Tag: spring training

Spring Training

I enjoy Major League Baseball’s Spring Training. Why? Because most of the games are afternoon starts, usually 1:00pm. They coincide with me going on my lunch break and I like to listen to the radio broadcasts while sitting at my desk.

Granted it is Spring Training so after a couple of innings the actual Major Leaguers all leave the game and it turns into the minor league prospects show and I literally know maybe 3% of the players. That’s okay. The best of the bunch will eventually break into the Majors… though many will do it for other teams. Whatever, it’s pro baseball and it’s always a fun listen.

Today’s work day has been weird at best. Having a Red Sox vs Orioles game playing in the background is a good thing. Even if my Red Sox are trailing 5-0. That’s another plus for Spring Training. If the Red Sox get trounced it’s okay because the game doesn’t count.

Happy Spring Training, everyone.

Spring Training

I missed the big day. I had too many other things going on to notice it. Boston Red Sox pitchers and catchers reported for Spring Training two days ago. Later that night they signed the biggest free agent on the market, Alex Bregman. We have a few new pitchers this year, including one who looks like an ace in the making, and now we have a power hitting infielder with a couple of World Series rings to bolster the lineup.

Know something? The Red Sox might not suck this year. Are they World Series contenders? Maybe, but probably not. Might they make a run at the American League East title? They might. Given that my beloved Bruins are more or less shitting the bed this year after years of excellence (in the regular season, at least), and the Red Sox have been a gigantic suck-fest for the last few years… a reversal of fortune is timely. I wish my dad were still around to see one more good season. He suffered through so many awful Red Sox teams in his life that it would have been nice to go out with a winning team. Okay, now I am equal parts excited for the new season and sad for the past. Shit.

Anyway, I snuck in a photo before I left the house to go to work this morning so that I could make sure I had something for the photo a day challenge. Here it is… it sucks even more than the Bruins.

167/365

Random Thoughts

How do you tell if your two cats are playing with each other, or actively tying to kill each other? One second they appear to be trying their hardest to tear each other’s throats out with their teeth, and the next second they are curled up together, grooming each other. I don’t get it. All I know for sure is that the kitten likes to stir up shit any chance she gets, and every now and then the bigger cat will turn the tables and ambush the kitten in ways that nearly make her shit herself. It’s scary and entertaining at the same time.

Harry’s coming home tonight. Just for one night. He’s having computer troubles and Jen is going to troubleshoot with him. That’s all. It’s going to be great to have him here though, even if it is a super short visit.

The weather sucks. It’s going to be super cold tomorrow, and we have another snow storm on the horizon. Hopefully I’ll be through with the car music by then. Hopefully the weather will start to improve once February ends, but we all know that Spring doesn’t come to New England anymore until mid-May at best. I want Summer. I want to move to San Diego where it’s summer all the time.

The Red Sox are playing their first Spring Training game right now. The annual beat-the-hell-out-of-a-college-team kick off to the grapefruit league season. They have a 5-3 lead over Northeastern University in the middle of the sixth inning. I am looking forward to the Red Sox season, even though it is clear we have another last place finish in our future. The fun part about Spring Training is the clean slate. Sure, our roster is a nightmare, but until you start losing games that matter, the possibilities are still very much endless. Speaking of San Diego, now that Xander Bogarts is a Padre, maybe it’s time to become a fan for real. I mean it is one of only three non-Boston stadiums I’ve ever been to. There’s personal history there. Maybe.

So television. I am currently trying to keep up with the following shows: The Last of Us, Star Wars The Bad Batch, Star Trek Picard, Poker Face, The Flash, Extraordinary, and You (season three, I am a full season behind). I may also get back into Star Trek Discovery but I’m a full season behind there too. The Mandalorian is coming back next week so we’ll add that to the mix as well. Yellowjackets season two is on the horizon too. On top of those shows, I have a weird compulsion to start binge re-watching The X-Files and Star Trek Deep Space Nine as well. Why am I torturing myself like this?

I haven’t shot any film since Disney World. I blame the weather. I still have a bunch of rolls saved up. I had way more than I needed for Disney so there’s still a nice supply available. I want to get some more black and white film to play with too, and once the weather starts clearing I am going to go WAY off the deep end, with both film and digital. I just need to find a way to convince people to go with me. Like a photography club or something, but just with people I actually know rather than random folks in some online club.

I want to go wander around Boston. I want to go wander around New York. I want to go wander around the mountains in New Hampshire and Vermont. I want to go wandering around the coast of Maine. I want to go wander around the coast of Massachusetts. I want to go back to Washington. I want to go back to San Diego and Los Angeles. I want to go to San Francisco for the first time. I want to go to Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington for the first time too. I just want to go places. Covid screwed us out of three years of exploring. I want to make up for lost time.

Okay. Back to work, Robert. Only 2.5 hours to go until the weekend when you’ll see Harry and do a mountain of work on music and spend quality time with the love of your life. Get on with it!

Happy Second First Day of Spring Summer Training

Baseball is back, sort of. Players who agreed to make themselves available for a 60 game season reported to their team’s facilities on July 1st. They were all tested for the coronavirus. They then got yesterday off for some reason which I assume had to do with getting all the testing results. Now today is the first day of the second attempt at Spring Training only it happens during the Summer so it’s not exactly Spring Training anymore, is it.

I’m wearing a Red Sox t-shirt to celebrate.

I think it’s probably a safe bet that 2-3 weeks from now the whole righteous endeavor will come crashing to a halt as about 70% of the players on every team are out sick with COVID-19. I applaud baseball for making something happen and taking their shot, but let’s be real. Once the players start dropping like flies this is all going to come to an inglorious, yet fitting end.

I hope you prove me wrong, MLB, but I don’t think you will.

I Didn’t Think of That

Given that last season the Boston Red Sox were a painful disappointment, and that this past off season has seen them lose their President, their manager (in one of the biggest cheating scandals in league history) and their best player (to the friggin’ Dodgers in what is effectively an embarrassingly awful preemptive salary dump), you can probably forgive me for not being fully up to date on the day to day goings on in Red Sox Nation.

It turns out that today is the day that pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training, with the first practice scheduled for tomorrow.  We don’t have a manager, and we don’t have a Mookie, but it’s still nice to know that the official kick off to the 2020 season is here.

As I was reading a headline that mentioned the big news (as opposed to yesterday’s big news about the finalizing of the trade with the friggin’ Dodgers) I was struck by a revelation.  Light dawned on Marblehead, as the saying goes…..

I am going to be in Florida during Spring Training.

Oh.  My.  God.  After 40+ years of die hard Red Sox fandom, I will, for the first time ever, be in Florida during Spring Training.  Now we’re staying at a Disney resort so we won’t be renting a car, but maybe it’s worth researching a way to see if we could day trip down to Jet Blue park and catch a game.

Then reality set in.  I live in Massachusetts.  Massachusetts is a little tiny state.  You can pretty much drive from one end to the other in a couple of hours or so.  Florida isn’t a huge state, but it’s bigger than MA.  How much bigger though?  I went to Google Maps and looked up driving directions from Disney World to Jet Blue Park.  It’s about three hours.  It’s almost, but not quite, the same distance as driving from Fenway Park to Yankees Stadium.

The dream died then and there, but not before a question drifted through my tiny brain:

How much would an Uber from Orlando to Fort Meyers cost me?

Nope.  Nope.  Nope.  Spring Training Baseball Dreams Shattered.  I’ll just have to settle for hanging out with The Mouse.

The Black Plague: Day Twenty-One

It’s official.  The flu/cold/plague symptoms have now been with us for three full weeks.  Hoo-freakin’-Ray!

After visiting the emergency room last week, Jen was not seeing any improvement so she went to see her primary care.  He gave a better explanation of the situation and prescribed yet another new antibiotic (her fourth since this all started) and a steroid.  Nice.  My wife is going to smash the long ball, just like Barry Bonds!

I’m still congested.  I still have a cough.  Neither is as bad as it was three weeks ago, but they are all still sticking around.  I had a bit of a tough night sleeping last night.  The cough woke me up a couple of times.  Last week I thought I was 90% well.  Now I’ll put it at 70% well.  My health is currently getting a C-.

We are having a post-holiday, holiday party with Larry and Mike and families this weekend.  I am going to be well enough to go to that party, even if it kills me!  My health needs to be at least at a C+.  I can do it.  Hear that, immune system?  I have confidence that you can stop sucking just enough for me to spend an evening with my family and my friends all in the same place together.  You can do it, immune system.  You can do it!

Did you hear that hockey is coming back?  (yes, that was a sudden change of subject)  Baseball pitchers and catchers are less than two months away from reporting to spring training as well.  The days of no sports to watch but football (yawn) and basketball (zzz zzz zzz) are coming to an end.I am still furious with the NHL.  That is not going to go away.  When it comes to holding a grudge about pro sports labor disputes, I am the king.  I am still fuming over the 1981 baseball players strike.  Because of that stupid thing, the stats on my 1982 Topps baseball cards did not include 162 games for that season.  Dwight Evans only got to play something like 104 games.  That sucked and I’m still pissed.

Anyway, I think one of the reasons why I am so much more upset about this lockout than the last one (don’t get me wrong, I was steaming with rage last time too) is that last time I had an AHL team to distract me.  The Lowell Lock Monsters.  Eric Staal.  Chuck Kobasew (sp? sorry Chuck).  Damn, what a great team we had that year.  While everyone else was boiling over with rage about not having hockey, there were maybe one thousand or so people in the Greater Lowell area who had Monsters season tickets.  No, it was not the same as having the NHL, but it did keep our hockey minds occupied for that black hole of a season.

100_1851

I could have followed Worcester, or Providence this time, but I still have that old Lowell loyalty. Be it the Lock Monsters or the Devils that replaced them, I loved AHL hockey in Lowell. For the record, there was no way I would ever have followed Manchester. That would be like rooting for the Yankees in the Red Sox absence. It would never, ever happen. In fact, I talked to my gorgeous wife Jennifer about maybe going to a game in Manchester, but I made it clear I would be rooting for the visiting team.

Lock Monster hockey, it’s alive! (or at least it was back then when I needed it)