Meet the sweaty, gambling, barfing, bonding Indians race known as the Beep Drill

GOODYEAR, Ariz. – Everyone knows about the Beep Drill. The Cleveland Indians can call it whatever they want – Warrior Dash tends to be the preferred nomenclature – but as players ascend through the minor leagues and learn more about what it’s like in big league camp, they all hear the stories of what happens on the first day on full-squad spring training, and the fear kicks in.

Baseball camp isn’t like football, with two-a-days in the blazing heat meant to turn men into men. Baseball is much lazier, much less demanding, which is what makes the Beep Drill something else. There is sweating. There is sprinting. There is betting. There is taunting. There is even the occasional barfing. Above all, the Indians believe, there is bonding.

On Saturday morning, the Indians held their second Beep Drill of the spring. One is for pitchers and catchers, this one for position players. The conceit is simple. They line up on a back field, listen for a beep from a speaker, run 21 yards to a cone, turn around and run 21 yards back, trying to cross the line before another beep. After a break, they do it again. And again. And again. Until the last player is standing.

“It’s basically go until you drop,” said Shawn Armstrong, an Indians relief pitcher who made a valiant effort earlier in the week before succumbing to the taunts of teammate Francisco Lindor – and the vagaries of his stomach. “Once I hit about 35, I kind of got tunnel vision and stopped hearing. When I first started dry heaving a little bit, I’ll be honest, I did hear Lindor yelling: ‘Get it out!’ I was able to go more once it started coming. It’s not that I really was vomiting. The dry air and mucous just got together a little bit and came out.”

The position players didn’t realize their break of 10 seconds was going to be shorter than the pitchers’ 13, and thus the record of 69 set earlier in the week by minor league pitcher Dylan Baker would be difficult to beat. So goes the Beep Drill. It is unrelenting, a test of speed and endurance for the players, knowledge and acumen for the coaches and executives.

A row of them stood behind the line of players. Manager Terry Francona, team president Chris Antonetti, GM Mike Chernoff, nearly all the coaches – each drafted a player. Pitching coach Mickey Callaway had picked Baker a few days earlier. This time through, Antonetti got the first pick. He could’ve gone with Lindor, the champion two years ago and runner-up last season. Instead, he chose Greg Allen.

This was a popular pick. Earlier, as bench coach Brad Mills strolled by the pitchers, he asked: “Who you got?” Answered pitcher Mike Clevinger without a beat: “Mr. Greg Allen.”

Allen is a 23-year-old with only 37 games of Double-A to his name, but he ascended the Indians’ prospect ladder last season with a deft control of the plate, keen base-stealing instinct and a legitimate major league-caliber center field glove. In July, he almost wasn’t an Indian anymore, as Cleveland agreed to deal him to acquire catcher Jonathan Lucroy. He rejected the trade, Allen stayed, and here he was, the player to beat.

“G.A., you got this?” asked Steve Karsay, the Indians’ Triple-A pitching coach.

“We’ll see,” Allen said.

On a field backdropped by an airplane graveyard, the players lined up and awaited instructions from the speaker. In a kind, computerized female British voice, it said, “Get ready. Three, two, one, run,” followed by a beep. When the players came back about nine seconds later, there was another beep, followed by a suggestion from the masochistic lady: “Stop and rest.”

Then another beep.

“The noise,” one onlooker said, “just gives me nightmares.”

The players, too. Lindor, in arguably the best shape of any player on the team, dropped out after 12. “I got tired,” he said. “I haven’t been feeling 100 percent.” Jose Ramirez, the Indians’ other left-side infielder, tapped out a few laps later. Edwin Encarnacion, their $60 million free-agent signing, cried uncle after 18.

The pitchers were chuckling, none quite as loud as Jason Kipnis or Lonnie Chisenhall had during the first race. They were into it, though, trying to handicap who was left and who would be there at the end. Francona walked down the line to Erik Gonzalez, an infielder whom he’d chosen with a late pick as a darkhorse.

“You all right?” Francona said.

He nodded, preferring to conserve his breath for the next run.

At the 20th lap, only 10 players remained. By the 28th, it was five: Allen, Gonzalez, top prospect Brad Zimmer, infielder Giovanny Urshela and Eric Stamets, a minor league shortstop. Zimmer and Stamets dropped out at 32, Urshela at 34. Allen showed no signs of slowing down as Gonzalez bent over after each subsequent lap.

On the 37th lap, Gonzalez finished late and got a warning. He did the same on the next. Greg Allen was the 2017 Beep Drill champion with 38 laps.

“I didn’t want to disappoint,” he said. “I know the staff and the guys like to have a good time with it and place their bets. That part of it makes it a little more fun.”

He high-fived Antonetti and everyone else he passed going off the field. He soaked in the notoriety of winning camp for a day. It won’t matter any until the Beep Drill next year, but that’s not the point.

“It’s a good team-building day,” Francona said.

And in baseball, where the players show up in February and, best case, aren’t separated until November, they cherish that sort of thing. Maybe the Beep Drill helps fortify bonds or strengthen friendships or start new ones. Or maybe it doesn’t do a damn thing. That’s the confusing part of trying to adjudicate cohesion. Nobody really knows what’s going to be a good clubhouse or isn’t.

What the Indians do as well as any team, though, is implement an overarching philosophy that goes top to bottom and side to side, from the team president down to the lowest level of the minor leagues and fanned out to players at all levels. They listen, they learn, they iterate, they implement, they grow. One thing they’ve learned is that for all the misery of the Beep Drill, the players, competitors as well as trash talkers, like it as much as those who don’t have to endure it.

So they’ll run it again next year, hopefully on a day more pleasant than the grim, overcast 60s of Saturday, and they’ll sweat and sprint and bet and taunt and, yeah, probably barf. And if all goes well, if that chemistry experiment turns out to be covalent after all, they’ll bond.