My first day on the job was, well to say the least, overwhelming. First of all, I arrived late partly because I forgot which gate of the stadium to enter. Luckily Mr. Wiener, who will be looking after me these next three weeks was very understanding. Mr. Wiener then took me around the stadium and explained what I would be doing and introduced me to countless people of which I remember 5. For the first week of my internship, I will be working with marketing.

After my morning tour me and some more senior interns who had been working with the Rays for months were preparing to do a media drop. A media drop is where we bring promotional gear for a weekend homestand and major talking points to major media partners so that this week they can wear and discuss what fans will be receiving at the weekends home games. We were supposed to leave at 11 but even at a multi-million maybe billion dollar company, the printer wasn’t really working with the personalized sticker sheets to put on all the bags we would be handing out. So for about 20 minutes, I was sitting at my new cubicle, with nothing but a box of pens and sticky notes in front of me twiddling my fingers. After a little while, I got up to go to the bathroom, on my way as I walked through the Baseball Operations office I overheard someone on the phone say they had a deal with the Mets. Sure enough, later that day news broke that the Rays and Mets did, in fact, make a trade. It made my day to know that I knew before anyone.

Finally, the printer cooperated and we were able to pack up all the media bags, which was quite a bit of manual labor but not bad at all. After this, we drove to iheart radio, WFLA, Spectrum, Tampa Bay Times, and WBTW to drop the bags off; of course, being in Florida there was a ton of traffic. Upon arriving back to the stadium, one of the members of the social media team took me down onto the field during batting practice. She is specifically in charge of the official Rays Snapchat account, along with auxiliary Instagram accounts such as the mascots and Rays team store. We talked about the role of social media in attracting fans as well in how to manage one. It’s very important to put care into each post because they represent the entire organization. For example, each Snapchat video during batting practice must be examined in detail to make sure there is nothing wrong in the background or the audio.

Overall my first day was action packed and I’m very excited for tomorrow.