APRIL 25 TO APRIL 29

Jacksonville to Pensacola

Games 15 to 20

A few hours before today's series opener, the team's pitchers are on the field throwing and running sprints, when out of nowhere the skies turn biblical. The clouds run black. The wind howls through the stadium like a train whistle. The rain hits in buckets. Dumbfounded Shuckers pitchers are told to evacuate and take immediate shelter in the visitors' clubhouse. With the team huddled together in the tunnel, watching and thinking the same terrible thought -- Are we in a f---ing tornado right now? -- the entire left-field fence uproots, cracks in half and blows to the ground. "Craziest thing I've ever seen," outfielder Kyle Wren says.

Then, just as suddenly, it all stops, and the grounds crew patches the fence. What felt like a tornado turns out to be just a 31-minute rain delay. Eventually, the players take the field but can't help glancing over their shoulders toward left, searching for funnel clouds.

The only Shucker who seems unaffected by the extreme weather -- or anything, frankly -- is shortstop Orlando Arcia, a 20-year-old can't-miss future MLB star. After the delay, he leads the Shuckers to a 4-3 win with a double and a homer. The second-youngest player in the Southern League, he's already equipped with major league defensive skills. All he needs is a bit more power at the plate -- like his mom, Lilibeth, a renowned softball slugger back home in Anaco, Venezuela. Confidence and charisma have never been an issue, though. Signed at 16, Arcia is the energetic, fearless locker room yin to the statesmanly yang of LaTorre, even if, as far as anyone can tell, his English to date mostly consists of two phrases: "You suck!" and "I'm Captain America, baby!"

Two days later, with an 8-2 win in Pensacola, right-hander Tyler Wagner becomes the first pitcher in the Southern League to reach four wins. He doesn't look long for Double-A, which is unsettling for the Shuckers. Sure, they'd hate to lose his arm and grind-it-out leadership. But the team would be even more devastated to lose Wagner's PlayStation.

APRIL 30 TO MAY 15

Pensacola to Huntsville to Pearl to Jackson

Games 21 to 35

When right-hander Jorge Lopez finds out he's starting on May 10 in Pearl, Mississippi, he strolls down to the computer in the hotel lobby and Googles: How to concentrate better. Lopez, a native of Cayey, Puerto Rico, and the Brewers' second-round pick in 2011, has struggled in his first few Double-A starts. These days his mind, sometimes even on the mound, is on his son, Mikael. Since his birth in 2013, Mikael has suffered from a mysterious, painful intestinal disorder that has required the use of a feeding tube. Despite numerous tests and long stays with specialists in Ohio, the word in May from Lopez's wife, Karla, is that there still isn't a definitive diagnosis. "I am scared for him," Lopez says.

On the morning of his start, Lopez kneels at the edge of his hotel bed, his elbows sinking into the soft white comforter. My son has a lot of sickness, but he keeps fighting, so I will keep fighting. My son is tough, so I will be tough. My son won't stop, so I won't stop. Everything is gonna happen positive today, for him, for his mom and for me.

"What I do now is I pray and I think about my son," he says, "and then I put that to the side and go to work."

Soft-spoken and always smiling away from the park, Lopez flips a switch on the mound. Able to spot his fastball on both sides of the plate and armed with a low, indecipherable changeup and exquisite command of his curve, Lopez mows down 14 consecutive hitters and carries a no-hitter into the sixth inning. He even adds an RBI single in a 2-0 masterpiece (the third of seven straight wins for Lopez) that manager Subero proclaims is "as good of a pitching performance as you'll see on this level."

Meanwhile, almost 2,000 miles to the west, in California, Josh Fellhauer can feel himself going numb as doctors inform his family: If anyone needs to see Julie or to say their goodbyes, "today's probably the day." Julie, though, has different plans. Still in a coma but off sedatives, she's fighting. Her blood pressure stabilizes and an EEG comes back positive for brain function. For the first time in eight years, instead of being on the road at a baseball game, Josh is able to spend Mother's Day with his mom. At home the next night, though, the Fellhauer men are making dinner when the hospital calls. She just coded, says the voice, you need to make your way down here. "I think she wanted to get to that day and then say, 'I made it, I'm ready to go,'" Josh says. Later that night, Julie dies. It has been less than 100 days since her diagnosis -- a thought that leaves Josh unsure where the strength for his next breath will come from. "She was competitive, and she beat us all to heaven," Josh says. "I try to think of it that way, and that helps, because honestly, I got nothing else to go to when I try to make sense of it all."

The Shuckers drop three of their last four to the Braves in Pearl and drag themselves back onto the bus. Half an hour into the 300-mile trek north on I-55 to Jackson, Tennessee, Brent Suter, a Harvard kid, somehow convinces his teammates that there is only one possible antidote to their mini-slump: Pitch Perfect. A chorus member at Cincinnati's Moeller High School, Suter tried out for Harvard's prestigious a cappella group but didn't make the final cut. So he decided instead to focus on how to pitch, perfect. "I say this in all seriousness," says Chris Harris, the team's media relations director, radio play-by-play man, website manager and occasional grounds crew assistant. "Brent Suter has the legitimate voice of an angel."

Arcia's English to date mostly consists of two phrases: "You suck!" and "I'm Captain America, baby!" -

There is some grumbling resistance to the movie suggestion at first. But slowly, quietly, up and down the bus, teammates unburden themselves of their secret admiration for the Barden Bellas and the Treblemakers. "We have guys of all ages, at all different points of their careers, from all different kinds of backgrounds and from all over the world," Suter says later. "Yet everyone realized they genuinely like each other, and maybe it was at that moment that we all started to realize this trip wasn't a disaster or a nightmare but a once-in-a-lifetime thing happening."

Still, some disasters can't be avoided. Most minor league clubhouses fall into a narrow range when it comes to quality and comfort. The best ones are a step or two below a high school locker room. The bad ones are a step or two above a serial killer's lair. Take the clubhouse in Jackson. It's painted cinder block, with coffin-low ceilings and no windows. It's steamy from poor ventilation and a permanently moist, thin layer of cheap carpet -- it might have been green once, but it's impossible to be sure -- laid over concrete that oozes and bubbles around your feet as you walk. It smells of mold, urinal cakes, rust and feet. Everything, from the hair gel to the coffeemaker to the towels, is mismatched, generic, gently used or held together with athletic tape. The showerheads are rusty, and the urinals stagnate to the point of coagulation. The more time you spend living and breathing inside spaces like these, the more your vision squeezes, narrows and stretches, as if looking at your baseball dreams getting farther and farther away through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.

On the lower left-hand side of the doorway to the visitors' clubhouse entrance is a mysterious indentation about the size of a serving platter; at first glance it looks like the work of an industrious woodpecker. For several minutes, a group of baseball neophytes stand and stare at the strange marking, trying to come up with a hypothesis. And then Nick Ramirez leans out of the doorway and, with his right hand, slams his dirty cleats against the wall and into the indentation.

At 7:08 p.m., just a few moments before they take the field, most of the Shuckers are singing along to "Everything Is Awesome," which is playing on the stadium speakers.

Another feature of the Ballpark at Jackson: a popular smoking section located down the right-field line, right above the visitors' bullpen and just below a kids play area. When the wind blows east toward the outfield, as it does tonight, it feels a bit like warming up in a cigar bar. To avoid the smoke, the Shuckers' staff retreats to the far, deep corner of the bullpen, just under the foul pole sponsored by the local Harley-Davidson dealership. There, before too long, Austin Ross and Suter are begging reliever Jaye Chapman for a little story time from the bigs.

It's a delicate request and a test of just how much the 24/7 close confines of the road trip have accelerated the friendships and trust among players who were strangers just 20 days ago. To some, talking about the dream of a call-up is like speaking about a no-hitter in progress -- you just don't do it. What's more, Chapman, a mature, approachable Florida native with Thor-like shoulder-length blond hair, doesn't want to be seen as bragging or, worse, endlessly reliving his 29 major league glory days at every turn. But when he looks around at his eager younger teammates huddled together on folding chairs, trying to escape the smoke and, at the same time, hold on to a dream just as ephemeral, he relents.

"So I'm in the Nationals' bullpen," Chapman begins. "I look down at my shoes, and I am so scared and freaking out ... "

Armed with a fastball in the low 90s and a split-finger changeup, Chapman was called up by the Cubs on Sept. 4, 2012, while the team was in Washington, D.C. Expecting a day or two to acclimate, Chapman hadn't bothered to tie his cleats when the bullpen phone rang. Panicked, he hurried to the rubber and started throwing, his laces still loose. His feet and his pitches slip-sliding all over the place, Chapman was living out a pitcher's version of the show-up-to-school-graduation-in-your-PJs nightmare.

Nearly two weeks later, he was on the mound at Wrigley freakin' Field. After the Cubs' Anthony Rizzo hit a grand slam in the sixth to put Chicago up 10-9 against the Pirates, Chapman was tapped for relief duty. He allowed a triple to Starling Marte and struck out Andrew McCutchen, then got out of the inning with what might have been the last legal execution of the third-to-first pickoff move outlawed by major league baseball a few months later. The Cubs went on to win 13-9. "The crowd at Wrigley went absolutely crazy," he tells his teammates. "It was so cool."

At spring training the next season, a pair of sore hips and decreased velocity sent Chapman to the team's doctor, who discovered that he had a genetic bone-growth condition called femoroacetabular impingement in both hips. So he had both hips repaired, sat out the entire 2013 season and has been steadily working his way "back from the dead" and into major league form ever since.

Right now, though, it doesn't look like anyone on the Shuckers will beat Arcia to the big leagues. The left-field fence in the ballpark in Jackson is 25 feet high, and Arcia, the shortstop, all of 165 pounds, clears it by 20 feet with a blast in the seventh to extend his hitting streak to seven games. A moment later, the skies open and the game is called. "Eat. Shower. Pack. Let's go," Subero says.

At 10:51 p.m., the Shuckers' bus merges onto I-40 East. The first sign says Nashville 121 miles. As FedEx trucks and horse trailers roar past on the left at 65 mph, blasts of lightning flashbulb on the horizon, showing the outline of huge thunderclouds. The Shuckers are headed right for it. Just a few minutes into the trip, the fuse on the TV screen blows. Then the outlets fry too. Without a movie or the ability to charge their cellphones, players sleep, watch their teammates play hockey video games or stare out the window, counting roadkill. At 1:37 (two dead deer, one possum), they pass the sweet home Alabama sign. At 1:54 (six dead deer, one possum, one skunk, one unconfirmed porcupine), they pass a rest stop featuring a full 363-foot Saturn V rocket. They are not hallucinating. The rocket commemorates Huntsville's contribution to the space industry and is proof that they are about to go where few teams have ever gone before: back to the city they abandoned.