Dear Friends,
I am slowly recovering from yet another saga of getting stranded. Only this time I was stranded in south Florida for an extra day. Luck has not really been on my side during my recent travels, so much so that I’m tempted to just never leave home again. The good news is that I’m not scheduled to travel again until late July, so I have a nice long stretch to just enjoy being home in Big Sky Country with all my girls.
It was certainly cumbersome getting to and fro, but all of the events of the past month were really excellent and I’m really honored to have been a part of it.
As I mentioned, I was privileged to actually be in Spring Training territory over the weekend, so I was able to attend two games of Base Ball. The first, at the Spring Training home of the Boston Red Sox, JetBlue Park, which is also a mini replica of Fenway Park in Boston. I had a pretty good seat!
The Twins starting nine had the Sox beat until the 8th inning, whereupon Minnesota subbed in all their Triple-A players who immediately coughed up the lead by giving up a Grand Slam that sent the Boston faithful into pandemonium. Yeah, that wasn’t so fun. Glad it’s just Spring!
And then I took in an afternoon game at the Twins home stadium, just a few miles away. This time they were hosting the Baltimore Orioles. Also, a great seat:
My phone camera always makes things look far away. Trust me: I was right on top of it. The game was great fun (another Twins loss—glad it’s Spring), but I made the rookie mistake of exposing my winter-hibernated skin to a full three hours of Florida ultraviolet sunlight. Yeah, I got pretty crispy.
What a delight to see these athletes up close and personal. I watched Twins reliever Caleb Thielbar throw a bullpen session:
Words cannot really describe what a 95mph+ fastball looks like from this angle and proximity. Mostly because the ball can barely be seen from this angle and proximity. The amount of power these guys can leverage out of their legs, hips, arms, and fingertips is jaw-dropping. Here’s something cool: you’ll notice the camera they have set up right behind Caleb. That is an expensive piece of technology that captures his throwing motion in super slow-motion so they can dissect every little aspect of his pitches. The amount of rotation, the sweep and movement, and so forth. Base Ball is a very high-tech sport these days.
Base Ball players are impressive physical specimens up close. I walked around the ballpark and stood in the vicinity of centerfield, and tried to fathom how a man could hit a baseball that distance with a cylindrical lump of wood. 400 feet is a long way. Later, in the game, Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson (reigning AL Rookie of the Year) hit a 460-foot BOMB to centerfield where I had been standing. The ball would have cleared me by thirty feet or so. It’s just kind of incomprehensible.
Anyway, tomorrow is officially Opening Day, and the games count! Play Ball!
What has been going on in the world? A container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and completely destroyed it. What a catastrophe, and tragedy for the six presumed dead. The bridge was a pretty vital transportation artery, as well, so there will be long term economic consequences.
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