Good morning!
College buddy Pete Dailey asked me to stay at his place but I joked I’d have to kill his cat, so we rendezvoused at the Sarasota Kennel Club, where jetliners angled into the sky from the runway across University Parkway and traffic crawled west toward the Ringling Museum of Art or east to I-75.
The matinee had already begun when we ambled out onto the track apron, where the greyhounds were being paraded past inquisitive railbirds and down to the starter’s box. A dog stopped and its handler eased the leash so it could defecate in front of two bettors with their elbows propped on a picnic table.
Both seemed unperturbed until the dog straightened up, turned and kicked the sand-covered missiles straight at them. They lurched away but it was too late for me to video this classic YouTube moment.
Two days later I was across state at my friend Jayne Johnson’s condo on Singer Island, where the third-floor view of the sun rising over the calm Atlantic Ocean was outstanding.
On the way I stopped in Jupiter to buy a $15 bleacher ticket for a weekday game between St. Louis and Washington at Roger Dean Stadium.
Spring training began a week early so that players could prep for the World Baseball Classic. Most days the place is jammed with so many red-clad Missourians that it looks like a matador has blanketed the seats with his cape. “We’ll only have 3,500 today,” said an usher. “The season-ticket holders aren’t here yet.”
The smaller crowds will give gate-attendants time to adjust to the new spring-training rule requiring fans to go through metal detectors. The poor sap in front of me had to go through four times before it stopped beeping. Fans are now either in for good or gone for good, re-entry into the ballpark was history.
Each spring brings a new marketing ploy and the latest gambit is the official MLB “Spring Training 2017” baseball. “These are the baseballs players use in spring training,” said the souvenir vendor. “These cost $30, and these baseballs they use in the regular season cost $27.”
“I’d think it would be the other way around,” I said.
“It’s asinine,” he exclaimed. “I keep telling people to stop buying or they’re gonna keep charging more money. I’ve been doing this for a long time but I’m about ready to quit.”
Perhaps the fans are already starting to revolt. The Red Sox were in West Palm Beach playing the Nationals on Tuesday, and John Blair texted me photos of empty seats— almost 500 of them, according to the box score. The Bosox not selling out a spring training game anywhere is remarkable, and an ominous warning to owners that they’ve reached critical mass.
“One guy said he paid $180 online for two tickets,” said Blair. “He thought it was a sellout. Shoulda heard him, every other word was F-this and F-that.”
The Nats and Astros moved from upstate Florida to play at the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches this year and their fans might be suffering from South Florida hotel sticker-shock now that they’re no longer in Viera or Kissimmee.
At half-filled Roger Dean Stadium, the grassy patch of foul territory where fans sat for a nominal fee is gone, replaced by the “Bullpen Club,” where for $62 fans can sit on a sundeck and drink $12 frozen cocktails — cotton candy for grownups.
Music was preempted by a blitz of tire, plumbing and pest-control ads. “Go Yard at the Yardhouse,” exclaimed the PA announcer.
I moved from under the loudspeaker to the right-field boxes and spotted a fan wearing a Cardinals jersey and a Chicago Cubs hat with a small cardinal perched on top. “He made it himself,” smiled his wife. “The bird is pooping on it.”
Boaz had dribbled whiteout from the top of the cap down over the “C” on the front. Fans like him hate the Cubs and claim the word stands for “completely useless by summer,” but Chicago won the World Series last year and the Cardinals missed the playoffs for the first time in six years.
Marketing departments can’t disrupt the relaxing rhythm of balls and strikes or the sound of outfielders like Adam Eaton running under a fly ball screaming, “I got it! I got it! I got it! I got it!”
Trea Turner lined a home run over the left-field fence and catcher Jhonatan Solano singled and tripled to give the Nationals an early 4-1 lead. The Cards later scored four times in the eighth, but by then I was long gone and packing for the long trip home.
It had rained overnight— five inches in five hours, according to the TV news— but the fog had lifted and the highway was dry by the time I stopped for coffee in Cocoa. The Daytona Beach News-Journal reported an only-in-Florida incident involving two teenagers, who confronted a girl scout about a debt she owed.
Your money or your cookies, they demanded, and “a chaotic scene (ensued) that left a table flipped over and boxes of Girl Scout cookies scattered over the sidewalk.”
It was my last stop except to gas up and bunk down. It takes five hours to get out of Florida, two hours to get through Georgia, and seven hours to make it out of the Carolinas. That’s on a good day driving, and those are a miracle.
This year’s dreaded flash of brake lights and stalled traffic was in South Carolina, caused by road crews rebuilding a half-mile stretch of the right lane on I-95.
“We had a four-mile, one-hour backup on I-95, courtesy of an RV that burned to cinders,” reported my friend Gil Longin.
Love him or hate him, King Baby’s plan to fix the nation’s highway system is overdue, just ask the truckers who say there are two seasons: Winter and road construction.
On SXM’s baseball channel, the Yankees-Red Sox game kept my mind off the monochromatic dullness of the green-mile markers.
“It’s 86 in Fort Myers,” chortled Joe Castiglione. “We’ve had great weather this spring. Yesterday was a record.”
Castiglione compensates for his lack of a deep, commanding radio voice with a vast baseball knowledge and conversant tone that fits well with his new sidekick Tim Neverett.
Hockey broadcaster Mike Emrick says he couldn’t do baseball because there’s too much time to fill, but not these two chatterboxes. They said Marty Barrett’s daughter is a successful pro golfer, Tim Naehring is an assistant Yankees GM and Joe Girardi is on the last year of his contract. I learned that John Farrell wants to steal more bases, Hanley Ramirez has a sore shoulder and Dustin Fowler was born in Dexter, Ga., while Dexter Fowler was born in Atlanta. (Think they’d say Dustin?)
The seventh game of the 1960 World Series was Neverett’s wheelhouse. He broadcast Pirates games for seven seasons and knows the folklore of Bill Mazeroski’s ninth-inning home run that beat the Yankees, 10-9.
“Each anniversary fans listen on a cassette player where they think the ball landed,” said Neverett. “Nobody even thought a recording existed until one was found in Bing Crosby’s basement.”
I stayed overnight in Emporia, Va., and left in the morning for an uneventful ride through D.C., Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and over the GW Bridge onto the crossways to the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut.
Branches were strewn on the yard from the tornado that had ripped through the county, but my roof was intact. March will go out like a lion, but the cherry blossoms will be blooming in Washington this week and the forsythia, dogwood and daffodils are already in color.
It’s dull and grey in these parts but spring and baseball are creeping toward us. I saw them both with my own eyes.
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley. He can be reached by email at sports@recorder.com.