HOUSTON — His team had struck out something like 18 or 19 times and, after the final one, Brandon Hyde couldn’t find his hitting coach. Other members of the 2006 Greensboro Grasshoppers gathered their belongings and boarded a bus bound for the team hotel in Augusta, Georgia.
Hyde’s wife, Lisa, accompanied him on the trip, so the newlyweds drove back on their own. On their way, on a traffic-filled highway, a figure appeared in full uniform.
“We’re driving along a busy area of Augusta — it’s not the greatest neighborhood in the world — there’s Joe in his uniform walking to the team hotel because he was so mad that he just wanted to go home,” Hyde said.
The Hydes pulled over and picked up Joe Espada, an excitable first-year coach enraged by a poor performance, a problem he sometimes shared with his boss. The 33-year-old skipper and his 32-year-old hitting coach considered every loss personal, every player’s slump something they needed to fix. That the Grasshoppers grinded their way to a 68-69 record only enhanced those instincts.
“We were both a little younger, a little more emotional at that time,” Hyde said this week. “We took losses really hard and we took individual player or team success or failures extremely hard. We kind of commiserated…
