Sept. 21 9 a.m.: Player and staff bus 1 departs the Four Seasons for Marlins Park 10 a.m.: Luggage to lobby 10:30 a.m.: Bus 2 departs for Marlins Park 1:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Marlins (buses depart for airport one hour post game; security screening at ballpark) 6 p.m.: Departure for Washington-Dulles 8:45 p.m.: Arrival at Washington-Dulles Buses scheduled to take players to Nationals Park, where their cars await.

Sept. 18-20 Noon: Player and staff bus 1 departs the Four Seasons for Marlins Park 3:30 p.m.: Bus 2 departs for Marlins Park 7:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Marlins Player and staff buses return to the hotel 45 and 75 minutes after the game

Sept. 17 1 p.m.: Check out and pay all incidentals. Player and staff bus 1 departs the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead for Turner Field 3 p.m.: Luggage to lobby 3:30 p.m.: Bus 2 departs for Turner Field 7:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Braves (buses depart for airport one hour post game; security screening at ballpark) Midnight: Departure for Miami 2 a.m.: Arrival at Miami International Airport

Sept. 15-16 Noon: Player and staff bus 1 departs the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead for Turner Field 3:30 p.m.: Bus 2 departs for Turner Field 7:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Braves Player and staff buses return to the hotel 45 and 75 minutes after the game

Sept. 14 9 a.m.: Check out and pay all incidentals. Player and staff bus 1 departs the New York Palace for Citi Field 10 a.m.: Luggage to lobby 10:30 a.m.: Bus 2 departs for Citi Field 1:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Mets (buses depart for airport one hour post game; security screening at ballpark) 6 p.m.: Departure for Atlanta 8:30 p.m.: Arrival at Hartsfield Jackson International Airport

Sept. 11-13 Noon: Player and staff bus 1 departs the New York Palace for Citi Field 3:30 p.m.: Bus 2 departs for Citi Field 7:10 p.m.: Nationals vs. Mets Player and staff buses return to the hotel 45 and 75 minutes after the game

The Washington Nationals made 12 road trips during the 2014 season. Each is planned long before Opening Day by Rob McDonald, the team’s vice president of clubhouse operations and team travel. Here is the itinerary distributed to players and staff for the trip from Washington to New York, Atlanta and Miami that concluded Sept. 21.

“That’s the hardest part,” he said. “You’re away, and you come back, and she’s changed. I try to turn it into a positive, like I can notice the differences because I’m not there every day. But you can’t get that time back.”

The Seattle Seahawks beat the Denver Broncos on Feb. 2. On Feb. 4, McDonald was due in Viera, Fla., to prepare for spring training. The season wouldn’t start for another eight weeks. During the Super Bowl, McDonald’s brother began doing the math.

“Basically,” he said, “you’re on call till October.”

He could only shrug. In a way, spring training, which seems like such a slow build for the rest of baseball, is the most hectic time of year for McDonald and Wallace. McDonald spends the months after the season preparing for the next, booking hotels, arranging charter flights, setting up apartments and hotels for players and staff during spring training. Wallace and his main assistant, Dan Wallin, use that time to take inventory, to order new equipment for the next year, to arrange the shipment of gear to Florida and back.

When players begin to trickle in, the needs come in a rush. There is no lull. “You’re excited to see everybody, to see how the players look, to see what people did in the offseason,” McDonald said. “And you get in a rhythm once the season starts. But to be honest, by now, I’m pretty fried.”

He said this in September, eating a salmon salad at Union Market, not far from his home in the District’s Brookland neighborhood. McDonald grew up outside St. Louis, went to Northern Illinois to play quarterback, moved to wide receiver, then suffered a back injury that ended his football career. He transferred to the University of Arizona, studied pre-law, and decided he preferred the pursuit of a career in pro sports over law school. So he worked in Tucson rec leagues, then for a sports radio station in Phoenix, then for the Arizona Diamondbacks in spring training before landing in the Arizona Fall League, where baseball’s best prospects go each year.

Gonzalez managed the team to which McDonald was assigned. Carlos Tosca, now Gonzalez’s bench coach in Atlanta, was the bench coach back then, too. And McDonald did whatever they asked.

“He took it real seriously,” Gonzalez said. “You asked him to do something — picking up the trash, grabbing laundry, whatever — he was full tilt going after it. He’d get it done and do it happily.”

McDonald so impressed Gonzalez that when the latter ended up as a coach with the Florida Marlins, he recommended his young protégé. McDonald, now 42, has been in baseball ever since, first as an intern in the Marlins’ baseball operations department, eventually, in 2002, as the Expos’ traveling secretary. He was 30. He now knows just about everybody in baseball, has relationships with players that date back decades. But when he came to Montreal, Omar Minaya — the general manager inserted by Major League Baseball, which owned the Expos — gave him some advice.

“No matter what happens,” Minaya said, “you can’t lose the trust of that clubhouse.”

No one knows what goes on around the Nationals more intimately than McDonald. If a potential free agent signee comes to Washington for a physical, McDonald arranges the flight, the car service, the appointment, the hotel. If a player is sent to the minors, McDonald has the conversation about his lease situation in Washington, whether he needs a rental car in Syracuse or Harrisburg or wherever. If a player’s wife and family are meeting the team on the road, McDonald books an adjacent room. When it’s time to distribute meal money for the road — $95 a day — McDonald hands out the envelopes. He knows who needs a gluten-free meal on the team flight, who is obsessed with fantasy football, who arrives at the ballpark early and who stays late.

“You really have to have a lot of discretion in what you do talk about and what you don’t talk about,” McDonald said. He will not bring every little problem to Rizzo. “You got to put out the fires. You have to take the pressure off of him as much as you do the players.”

So from his spot as gatekeeper, concierge, liaison — “Kind of like our ‘slash,’ ” Storen said — McDonald has not only watched as the Nationals have transformed from baseball’s Island of Misfit Toys into an organization that expects to compete for a division title every season, but he has helped shape it, in tiny but tangible ways. When the club contracted with a small charter company, and that company couldn’t provide a replacement plane when one broke down — forcing the Nationals to sit on the tarmac for six hours, then return home at midnight before flying the next day — McDonald convinced the club it needed better services. The Nationals now charter with United.

Clubhouse and equipment manager Mike Wallace pushes a box full of necessities out of the Nationals' locker room shortly after the conclusion of their day game.

“If Ian Desmond gets offered $100 million [as a free agent], and we offer him $80 million, it’s easy,” McDonald said. “You go with the $100 million. But if he gets offered $100 million from both of us, and his wife is comfortable and his family likes it here and he knows the way he’s going to be treated — to us, that could make a difference.”

It is why he arrives at the ballpark between 10 and 11 a.m. on most game days, maybe nine hours before first pitch, an hour before the coaching staff starts to trickle in, a couple of hours before the players show up. It’s why, when he got off the elevator and walked across the marble floor in the lobby of the New York Palace Hotel, his phone was to his ear.

“Bus is at 10:30,” he said. This was Sunday, the last day of a four-game series against the Mets, the day for travel to Atlanta. One bus, with the staff and a few early-rising players, had departed for CitiField at 9 a.m. Wallace was in the lobby, working with white-gloved bellmen to check off each piece of luggage headed to an equipment truck, checking his list. He grabbed his own phone, and listened.

“I told him to put a tag on it,” he said. He listened some more. “I’ll see if I have another one,” and he turned to his own roller bag, moved aside his copy of “A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations that Shaped Baseball,” and rummaged for a tag.

“The old saying: You can lead a horse to water,” he said.

At that moment, the Nationals’ magic number to clinch division was six. The second bus departed, right on time.

On the road again

By the time United flight 1809 pulled slowly into Gate D8 at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, the concourse was nearly empty. The largest screen at the Atlanta Braves All Star Grill, adjacent to the gate, had long since switched off the Braves’ miserable 10-3 loss to the Texas Rangers, completing a sweep. The Nationals had quickly overcome their own issues — a plane damaged by a mobile luggage ramp at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, a switch to a new Boeing 737, a flight that took off just after 6:30 p.m., about an hour late.

Two buses waited on the tarmac, and a staircase wheeled over to the plane.

“People ask how often we play, which is every day, and they hear about how much we travel, which is all the time, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god. I had no idea,’ ” Werth said. “ ‘You must be exhausted.’ And then I’m like, ‘Well, you don’t know how we travel.’ ”