.; six in Buffalo; and four in Pawtucket, R.I.

The Yankees had eyed playing Scranton’s 2012 home schedule in Newark, but the Mets — who share exclusive baseball rights in New York and northern New Jersey with the Yankees — blocked the move last September because they claimed the presence of a Yankees affiliate so close to Queens might harm attendance at Citi Field.

That left Scranton scrambling, and forced to resort to this summer's vagabond existence.

"We're making the best of it," says Russell Branyan, a 36-year-old, 14-year big-league veteran with 194 home runs on the back of his baseball card. "But it's definitely a tough situation. These are circumstances beyond our control, so what are you going to do?"

As he talks, Branyan helps prepare a plate of food for his 5-year-old son, Cash, who has made the trip up with his sister, 2-year-old Quinn, from Tennessee to see dad for a few days. That’s another thing the Yankees — there are many family men on a team with an average age of about 30 — are trying to deal with.

“I have a nine-month-old daughter,” says 31-year-old shortstop Doug Bernier. “Our first child. She and my wife are home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. They’ve been up here once. I went home for the All-Star break. Other than that, it’s been talking on Skype. Most of the guys on this team have families, so that’s been hard on almost everybody.”

From a competitive standpoint, the Yankees have held up pretty well, and have actually managed a significantly better record at “home,” where they’re 33-23. Must be the pinstriped uniforms, or batting last, because in Rochester they play in front of several hundred scattered fans, dress in a small L-shaped clubhouse, and try to do all their strength and conditioning work in a hallway that’s about 15 feet wide.

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“It hasn’t been fun,” says former Mets pitcher John Maine, who has been with the team for about a month as he attempts a comeback after missing all of 2011. “I mean, none of us even have cars. So we eat at the hotel or make sandwiches in the clubhouse.”

Maine is one of only a handful of veteran players on the team who has the extra funds to pay for his own hotel room. Most of the others double up, which also gets old in a hurry.

"Baseball's about making adjustments," says Frank Menechino, a former big-league infielder who is one of the coaches. "And they've had to make adjustments. We're in close quarters constantly. Guys get heated. They argue like brothers and sisters in a house. It's just aggravating. But when they get out on the field, they just play the game."



For most teams, the road is a place to bond, but that's when you play half your games away from home. Just as important is the time at home, when players can take time to remember that there's more to life than baseball, when they go home to a wife and kids. Or, at the very least, go home to an apartment, instead of to another restaurant and hotel.

“We’ve had a sense of humor about it since April,” says Menechino. “We’ve had to or someone would be dead by now. You’ve got to laugh a lot of things off. That’s harder for some guys than others. But we can’t change it. The guys who adjust and the guys who deal with the baseball part of it are going to be the guys who will move on and succeed. The guys who let it become an excuse, well, no one cares. I tell them, ‘Only your mom cares. Nobody cares except your mom. And your mom’s not here. So get on with it.’ ”

Back in the clubhouse, Cervelli puts the knife down. He walks out of the clubhouse door, sits down on one of the trainer’s tables in the hall, and turns on his iPad to watch a Spanish-language soap opera.

When someone tells him it’s a far cry from the leather sofas and high-definition, large-screen TVs that fill most big-league clubhouses, he laughs.

“Yes, it is,” Cervelli says, raising the cup of juice in a mock toast. “But today, this is home.”

Jeff Bradley: jbradley@starledger.com; twitter.com/JerseyJBradley