About Me

My name is Jordan Litke and I am a current collegiate baseball player in the Chicago area. I have played baseball for almost all of my life but I never would have expected some of these things to happen at the collegiate level, let alone any level. Let’s mix kerosene and water and make this shit blow up and spread the love.

Hit me up down in the comments section if you have experienced any random shit of your own and let the creative bullshit begin.

Never Drop A Phone Under A Tarp

It was going to rain one night so our coach messaged our team to do what any sensible baseball program would do. He asked us to put the big tarp on the field. The sun was beginning to set so it was starting to get dark outside. Thankfully campus safety never came to yell at us for putting the tarp on our own field. So things went by smoothly.

Half the team unrolled the tarp while the other half stood around and watched. Then we all grabbed a part of the tarp and began to walk it over the field. Once the tarp got pulled across the field, we all grabbed an edge and pulled it tight to make sure there were no air bubble underneath. Then we grabbed all the pins and pinned the tarp down to the field so that it would not fly away with the wind.

After we got the field all tarped up our coach had us gather up so he could tell us a few things before we all dispersed. Once he was done meeting with us, a member of our team started freaking out. He realized he dropped his phone while we were pulling the tarp across the field. This meant that his phone was trapped somewhere on the infield under the tarp.

Fortunately, his phone was fully charged so all we had to do was call the phone and figure out where it was under the tarp. But when we called it, it was in the middle of the tarp. This meant we had to undo a ton of the tarp just to get to that section.

We were all so mad at him for dropping his phone that we made him put the tarp back together after he grabbed his phone. Hopefully this does not happen again so we do not have to deal with that again.

How To Move A Baseball Field Tarp

Currently on our baseball field, we have an extremely nice tarp. There are never any issues with holes in the tarp or it coming undone on the field. However, it was not always like this. We had an old tarp that we donated to the softball team after we got our new tarp. This tarp did not just magically fly over to the other field. We had to manually move it to the field.

Our coach had us fold the tarp up as small as possible and flip it onto a pickup truck so we could drive it up to the softball field. According to Beacon Athletics, a full infield tarp can weigh about 2,500 pounds. Yes, we had close to 50 baseball players to try and lift this tarp but when you fold it up, only a limited amount of people can actually help in lifting the tarp onto the truck. In other words, it was impossible to lift this mammoth of a tarp onto the pick up truck.

Instead of lifting the entire tarp, we lifted one end of it and backed the truck up into it so that part of the tarp was on the back end of the truck. From there, we began to flip the other half over the top. We started flipping the tarp and so more and more people began going under this 2,500 pound tarp trying to help. If one person decided to stop trying, it could turn into half of our team heading to the hospital with broken necks as the tarp comes crashing down. Thankfully, this did not happen. I talked with a few of the members on the women’s softball team afterwards and they all just laughed at us because they had no idea that they were even getting a tarp.

Once we got it onto the truck and over to the other field. We unrolled it again and cut it to the smaller size that fit the softball field’s dimensions. After 2 hours of a full body workout, our coach sent us up to the weight room to really make sure our bodies felt like shit the next morning.

Why You Should Never Be Last

It was a Friday and we had three games down at Southern Illinois University‘s field. These were our first three games of the season and we wanted to start the season off right. We left Thursday night as it was close to a six hour drive down to the hotel we were staying at for the weekend.

The games went by smoothly. We went undefeated on this trip outscoring our opponents by a total of 29 runs between the three games. However, winning these games was only part of the fun that happened on this trip.

We loaded up the bus to head to the field and we were just waiting on one player. The bus was parked to the side of the hotel visible from the front door of the hotel. The tricky thing was, there was a similar bus parked in front of our hotel that the Indiana State women’s basketball team was using for their trip.

When the player came out of the hotel, he assumed that the bus parked in front of our hotel was our bus so he was shocked and confused when he boarded this bus to see an entire bus full of girls. When he finally got off that bus and boarded ours, our team all gave him a round of applause for his actions. To go along with this, a video was also taken of him boarding our bus that shows us all clapping, and also the other bus that he got on, which was then uploaded to twitter and received over 5,000 views overnight.

When we asked him what happened when he boarded the bus he said that the bus driver looked at him and asked if he had the wrong bus. Then he looked up and saw a bus full of girls. Finally, he said he had the wrong bus and turned around as the entire bus laughed at him.

So not only did our team start out the year on a strong note going undefeated on our first weekend trip, but he definitely had a hell of a start to the season getting on the wrong bus for our first game and becoming semi Twitter famous overnight.

The Reason We Got The New Tarp

It was a normal day for baseball season in the Midwest, windy and rainy. We had put the big tarp on the field the night before to be ready for the ensuing weather, but this was when we had the old tarp. The new tarp was one large tarp that was held down by pins and would withstand almost any weather.

The old tarp had holes everywhere in it and was held down by PVC pipe filled with concrete. We used other smaller tarps to cover the spots where the holes were on the bigger tarp. Any slight gust of wind and the whole thing may come undone. This is exactly what happened on one of these days.

During the middle of the day, our coach texts us a picture of the field and says to fix it. We immediately rush down to the field and see the mess that is our tarp. Many of the concrete PVC pipes had rolled off the tarp and large parts of the infield was exposed to the rain. When we attempted to put the tarp back on the field, it was so windy that none of the concrete filled PVC pipes would hold the tarp down.

This is when we had to get creative. We began to bring the metal benches from the bullpens and the dugouts and place them on the tarp to help hold them down. Even this was not enough to hold this damn tarp down so we went back and started grabbing the shovels, rakes and anything else that we could use to put on the tarp so that maybe we would have a chance of using our field for the game the next day.

Finally, we got the tarp to stay down after fighting with it for way too long. This situation was probably one of the reasons that we got the new tarp much quicker than expected.

The Day We Had A Party Bus

It was a Friday and we had on our schedule a double header against Augustana College at their field. This is close to a 3 hour drive from our campus. We were leaving for the game around 10:00 A.M. as our game started at 4:30 P.M. Everything seemed normal when we showed up to the clubhouse before loading the buses.

When we began to load the buses, this is when we noticed something strange. The bus we normally had was not there, but it was a different bus instead. When we boarded the bus, it looked like a party bus you might see on someone’s Vegas trip. In the front of the bus there was a large fridge, a table with benches around it, a microwave, and a full kitchen. In the back of the bus there were leather couches that lined the sides of the bus with a large television on the back wall, a smaller television in the middle of the bus with surroundsound speakers.

Right when we saw the bus, we sent someone to go get their Playstation4. Once they got back, we finished loading up the buses and off we went. The entire way down we played video games trading off who was playing while blasting music through the speakers.

We arrived at their field and the games went by smoothly. We won the first game by 11 runs and the second game by three runs. Once the games finished up, we loaded our party bus back up and headed back to campus. On the way back, instead of playing on the Playstation4 we hooked up someone’s’ laptop to the television on the back wall. From there, we proceeded to watch every episode of The Real Bros of Simi Valley on Facebook.

This was hands down the best bus ride I’ve been a part of at North Central College. Once we got back, we unloaded the party bus and it drove away never to be seen again. A few minutes later, a small red van showed up with a few guys who did not fit in the party bus. It must have sucked to be them.

When Campus Safety Was Too Overprotective

It was spring break at North Central College, and we had just gotten back from our Florida baseball trip late Friday night. We went undefeated down in Florida and so our coach gave us the rest of the weekend off after a long and intense week. The only thing we did have was a tarp pull Sunday night at 7:30 P.M. The weekend break from baseball was nice and then our tarp pull time came around.

As soon as that time hit Sunday night every North Central College baseball player came down to the field. We proceeded to unroll the tarp, drag it across the field, pull it tight along the edges and place pins in the tarp to keep it from blowing away. I was pulling the corner closest to Homeplate when something strange happened. A flashlight began shining at me from behind.

When I turned around it was blinding me in the eyes, but I could see the uniform. It was a campus safety officer. We were all confused because we were just doing what our coach told us to do. She yelled out to us asking what we were doing so we explained to her that we were on the baseball team and that we were putting the tarp on the field because it was going to rain.

This is when she asked us why we did not turn on the lights on the field. We told her we did not have lights on our field and one of the members of our team yelled from across the field, “Yeah those aren’t in our budget but you could help grab a corner of the tarp and pull!” She then continued and asked us that if she were to identify every one of us that we would all have our North Central College identification card on us, and we said yes.

Then she asked us something that made no sense at all. She asked us why we did not turn on the lights on the football field. Yes, our field is located right next to the football field on our campus, but those lights do not just turn on and off with the flip of a switch. They take time to turn on and none of us have access to those lights.

Finally, she believed us but told us to try and do the tarp pull earlier in the day to avoid her coming by and ran off saying that she had to go chase some people off the football field. It was probably just some cross-country runners using the track seeing how she reacted to us. Maybe this will help get lights for a field sooner rather than later so campus safety can get off our ass.

How To Get Rid Of Ice On A Baseball Field

It was another classic day for a spring baseball game in the Midwest. It was a Sunday in late April, the sun was shining, the temperature was cold and there was snow on the ground. It was our senior day and we did not have very many days left in the season where we could not reschedule the game. There was a possibility that we could play the game at another location that had a turf field and could handle the weather better, but our coach wanted senior day to be on our home field.

The game started at 2:00 P.M. and our coach had us report to the field at about 8:00 A.M. to get to work. We had the tarp on the field and a lot of the snow had melted and then refroze into giant ice chunks on the tarp. This only made removing the tarp off the field that much harder since the tarp weighed so much.

Once the tarp was removed, it left a line of giant ice chunks along the edge of the field. They were too big to pick up or move so our coach had us do something unique. He instructed us to put on our metal cleats and start stopping on the ice to break it up. He did not give us an ice pick or tell us to hit the ice with bats. Instead, he told us to stomp on the ice. So, there we were, on an early Sunday morning, stomping on ice.

At this point in the day our team thought there was little to no chance we would play on our field because there was snow on the field. But our coach persisted and put us to work. After we stomped on the ice for close to 30 minutes, he brought out the shovels and the Gator.

For the next hour we shoveled the snow and ice onto the Gator, drove it off the field, dumped the snow and ice, and drove back to fill it up again until all the ice and snow was off the field.After hours of hard work getting the field ready, we played on our home field for senior day, and fucking lost.

How To Get Rid Of Morning Dew

It was my first day of official fall practices for baseball and I was beyond excited. I worked so hard to get to this point and so I show up a little early to the field to make sure I had everything ready to go. I put my cleats on, tie my laces up and began to set up the field.

This meant taking the small tarps off the field, getting the water down to the field from the athletic trainer’s office, and putting the bases in the field. This was everything we had to do to set up the field, or at least that’s what we thought. This is when our coach asked us to do something we never thought we would be asked to do in our lifetime, he asked us to get rid of the morning dew in the outfield grass.

We all looked at each other extremely confused as ideas began going through our heads of how the hell we were going to do this. Our coach saw how confused we were and so he told us how to do it. He asked us to go into one of the bins behind the baseball field, grab a long garden hose, and drag the hose across the grass in the outfield to break up the dew.

So there I was, finally preparing for my first official collegiate practice, dragging a hose across the outfield grass for about 20 minutes to break up the dew. To everyone’s surprise, it worked. The water was removed from the blades of grass and soaked into the soil much quicker than what would have normally happened had we not had the hose. Apparently he learned this from some of his golf buddies back in the day that they would use on the green. Having this been my first awakening into the collegiate baseball world, it only showed the type of creative bullshit that was yet to come.

The Day We Had A Sauna For A Bus

It was another double header against a conference opponent, Illinois Weslyan University. If we won both games we would clinch first place in our conference and earn the right to host the conference tournament. Today was not a classic baseball game in the Midwest. Instead of it being cold and windy, it was hot and muggy. This is probably because we had to drive close to three hours south to get to their field.

The first game was actually the continuation of a game played previously in the season that was cut short due to bad weather. It ended on a walk-off slaughter rule as we won by 10 runs. The second game went similar to the first game as we won by 5 runs and it was never really a close game.

After we won the second game we stormed the field as we had just won our conference for the fourth consecutive year. We received the trophy and the banner and took the team pictures for our website. After this we all stood around and waited for each member of our team took an individual picture with the awards received so they could actually have some clout on their social media pages. Finally, after about an hour of waiting for all of the pictures to be taken, we loaded the bus and began the long trip back to our school.

By this point it is close to midnight so we wouldn’t be making back to campus until after 3:00 a.m. Initially this was going to be a good thing as it would give me two hours of time to finish a paper that was due at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Once we departed from the field I pulled out my laptop to start working on this paper. About 10 minutes in a bunch of us began to notice that it was getting a little toasty on this bus. We decided to get our coaches attention and asked if he could have our bus driver turn on the air conditioning.

This is when things went south, the air conditioning was not working. This meant that we had 35 sweaty, gross guys packed into a coach bus with no way to open the windows and no way to get any air flow whatsoever for the next three hours as it is upwards of 90 degrees outside and much hotter inside. In other words, we were shit out of luck. I passed out from the heat and woke up back at our school three hours later taking a bath in my own sweat.

The second I got off the bus, I immediately ran back to my room, chugged a gallon of water, and typed up an four page paper due in less than 8 hours. My advice from this experience would be to always make sure the air conditioning is working. If not, you may have just entered into a mobile sauna that only has one temperature, hot as shit.

The Day the Dugout Almost Blew Up

It was a classic day for a baseball game in the Midwest, cold and windy. We had a double header against our conference opponent, Carthage College. The first game ended on a close win as we won by one run. The second game started off similar to the first game as we had a one run lead heading into the fourth inning. This is when shit got real.

Our team was in the field when suddenly, their entire team came sprinting onto the field. Being on the opposing team, we thought a huge brawl was breaking out so our whole team came sprinting out of the dugout onto the field as well. After every player was on the field, we realized what had happened. The opposing team had knocked over a kerosene heater that we had given them and started a fire in the dugout.

One of our coaches, being the helpful man that he is, grabbed a jug of water and began walking to the fire to pour it on. For those of you that are not big science people, this is not how you put out a kerosene fire. This is how you blow up a dugout.

Maybe this was a hidden agenda to get new dugouts for the field but I’m sure there are better ways to do this. We quickly stopped our coach from pouring the water on the fire and waited for the fire department to show up. After about 15 minutes of waiting, the fire was finally put out, and the game continued.

The opposing head coach is known for being a heavy smoker, so of course the jokes had to come out about how he dropped his cigarette on the heater and started a fire. But these jokes were cut down quick as we found out he moved on to vaping instead. Once the fire department left, we continued the game as normal and won by six runs. But as normal as this game ended, it is still one of the strangest things to happen during a collegiate baseball game.

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