Spring Training Day 1

There's something uniquely American about going to spring training, and there's also something very American about listening to a Bob Dylan album while driving down the interstate, though I'm not sure how well the two go together. The Dylan record, which I bought this morning, is a symptom of the unfortunate fact that my rental car doesn't have a tape deck to play my iPod, so I had to find something to save me from eastern Florida radio.

Lined with palm trees and orange groves, the drive down Florida's coast down I-95 is really beautiful, with a couple notable exceptions. The last time I was in Florida was for a waste-to-energy project with Dow. I learned that because Florida has a high water table, there are very few places they can put landfills, so the landfills they do have are extremely large. In fact, in some counties the highest elevation is actually a hill filled with garbage. Along my drive today there were only two hills of any size, and wouldn't you know it, both of them were landfills.

I arrived in Jupiter at about 10:30 after leaving Orlando at 8:00. When I made it to the practice fields there were some guys taking batting practice to my right. I was a couple hundred feet from the batter when I heard a ball being hit. When I looked up, it was coming straight for me. I reached up to grab it, and the ball bounded off my fingers and was retrived by a guy behind me. I should have known this already, but I had it reinforced in a pretty painful way: it's tough to catch a well-struck ball barehanded.

At the beginning of last year I got a little tired of hearing how all the Cardinals fans were going to fall in love with David Eckstein. He was described as the kind of guy who brings his lunchpail to the ballpark--he runs to first base on a base on balls, always hustles on every play, and works hard enough to overcome his lack of size. But I've discovered that he's more than just Pete Rose with an adequate haircut. He's a really nice and funny guy, as he continues to demonstrate. Last year at pregame warmups in Houston he enjoyed leaning into the first two rows of fans to catch balls being thrown by his partne, and today he stopped to pose for a few pictures, joking with the woman who was snapping them. Plus, he signs more autographs than just about anybody I've ever seen.

The thing that really cracks me up about spring training is how chummy the players and fans are. After Scott Rolen finished batting practice, an older woman complimented him on his hitting and asked him if he was healthy. He smiled and said, "Healthy enough." Later the same woman had a long conversation about an upcoming cruise that some of the Cardinals participate in.

The game was pretty decent. The Cards beat the Marlins, 6-3, in a pretty sloppy game that featured six errors. By far the most interesting game was had by Travis Hanson. He came in to play third base in the sixth inning and immediately got to work, collecting two quick errors. He had another error in the seventh. Then he hit a homer on the only pitch he saw and had a very nice defensive play in the ninth. For those of you scoring at home, he had a fielding average of .500 (three errors in six chances) and a slugging average of 4.000. Wow.

The Marlins had a fire sale in the offseason. Again. Here's the surnames that made up their starting lineup today: Andino, Uggla, Jacobs (Mike), Willingham, Hermida, Helms, Olivo, Cepicky, Abercrombie, and Mitre. In the entire starting lineup, everybody not named Wes Helms or Miguel Olivo had a grand total of 400 major league at bats (and Helms and Olivo are certainly a far cry from Delgado and Castillo--Miguel Cabrera and Dontrelle Willis are the only notable 2005 Marlins still on the roster). I'd say their owner is pulling a Major League and fielding an intentionally bad team so the team can move to Miami, except they're already in Miami. It is fun to see them do the push-ups after popping the ball up, though.