"Sometimes I just like to, you know, chill with my baseball. Lookin' all smoldery."
GG y'all, click that link.
Last weekend was fantastic. I worked a short shift Saturday morning, changed into shorts, t-shirt, tevas and Cubs hat after my last student left and waited for the Beck to pick me up. We headed down to a great Cubs-White Sox spring training game - even though we didn't leave north Scottsdale until 12:15 or so, we found a good parking spot and made it into HoHoKam park with plenty of time to spare. We sun-tan-lotioned up and took our seats in the left-field foul bleachers - it was a crispy 88 degrees or so, just a gorgeous day for baseball. Here's a shot of the opening lineups as posted before the game:
So we were getting to see more or less the real live starting lineups, not the usual crew of # 73s and 98s. Good deal. UNFORTUNATELY, Ted Lilly was pitching about 72 mph. You know how it's a little tough to follow major league pitchers fastballs and sliders? Not so much with Lilly. I had to check the ticket stub a couple of times to make sure we hadn't accidentally gone to the Cubs slow pitch softball extravaganza. As you can imagine, the White Sox roughed Teddy up quite a bit, and jumped out to a big lead. It didn't help that Soriano is supremely incompetent in left field. It probably won't show up in his fielding stats, but note that if there were a category for " outs turned into doubles and triples," Soriano could lead everyone. Egads. Vazquez was pitching for the South-siders, and he kept us in check for the first five innings. Here's Mike Fontenot getting something of a "what the hell was that?" hug from the third base coach after he just barely stole third with the heart of the Cubs order coming up:
I also noticed for the first time - how did I miss this last year? - that Fontenot is wearing Fatty Fat Grace's number! What??!?!? No love for the Mark. Next thing you know they'll let some "basketball player" wear Ryno's 23 in Chicago. For shame.
So Vazquez's luck ran out, and his relievers helped him not at all. The Cubs tied it up in the sixth with a slew of extra base hits - finally! Neato times were had in the seventh, when Kerry "the singular form of the noun is" Wood blew away the Sox. He's gonna close for the Cubbies this year, so we may get to party like it's 1998. Sweet. The rest of the game lagged a bit and fell into sloppiness, and ended in a 10 inning kiss your sister-fest, 8-8. But just an excellent game.
EXCEPT: for the row of dingleberries sitting in front of us. It was a fairly typical "pay money for tickets but then don't watch the game" type group, and they just drank 100 dollars worth of beer and gabbed and gabbed about anything and everything for the duration. The highlights came when they debated how they were going to get to both the bar and the church on Easter Sunday and, when informed of the Cubs' new right fielder Kosuke Fukudome, one of the girls asked, "is he related to that Matsui guy?" (To the group's credit, she was justly chided for that remark with the usual hyper-ironic "yes, they all look alike and they're all related" sarcasm). They were highly distracting. So boo on them.
Beck rather brilliantly packed our hiking gear, so we left the park and headed straight for the Superstition mountains. Just a gorgeous hike - we should go back there with in-town-for-a-rocket-conference friend Craig this weekend - and we got to come back down the mountain at sunset. Picture page, it's picture page:
If you check that bottom right pic, you'll get a sense of why the Phx Suns' colors are what they are. Oh, and yes - what post would be complete sans superhero?
So we hiked back through dusk and drove home, nabbing some Nello's pizza on the way. So Saturday was great -a little work, a little baseball, a beautiful hike and some pizza. We even watched a bit of the Darjeeling Limited, which beck predictable despised and I... review withheld.
This has been a gigantic post, so I will continue with Sunday in another.
(And yes, you've been waiting for this - *THIS* post is POST #300!!! Official, blogger post 300, 363 if you count those on the old site. SO huzzah - two years of blogging, and almost a post every other day. My mundane is your world!)
("My mundane is your world." I fine myself 30 pun points).
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