JACKSONVILLE, Ala. -- Do you know who this is,” Ricky Whaley says to his Agriscience class at Jacksonville High School.

“This is Shed Long,” Whaley points to the 22-year-old standing in front of a classroom he once sat in. “He plays for the Reds.”

Shed Long, one of the Reds' top prospects, has played 331 regular-season games as a professional baseball player since he was drafted out of high school in the 12th round of the 2013 Major League Baseball Draft. None of those games have been for the Cincinnati Reds.

Listen to the 12 episode podcast

So far, he’s been an Arizona League Red, a Billings Mustang, a Dayton Dragon, a Daytona Tortuga and a Pensacola Blue Wahoo.

No one is guaranteed a spot in what players call "The Show." You earn it, through perseverance and performance.

As Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. noted, “Babe Ruth had to go through it, Willie Mays had to go, Hank Aaron had to go through it, everybody."

Griffey played in only 129 games before he debuted in The Show.

Still, “was it too long? Absolutely,” Griffey said. “Any time in minor league ball is too long.”

The dream began with Lisa Long. When she was pregnant, she had a dream that her unborn son would be a Major League Baseball player.

“It was just very short and I told his dad about it,” Lisa Long recalls 22 years later.

The father, Shed Long, was a former college football player. His son, who would also be named Shed Long, would follow in his footsteps. He’d be a football player.

This is Alabama, after all. In Alabama, boys play football. They dream of playing in the Iron Bowl, for either the Crimson Tide or the Auburn Tigers. Big Shed, as the elder Long would come to be known, was an Auburn man. His son, in a perfect world, would be a Tiger. The next Bo Jackson or Takeo Spikes or Dameyune Craig.

His mother, though, had other ideas. And not just because one of her degrees is from the University of Alabama.

When Lil Shed, as he is known in his hometown, was 1, he swung a plastic bat and hit a ball over a fence at daycare. It was Lisa Long’s first I-told-you-so.

By the time Lil Shed was 3, the father and son played baseball in the yard. Big Shed looked all around Calhoun County for any organization that would let his son play Tee Ball as a 3-year-old. Only one, Wellborn Youth Sports, would. And at the fields across the street from Wellborn High School, Big Shed decided his wife was right.

“He was one of the very few Tee Ballers who could stand and catch and throw like the older kids,” Big Shed said. “As he advanced, I figured he could play.”

Years later, David Screws, the youth league president at the time, recalled how the league had to change the rules on the field because of Lil Shed. He’d play the pitcher’s spot in Tee Ball and he could run down any ball at any spot on the field – even to the outfield fence – and tag out the runner before they reached home. From that point on, a line was drawn between the infield and the outfield and no fielder could cross that line.

At a camp run by Jacksonville State University, 4-year-old Shed was named the best thrower and hitter.

His parents’ apartment in Talladega, Alabama, sits as a shrine to his youth spent playing baseball. There are trophies throughout, a bat rack with bats ranging from metal Tee Ball bats to professional wooden bats with his name on it. Then there’s the scrapbook Big Shed pulls out, full of photos of Lil Shed in a baseball uniform, wearing a smile.

As an eighth-grader, Shed was seen by Jacksonville High School assistant coach David Clark. He said he knew he wanted Long for his team. Four years later, the Cincinnati Reds took Long in the 12th round of the 2013 draft, the 375th overall pick that year. That means there were 374 players the industry thought were better than Long and 12 the Reds thought were better.

Now, with 331 professional games under his belt, Long is on the brink of the big leagues.

Unlike the NFL or the NBA, getting drafted is more of the beginning than an end to stardom.

Between the draft and the big leagues is minor league baseball. A complex organization of 247 teams makes up the minors in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.

Long has played for five different teams in five seasons – the Arizona League Reds, the Billings Mustangs, the Dayton Dragons, the Daytona Tortugas and Pensacola Blue Wahoos. He’s gone from Rookie ball to Double-A. He has yet to move up to Triple-A, the highest level before the majors.

This offseason could see him join the Reds' 40-man roster, just one more step up the complicated ladder to the big leagues. It’s a journey that few outside the game understand, a story of long bus rides, bad food, games in front of empty stands and long nights in hotels that never appear in anyone’s guidebook.

But it’s the road to the big leagues, to the dream, to “The Show.”

“I think about it every day – I think about starting off hot. And I've got to move (up),” Long says, sitting on the bleachers of his high school stadium in early October. “You don't want to get ahead of yourself, but at the same time, you're not dreaming about it, how else is that dream going to come true? That's how I feel."

Big leaguers report to spring training the second week of February. It’s a resort-type vibe, with players going through workouts in uniform in the morning and having their afternoons free to do what they may in Arizona or Florida.

Minor leaguers don’t have to report until April, but many get to Arizona to work out on their own or with teammates at the big-league club’s facility.

At the Reds’ facility in Goodyear, Arizona, the major leaguers occupy one side of the complex building, while the minors leaguers have another with smaller lockers, less personal space and a cafeteria instead of a cozy dining room.

That cafeteria doesn’t open until the minor leaguers report. The minor leaguers have access to housing and are provided two meals a day at the complex and meal money for dinner once they officially report but, until then, they are on their own.

Neither big leaguers nor minor leaguers get paid during spring training. They get a stipend if they chose to forgo the team-provided lodging, but hardly a full paycheck. For big leaguers with a minimum salary of $535,000 in 2017, this isn’t as big of a deal. For minor leaguers on a minor-league salary (as little as $1,100 a month at the rookie level, according to USA Today), that’s a big deal.

Shed Long is in Arizona early. Luckily, he has friends in high places – namely the big-league clubhouse.

Long stays with Reds center fielder Billy Hamilton in February and March, rides to the complex with Hamilton. At the end of the day, he hitches a ride back with Hamilton.

“My goodness, man, I can't even like … words can't even explain it,” Long says. “I've told him before, ‘man, you don't know how much I appreciate you.’ Just in every aspect, ‘cause I mean it's not just like baseball stuff, we talk about life. He’s always just trying to motivate me and stuff and just showing me the ropes and saying it's gonna be like this.”

For Hamilton, he remembers working his way up through the minors all too well. If he can help someone else, especially a friend, he’ll do it.

“He’s one of those guys that you can tell who want to get to the big leagues,” Hamilton says. “(He’s) worked hard every single day just to try to get there.”

Sometimes life interrupts baseball. In a 48-hour period, two grandparents – his mother’s father and his father’s mother – suffer strokes and die. Long returns home for a pair of funerals, only to return to Arizona in short order to prepare for the upcoming season.

Minor-league spring training is a lot like major-league spring training, just shorter and without the frills of 10,000-seat stadiums and crowds. The teams play on back fields of the complex against teams from other organizations. Long played with future Daytona Tortugas teammates Nick Senzel at third base, Alfredo Rodriguez at shortstop, Gavin LaValley at first and Chris Okey behind the plate.

That group, along with several other minor leaguers broke camp with the Reds, playing in two exhibition games the Reds called “Futures Games,” pitting prospects against big leaguers in Dayton and Louisville.

It was a funny spot for Long, who had played in Dayton in 2016. Although he enjoyed his time there, once a player completes a level, going back is hardly something you want to do. It’s a regression – and can feel that way even in an exhibition.

Countless times in his life, Shed Long had ridden home from a baseball game in the back seat of his parents’ car. You’d think that would be a thing of the past, but here sits Lil Shed, now 21, as a professional baseball player, hitching a ride home in the back of his parents’ car.

About a week before the team broke camp, Long had been told he’d start the season in Daytona, Florida, for the Reds’ high-Class A team. He was also told he’d play the Futures Games. Big Shed and Lisa drive up from Alabama.

They stay in Dayton after the April 1 game and dine with Jim McKinney, who hosted Long during his time in Dayton.

Many minor leaguers live with families in the local community, people who open their home to minor-league players to help offset the cost of living. McKinney had four players at a time in 2016, including Long. McKinney’s contact info in Long’s iPhone identifies him as “Host Dad.” The two still keep in touch. This year, the newly remarried McKinney hosted two players at a time.

The Dragons have a strong host family program, as does the Reds’ Rookie League team in Billings, Montana. (Leslie Chambers from Billings is in Long’s phone as “Host Mom). There are host families in Pensacola, but not in Daytona.

Long left his Audi A4 at home in Alabama while he was at spring training, so he’s riding back with his mother and father to retrieve it, spend one day at home and then head to Daytona in advance of the team’s exhibition game on April 4 and then the start of the regular season the next day in Kissimmee, Florida, where the Tortugas will open the season with four games against the Florida Fire Frogs.

After driving from his parents’ home in Talladega to Daytona, Long has one full day to find a place to live.

With no host families, he’s got to find an apartment – and good luck finding a place in the vacation town that allows month-to-month rentals and is affordable.

He’s not alone. Everyone finds their own place, somehow, some way. Outfielder Daniel Sweet and pitchers Ty Boyles and Robert Stock need a place to stay as well. So Long takes the reins to find a place with a six-month lease that will allow them to move in immediately.

“It’s just crazy,” Long says from his new apartment in Daytona. “It’s either nice and really expensive or it’s trashy and cheap. And I’ve got my car down here, so I’m not going to stay just anywhere.”

Nice and expensive it is.

The four share a three-bedroom apartment. They all have their own rooms, it’s just that Boyle has the living room.

The good news is that the Reds have begun investing more in the nutrition of their minor leaguers. The team provides three meals a day – lunch, a pre-game meal and a postgame meal.

On a random day in April, Long said they had grilled chicken for lunch and rice with grilled shrimp and vegetables for the pre-game meal.

That’s different than the way it used to be. Reds shortstop Zack Cozart said when he was in the minors, he and his teammates would buy a $5 footlong from Subway, eating the first half before the game and saving the second half for after the game. Others recall, if lucky, getting the leftover hot dogs from the concession stands.

And while figuring out mundane things like what to eat and where to live, there’s still baseball to be played. That can be an issue.

On April 20, Long has played in 12 games and had just 10 hits – and no home runs. He's hitting just .222.

“I’m not stressing over it,” he says before a game against the Charlotte Stone Crabs. “And the thing is, my swing is starting to get where I want it. I mean, the biggest thing is who’s gonna remember in August about April and May?”

He’s right not to worry. In a couple of hours, his stats look a lot better. Because it’s April, he goes from a .222 hitter to a .260 hitter in five at-bats. He has three hits, including his first homer of the season.

“It was just an easy swing right to the ball,” he says of the home run. “The rest was what it was supposed to be.”

In the final 10 games of the month, Long has 15 hits in 45 at-bats, raising his average to .278.

On the final day of the month, Long’s played in 49 games and is hitting .321 with a .380 on-base percentage and a .528 slugging percentage. And that’s in the Florida State League, a league known as pitcher-friendly.

One of the few constants in the minors are the ballparks. Players constantly change, ballparks more slowly. A league can gain a reputation as a hitter’s league or a pitcher’s league based on altitude, humidity and park sizes. The California League, which like the Florida State League is the high-Class A level, is a hitter’s league, featuring high altitudes and quirky old parks. Equal statistics in the California League aren’t looked at the same as they would be if achieved in Florida.

So not only is Long’s .908 OPS (on-base plus slugging, a quick and easy statistic to show a player’s offensive output) impressive on its own, it’s doubly impressive in Florida.

“Finally, I just settled in,” Long says at the end of the month.

Long hits his ninth homer of the season on May 31 against the St. Lucie Mets. He also steals two bases that night and walks twice. Gavin LaValley also homers, giving him a league-leading 13 on the season, and adds his 13th double. The Tortugas lose, but they’re sitting two games above .500 and none of the four infielders are hitting lower than Alfredo Rodriguez’s .283.

Life is pretty good.

A reporter from MiLB.com wants to do a story on Long at the Florida State League All-Star Game. He won’t, the story notes, do it without his teammates.

Nick Senzel and LaValley are also Florida State League All-Stars.

“They even called us the ‘trifecta,’” Long says a couple of days later. “We have our own little group text chat. We all know that we have to push each other. In order for us to succeed, I feel all of us have to be successful. I just feel like, if I get on base, Nick knows he has to do a job. When Nick does that job, Gavin knows he has to do the next job.”

The three are in their first year on the same team – LaValley and Long had played together before, but Senzel was the second overall pick in the 2016 draft out of the University of Tennessee. He’s two months older than Long, going to college for three years before being drafted by the Reds and signed with a $6.2 million signing bonus. A third baseman, Senzel is regarded as one of the top prospects in all of baseball.

LaValley is eight months older than Long, but was drafted a year later. An offensive lineman in high school, LaValley was drafted for his power potential, but he hit just 11 home runs in all of 2016. A year later, LaValley enters the Florida State League All-Star Game with a league-leading 15.

In Lakeland, Long singles twice and scores both times on LaValley home runs. LaValley is named the game’s Most Valuable Player.

Despite the break for the All-Star Game, the Tortugas have three more games to play to complete the first half of their season. These games are important, as a first-half title would mean a playoff berth in September.

That doesn’t happen.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no good news. Entering the last day of the official first half, Tortugas manager Eli Marrero tells Long, Senzel and LaValley that they are headed to Double-A Pensacola after the game.

Even though he had expected to be called up, Long hasn’t prepared himself. With a 7 a.m. flight to Chattanooga to meet up with the Blue Wahoos, Long wasn’t finished packing until 2 that morning.

Long’s Audi stays behind in Daytona, where outfielder T.J. Friedl, called up from Dayton, will take over Long's part of the apartment lease. After the series in Chattanooga, Long flies back to Daytona, where he packs up the rest of his belongings and makes the drive across Florida to Pensacola.

Long moves into an apartment with shortstop Blake Trahan, his best friend in the organization, and outfielder Angelo Gumbs.

“I know how to get to the park. I know how to get to Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club,” he notes of his new home. “Really, all the places I need to get to, I know how to get there.”

Once again, Long is starting slowly.

In his first seven games in Double-A, he has just two hits in 20 at-bats. That’s a .100 average.

To add injury to insult, in his last game of June, he hits a ball as hard as he’s hit all season. On the radio call, Blue Wahoos announcer Tommy Thrall says excitedly, “Shed Long hammers one down the right-field line. If it’s fair, it’s gone.”

It was fair. It wasn’t gone.

Pensacola’s Blue Wahoos Stadium lies on Pensacola Bay, a beautiful place for baseball with sunsets providing spectacular light shows. It’s not a beautiful place for left-handed hitters. Because it sits on the bay, there is often a wind blowing straight in from right field, making it play much larger than 335 feet down the line.

Long came up with two runners on and two outs in the fourth inning, looking for his first Double-A homer, and he crushed it.

In retrospect, Long would say the ball just hung in the air and blew backward. A homer anywhere else, it comes toward the fence, where Biscuits right fielder Justin Williams jumps, reaches over the wall and catches it to end the inning.

“I’m like, ‘OK, this is exactly how my year is going right now,’” Long says the next day.

“I’ve probably hit 13 or 14 balls on the barrel and I’ve probably hit eight at someone,” he says. “And you can make it nine with me getting robbed.”

In Daytona, Long turned his season around quickly after a slow start. That doesn’t happen in Double-A.

At the end of July, he’s played 32 games as a Blue Wahoo, and he has just 20 hits in 110 at-bats. He’s hitting .182/.268/.357 with three home runs and 11 RBI.

If there’s one reason to be optimistic, it’s a statistic called batting average on balls in play (BABIP). The stat is exactly what it says – how many balls hit fall for hits? One of the funny things about BABIP is that over the course of baseball history, the average is around .300. Some players have skill sets that give them a higher or lower BABIP, but for most, it's around .300. Through his first month-plus in Double-A, Long’s BABIP is .210. In high-A, it was .368.

“In Daytona, at the beginning, it was like how I was trying to do too much sometimes, or you know, rolling over a lot on pitches that I shouldn’t be rolling over on or striking out,” he says. “But the thing is, here my swing is there. That’s it. My swing is there. I’m putting the swing on the ball that I want to put on and putting in the work.”

The results just aren’t there.

Although Big Shed and Lisa Long have traveled all over the country to watch Lil Shed play, the Southern League is in their backyard. There are three teams in Alabama and most of the league’s affiliates are within an easy five-hour drive

That means not only do Long’s parents get to see him play, so do friends and family.

The Blue Wahoos’ final two games of July and first three in August are in Birmingham, less than an hour from his home with a heavy foot. Long has a hit in each of the five games, six total, two doubles and a pair in the series finale, a 5-2 loss to the Birmingham Barons.

Either on a broken-bat single or on a pop-up slide – in retrospect, Long doesn’t know where it happened – his right-hand starts bothering him.

Long’s 2016 season was cut short by an injury to the hamate bone in his left hand that required surgery. This, he suspects, is another hamate bone injury.

The team leaves that night to drive to Tennessee, where they start a five-game series against the Cubs’ Southern League affiliate, the Tennessee Smokies, outside Knoxville.

The next day, Long sees a doctor. For now, he’s told to rest the hand. A week later, he sees another doctor in Pensacola and the prognosis is confirmed. But he shouldn’t need surgery and he should get back in time to finish the season on the field.

“I don’t know if I want to sit out,” he says. “I mean, I’m feeling good. I’m starting to feel back how I was midseason. I mean, this is the worst time.”

For 24 games, Long watches from the bench, more than three weeks of watching baseball, not playing baseball. That doesn’t mean he can’t contribute to the team.

After the series-ending doubleheader in Tennessee, the Blue Wahoos pile on a pair of buses for the long trip back to Pensacola. They expect to get home sometime around 3 a.m.

As the caravan drives through the rainy night into Alabama, somewhere around Fort Payne, in the northeastern part of the state, one of the buses’ windshield wipers stops working.

It’s around 2 in the morning and the team sits at an exit for an hour, waiting for the bus company to help out.

Finally, Long offers up a suggestion. Put shaving cream on the windshield and wipe it off. That should keep the fog off the windows at least until Montgomery.

“It's a country remedy when you're in humidity so much you got to figure out ways to prevent fog you know ‘cause, I mean, we have a lot of fog,” he says.

Somewhere around Clanton, Alabama, the bus company gets a replacement bus. It takes some time to get all the bags transferred, but they’re on their way again.

In the hour from the Alabama border to Pensacola, the bus stops three more times. They don’t return to the field until 9 a.m. – five hours later than expected.

Most minor-league travel horror stories include the Pioneer League, because of the long distances between affiliates in the Rookie-level league.

“At least in Billings, our bus was running we didn't have to stop because the bus wasn't going to work,” Long says. “You figure you get to Double-A, you get nicer buses. That's not the case.”

And then, on Aug. 29, when Long’s finally scheduled to return to a game, the game is rained out.

Long singles in his first at-bat back. And his second. He walks in his next two times to the plate and then in his only plate appearance in the second game of the doubleheader.

In the final seven games of the regular season, Long collects eight hits in 20 at-bats (a .400 average), including two doubles.

His final Double-A numbers are .227/.319/.362 with three home runs and 14 RBI in 42 games. But his overall numbers are much better, hitting .281/.358/.477 with 16 homers and 50 RBI in 104 games.

“I kept really saying like, man, that’s a terrible year, I should have been better. I could have done this, I could have done that,” Long says. “Then I catch myself thinking back -- if you go back and look at the numbers as a whole, there are people that would love to have the season I’m having and I’m sitting here dreading the season I’m having.”

As soon as Long was promoted to Double-A Pensacola back in July, he knew his season wouldn’t end on Sept. 4 when the Southern League’s regular season finished its schedule. There was postseason baseball to be played.

Minor Leagues often have strange and complicated ways of deciding championships. For the most part, minor-league seasons are cut in half, with first-half champions and second-half champions. A lot of that is because of the movement of players.

Long’s Daytona team was 33-32 in the first half, just missing the playoffs.

The Blue Wahoos won their first half with a 40-30 record before getting the Tortugas players and sending some players up to Triple-A Louisville and even Cincinnati. The team was two games under .500 in the second.

Hurricane Irma is headed toward Florida as the Blue Wahoos begin their three-game playoff series against the second-half champions, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp.

With Irma projected to hit Jacksonville, the Southern League decides that the playoffs will end.

It was another odd weather quirk to the Blue Wahoos’ season. Pensacola was scheduled to host the Southern League All-Star Game, but it was rained out.

And instead of the best-of-five series having two games in Pensacola before moving to Jacksonville for the final three games, the first three games are played in Pensacola and the final two are scheduled to be played on the road in Biloxi, Mississippi.

That wouldn’t be necessary.

In Game 1, Long singles with one out in the sixth and scores on Josh VanMeter’s single to give the Blue Wahoos a 1-0 lead. Starter Deck McGuire throws eight shutout innings, striking out 13 in a 2-0 Blue Wahoos win.

Long is 0 for 4 in Game 2.

Game 3 goes 12 innings, but Aristides Aquino hits an RBI single in the top of the 12th to give the Blue Wahoos a 5-4 lead. In the bottom of the inning, as the Jumbo Shrimp play as the home team in Pensacola, the first batter hits a grounder to Long, who throws on to first for the first out. The next batter strikes out and finally, a ground ball is hit to shortstop Blake Trahan.

“As long as it was hit to Blake, I said, 'we done it,’” Long recalls.

Long hugs Trahan before joining his teammates on the mound. In the locker room, the Blue Wahoos spray each other with champagne and beer.

“When you're in the minor leagues, that's what you're working for, to win championships and develop as a player,” Long says. “To be able to look back on the year and say I developed, I learned more about myself and I got a championship. That's amazing.”

That should be the end of the season, the closing scene, roll credits.

But this is baseball.

Days after the celebratory drinks are cleaned off the clubhouse floor in Florida, Long’s back on a plane, back to Arizona. This time it’s for a month of instructional league.

This how you achieve a dream. You miss football games, you miss friends, you play baseball.

“Sometimes you look at it, and I’m like, dang, I wish I was there,” he says. “But then they wish they were here. There are so many people that wish they were in the spot I’m in. I wouldn’t want to be in a different spot.”

Even in Goodyear in October?

“No.”

I have one of only two jobs I’ve ever wanted – I cover baseball for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Before I wanted to be a ball writer, I wanted to be a ballplayer.

When I was 10, I saw the writing on the wall. My team, the Angels, had a left-handed left side of the infield, my friend Jimmy played shortstop and I played third base. We were the only two who could make the throws across the diamond. Even though I could get the ball to first, Jimmy’s throws were different. They were always right on target and they got there much, much more quickly.

Jimmy Anderson played parts of five seasons in the big leagues, pitching for the Pirates, Reds, Cubs and Red Sox — he even got a World Series ring from the 2004 Red Sox, pitching in a single game for his childhood team.

I got my dream job a little later, covering the Cincinnati Reds first for the Cincinnati Post and now the Cincinnati Enquirer. I made the big leagues, but still kept an interest in the minors. Like superhero movies, I've always found origin stories more interesting. That's why I wanted to tell a story about minor-league life.

On a family road trip this past January, I decided a podcast may be the best way to tell the story of the minors, checking in on one player throughout the season and hearing directly from him about the life and the challenges.

The first player I thought of was Shed Long because he was good, smart and insightful. Luckily, he agreed. We talked before spring training, during spring training and on the phone and in person many times during his season. We texted nearly every day.

Along with editor Amy Wilson and producers Amanda Rossmann and Phil Didion, we tracked his progress, his ups and downs in the 12-part podcast, Great American Dream, which you can now listen to in its entirety.

The 12-part story started with reporting in January and ended with a visit to Long's home in October. It included trips to Arizona, Florida and Alabama. The scripts for those 12 episodes (and this story) number more than 50,000 words.

It is Shed's story, of course, but it's also a universal story. It is the Great American Dream.

Listen on SoundCloud