Outside of Historic Grayson Stadium on Friday night, a group of Lexington Legends stood near their team bus talking on cell phones. I didn’t linger as I walked by them toward my rental car, but I overheard one sentence’s worth of conversation: “I love you.”

The opportunity to play baseball professionally is a pretty amazing one, and something I’m sure few of those guys would willingly trade for the cramped college dorm rooms enjoyed by many of their contemporaries. But the Minor League life is a difficult one.

That night or sometime shortly thereafter, the Legends’ players and coaches would endure the 9 1/2-hour trip back to Lexington in that bus. They will spend this season riding the bus to Delmarva and Lakewood and Charleston and all the far reaches of the South Atlantic League. And if any of them are lucky enough to advance to the next level at any point, they’ll have to adjust to a new home city and a new bus and a whole slew of new destinations.

It’s all part of the game, of course, and it has been a long time. Still, I wonder if there’s a way the system could be improved. If the Minor Leagues are aimed at maximizing the potential of prospective Major League baseball players, is that best accomplished by forcing 19-to-22-year-old kids into nomadic lifestyles?

Here’s a half-baked thought: As far as I understand, there are teams in the Sally League that draw as well as some International League teams. And there’s some overlap in the areas covered by the Class A South Atlantic League, Class A Advanced Carolina League, Double-A Eastern League and Triple-A International League.

Not many Major League teams own a lot of their own Minor League affiliates. But, in theory, could a big-market club purchase Minor League franchises in four strategically located markets and switch around each team’s level every season?

In other words: Could a team start a crop of prospects in the Sally League, then keep them together and in the same city the next season, but have them play in the Carolina League? They could move to the Eastern League the next year and the International League the next, but stay in the same home city the entire time. That way, prospects get a full slate of Minor League experience, but can maintain some degree of normalcy.

For what it’s worth, it would benefit the various Minor League fanbases, too. Fans in each city would have a chance to get to know their particular group of players before the best ones moved onto the Majors.

There are logistical problems, of course: For one, I’m not certain there are enough appropriate markets to make it work, nor do I know if Minor League Baseball would permit clubs to so rapidly jump levels. Plus I’m near-certain there’s some minimum stadium capacity required for the different levels, even if the higher levels aren’t necessarily drawing more fans.

And it doesn’t all make sense from a development standpoint: A team that endeavored that plan would lose a lot of the flexibility afforded by the current system, since it would likely try its best to keep players in the same place for as long as possible. Certainly there would still be players who moved too quickly to be held back and players who demonstrated they had no business jumping a level, so some guys would still have to move every year. But likely the players at the margins would be socially promoted with the rest of their guys in their “class” every offseason.

Plus the system breaks down for Quadruple-A types, since presumably a city will only host the Triple-A team once before the whole system shuffles again. So any player entering his second season in Triple-A would finally be forced to move, and he’d have to move again every season until he cracked the Show.

Are all the logistical problems and hangups worth it to give developing players a rooted home base for the several years they spend in a system? I have no idea. Hell, maybe the going thinking is that they’re better off not getting too comfortable in any one city, since comfort probably leads to girlfriends and social lives and all sorts of non-baseball distractions.

I don’t know. I’m just thinking out loud, and thinking that as awesome as playing Minor League baseball certainly is, it probably doesn’t always feel that way. And maybe a system that makes life a little easier for the athletes would pay off for teams down the road.