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By Root 1261 0

is. When the new-to-the-Lake faces started circulating how shockingly awful their living arrangements are, it came as no surprise to me. I already knew the covers beneath the comforter had pictures of airbrushed women riding white tigers à la Ronnie James Dio. I knew that if you turned a black light on in the room, it would look as if Jackson Pollock had painted on your bed. I knew the cinder block walls have bullet holes in them. I knew the hotel restaurant’s food is made by someone who seems to shed pubic hair. Yes, I even knew that is what blood looks like when it dries. The Bellagio, it ain’t. But home it is, unless you get a host family pronto.

The host family business is an interesting one. Essentially, a local family agrees to shoulder the burden of an extra person, a baseball-playing person, during the length of the season. They provide a spare room, a few meals, and transportation if they have it. It’s a lot to ask, but a host family is an absolute necessity as living in Southern California isn’t cheap.

The Adopt-a-Player campaign starts before the team arrives in hopes willing families can be lined up for a seamless transition. However grateful we baseball players are to the families who adopt us, we also know not all host families are created equal.

Beggars can’t be choosers, so there’s a certain degree of luck involved when getting paired up with your new family. Some families are the perfect model citizens, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Host family with their white picket fence and adorable little children with cherub faces who can’t wait to be just like their new older brother. Some families are wealthy and treat you like the draft pick you always wanted to be. Some host families aren’t even families at all; some are just one person: a well-toned Cougar looking for an after-hours power hitter to keep her company between filming.

Depending on the makeup of the player, all these choices are desirable. However, they only represent one side of the coin. On the flip side, there is the family who has a pack of misbehaved trolls for children with parents who don’t believe in discipline. The reason your PlayStation has peanut butter leaking from the optical drive can be chalked up to “youthful curiosity.” You may live with a super fan who wants to play coach, manager, and parent. He’ll live vicariously through you and evaluate, criticize, judge, blog, and call the organization about you. Or you may end up with a miserable old spinster who loves cats and hates men. She’ll give you a sleeping bag next to the litter box. She’ll turn off the air-conditioning in the hot months, yell at you when you don’t polish the spoon you used, curse you for coming home after sunset, and accuse you of going through her things when she’s away.

Players aren’t saints either, and it takes a special family to agree to house one. If you’re a devout Catholic family, getting a Mormon player can make things a tad awkward. If you’re parents of little children, getting that Bostonian player who uses “fuck” for greetings, good-byes, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, and prayer might be more than you bargained for. If you’re the proud parent of daughters close to the legal limit, it doesn’t matter who you get, you’re asking for trouble.

For the most part, players get paired with families somewhere in between the best-and worst-case scenarios. Just normal folks lending a helping hand. I had the good fortune of getting paired with good hosts every year I was at the Lake, including this year. I landed a big-hearted family with an extra car. They had a pool, a spare room, and all-you-can-eat groceries. To balance things out, they also had a dog who hated me. A little Jack Russell terrier who thought I was pure evil. It would growl at me whenever it saw me, lurk around corners giving me the stink eye, and crap in my shoes. I got even with it by waiting for it to fall asleep on the family’s plus-sized beanbag, at which time I would leap on the bag launching the dog like a mortar shell across the living room and into the wall. Jack Russells are surprisingly aerodynamic.