Best line of the day
“Life is like a maze – you turn left, you turn right and just when you think you’ve found the right way, there’s Jack Nicholson with an axe.”
Best lines summing up my week
“I’ve always said that people should enjoy baseball the way they want to enjoy baseball. It is a sport, and it is meant to be loved, and if you love it by doing spreadsheets, if you love it by sitting down the third base line with a beer and without even knowing the players names, if you love it for its history, for its pace, for its drama, for its familiarity, for its connection to spring, for its apparent simplicity, for its apparent complexities, for the way the game reveals character, for the way the game reveals talent, for the way the game rewards consistency, for batting average and wins and RBIs, for UZR and Runs Created and FIP, for whatever … that’s great. Love the game your own way.”
I’m petrified
More La Posada
Where to go in Winslow
La Posada Hotel, built by Fred Harvey, designed by Mary Colter.
Standin’ on the corner
Movin’ on up
$3.96-nine a gallon.
Today’s Photo
iPhone photo.
10-9 Reds in sixth
26 hits including a couple of looooooong balls.
Update: 14-9 Reds in 8th.
13,182. Fourth largest single game crowd ever at HoHoKam. Cubs have spent spring training here since 1979.
Update update: Reds won 14-13. 40 hits.
West Addison West
Today’s game
Reds vs. Cubs at HoHoKam Park in Mesa.
If ever in Scottsdale
. . . I thought the Roaring Fork just north of downtown on Scottsdale Road had wonderful food and first-rate service.
And it’s still officially winter
Idle thought
Old age might best be defined as being unable to carry your first beer from the bar to the pool without spilling some.
Take me out …
iPhone 4 photo. Is it any good? I don’t have any way to see it full size.
Idle thought
Security was cursory getting into the ballpark yesterday, mostly to see if I had contraband food and drinks. I could easily have walked in with a handgun.
And then I thought, “Shit, this is Arizona, it’s assumed I have a handgun.”
Today’s Photo
Look what I got.
Nice
84 degrees, 15% humidity at game time.
Best line of the day
“There is no scalping on an Indian reservation.”
Ticket salesman at Salt River Fields, which is on Indian land. He was referring to second-party ticket sales.
I think.
Great facility
The Pima-Maricopa tribes, the D’backs and Rockies did a great job. Beautiful park.
Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Scottsdale.
The Boys of Summer
Salt River Fields at Talking Stick
Valentine’s Day
. . . is one of the great days of the year — the day when pitchers and catchers reported to spring training.
Today is an even greater day.
It’s the day when I report to spring training.
Angels and D’backs tomorrow. Rockies and White Sox Thursday. Giants and Dodgers or Cubs and Reds Friday.
Scottsdale temp forecast to be in the 80s all three afternoons.
What he said
Again, I realize it’d never happen, but I’d love to see a situation where all the [NFL] teams were publicly-owned and the players got 80% of all revenues, with the rest of the cash going to pay for road repairs, teachers’ salaries, and so on. Then I’d love to see Jerry Jones or Jerry Richardson and all those assholes strapped to chairs and forced to watch their former profits spent on new school gymnasiums and wheelchair ramps for courthouses and that sort of thing. I would be willing to go without football for a full year – no, make it two years – if at the end of it I could watch a weeping Dan Snyder taken on a tour of a new Public Football League-funded school for the blind.
Vast Devastation
51 more earthquake/tsunami photos from The Big Picture – Boston.com.