Spring Training!

And just like that, baseball is back. Hooray! Last weekend I headed to Florida with Jenny, Katie, & Courtney for a baseball trip. And when I say baseball, I mean baseball: 5 games in 3 days. It was awesome.First stop: Atlanta Braves vs. Toronto Blue Jays, at Champion Stadium, the spring training home of the Braves - at the Disney Sports Complex.
We started off our trip with lawn seats and enjoyed every minute of the Florida baseball and sun. Some of us a little more than others (more on that later).That night, we headed to Lakeland, home of Tigertown, to see the Detroit Tigers take on the Tampa Bay Rays. We had bleacher seats for this game, but they were so crowded that we found a nice spot on the grass in right field to enjoy the game.The game was great, and it even got a little chilly that night. The stadium was packed - I guess there's not much else to do in Lakeland on a Friday spring night! Halfway mark: Houston Astros vs. Philadelphia Phillies. Jenny's team - and they were great. The game was probably the most exciting one of the weekend, and it didn't hurt that we had seats about 10 rows behind home plate.The Florida sun sure beat down that day - we were sooo hot by the time the game was over!! Thanks to the burn on my legs/feet from the day before, I spent most of the game like this ...Nice, huh?!? I kept getting comments all weekend about my sunburn ... and I'm really not sure how it happened that I missed that entire part of my legs. Oh well. It looked a lot worse than it actually was.

Next up: New York Yankees vs. Cincinnati Reds in Tampa at the Yankees Steinbrenner Field. As much as I hate the Yankees, they sure know how to make things nice. Their spring training facility is nicer than some of the MLB parks I've been to. And they even won their game. I did find it odd though that when they sang the National Anthem, only 5 Yankees were lined up outside of the dugout, and 3 of them were coaches. As opposed to the almost entire lineup of Reds. Hmm. Oh and Richard Gere threw out the first pitch - that was entertaining. Speaking of entertaining, here's a shot of my sunburned legs enjoying the game ...
Katie's parents came to the game with us, and since her dad is a huge Yankees fan, I had to pretend to be happy that they won...it didn't work out so well.At least the game ended with a bang:
On our last day, we went back to where it all began only two short days earlier: to see the Braves take on the Yankees. Unfortunately, they couldn't win. Why is it that when I go to spring training, when the Braves had the best spring record going into the weekend, they lost both games I saw them in? Hmm. I guess that's nothing new as a Braves fan, but still. How cute is this little boy though? He's holding the foul ball that his dad scrambled to catch for him. Lucky kid!Spring Training in Florida? Awesome! Baseball, friends, sun, and every night when we got back to the hotel, we watched NCAA basketball games before going to bed. It really doesn't get much better than that!