Backup Bonus

First pitch at Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium in Jupiter, Fla., spring training home to both
the Miami Marlins and the St. Louis Cardinals. This night, the Cardinals were the visitors.

It was supposed to be opening night for the Miami Marlins vs. the World Series champion Braves last night, but the contract negotiations between Major League owners and players put a stop to that. Instead, the Marlins’ season will open on the road against the Philadelphia Phillies in two weeks and their home opener is in mid-April.

This would have been upsetting because I had planned on opening night in Miami and with the Savannah Bananas the next night on their Banana Ball World Tour stop in West Palm Beach. Thanks to baseball’s backup plan, it turns out my trip will be even better. The delay in the big league regular schedule forced them to squeeze in some spring training games and I’ll be seeing a lot more baseball — and a lot more Marlins — than I had planned.

Last night I saw the Marlins at their spring training ballpark in Jupiter against the St. Louis Cardinals. Friday, it’s a double header, first the Marlins at the Houston Astros at the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, then the Banana Ball game that night in the same stadium. Saturday, it’s back to Jupiter for the Washington Nationals at the Marlins and on Sunday, I’ll stop for Marlins at the New York Mets in Port St. Lucie on my way back to Central Florida.

But wait, there’s more.

I’ll be in Lakeland Monday when the Detroit Tigers face the Toronto Blue Jays. Tuesday is opening night for AAA baseball, and I’ll be in Jacksonville when the Jumbo Shrimp face the Worcester Red Sox.

Not my first trip to Roger Dean Chevrolet Stadium, but the first since
I started keeping track in my spring training passport book.  

Spring training comes to an end on Tuesday, but the Tampa Bay Rays have scheduled an extra game against the Phillies at the Trop, their major league home in St. Petersburg, on Wednesday. Too bad the Rays aren’t playing on Thursday, which is opening night for most of the Major League teams, but I think I’ll be ready a day of rest after eight games over seven days in five ballparks.

The fun continues next Friday, opening night for the rest of minor league baseball, and I’ll be joining friends at Jackie Robinson Park in Daytona Beach when the Tortugas play the St. Lucie Mets. Finally it’s back to Jacksonville on Saturday for another Shrimp-Sox matchup.

I say finally, but there might be one more game in Jacksonville on Sunday afternoon, and then I’ll head out on my first road trip of the season. It looks like my baseball adventures are off to a good start in 2022.

A nice spring training pin for the Cardinals.

That first road trip will start in the Carolinas and take me through Georgia and Alabama, then back to Florida. Two of my stops are on the Banana Ball World Tour when they play in Columbus, Ga., and Birmingham, Ala.

My second trip will be built around the last Banana Ball game against the Kansas City Monarchs in early May. I haven’t worked out the details, but it looks like I’ll be driving from Florida to Pensacola, then up to Kansas before heading home to Pennsylvania, with plenty of baseball along the way.

One more trip will take me to Texas for games in Corpus Cristi, Sugar Land, Houston, Frisco, Arlington, Round Rock and San Antonio. This tour includes two Major League games, the Marlins at Houston Astros and my first visit to the Texas Rangers’ new ballpark. Once again, I’ll be able to say I’ve been to all the Major League Baseball stadiums. Also, it’ll be my first time in the capital of Texas, and I’ll have a day off to visit the grave of former President Bush. That's my triple crown: baseball, state capitals and presidents resting in peace.

There might be a trip southern California and I’ll be able to check Nixon and Reagan off the list and complete my tour of presidential burial sites. There are three Single A teams in the area, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to fit that trip in this year.

Some excitement at the ballpark last night. Jorge Soler cleared the bases with a big double and Jazz Chisholm Jr.hit a grand slaw to give the Marlins a big lead early in the game. The Cardinals never caught up. Final: Miami Marlins 7, St. Louis Cardinals 4.

Back to Spring Training

The fans are back at Publix Field at Joker Marchant Stadium for spring training.

It was good to be back. Back in Lakeland where downtown still looks like downtown even though the Maas Brothers department store is long gone along with all the other shops that used to line its streets. Where the swans are the main attraction still in the donut-shaped park that surrounds Lake Morton. Where 50 years ago, I graduated from Florida Southern College and learned so much, not just in class, but from day-to-day immersion in the architectural brilliance of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings.

And it was good to be back in the stands at Joker Marchant Stadium, now known formally as Publix Field at Joker Marchant Stadium. I saw it brutally hyphenated as Publix-Marchant Stadium on one sign. Fans still turn off Lakeland Hills Boulevard onto Al Kaline Drive to get to the parking lots. There were a lot of them at the first game of spring training for the hometown Detroit Tigers vs. the Philadelphia Phillies. The line of cars was so long that I thought I might miss the first pitch, so I darted around the traffic to a freelance lot across the street.

It had been two years since I was at a spring training game, I managed to catch a handful of games in 2020 right before the pandemic arrived and shut down everything. Spring training returned in 2021, but with limits on crowd size. It was almost impossible to find tickets. This year, it looked like the major league contract dispute was going to mean another year without spring training for me, The schedule had been cancelled, but a new one was slapped together after the owners and players settled their differences.

The Tigers have been training in Lakeland for 84 years and by the time their current lease runs out, it will be over 100 years. The Tigers owns the minor league Lakeland Flying Tigers, a partnership that has lasted 52. They are tied with the Phillies and their AA team, the Reading Fightin’ Phils for the longest major league affiliation. 

Where to take in a spring training game in Florida.

I’ve been to a few games in Lakeland recently since the big 2017 renovation that transformed the stadium into one of the best among spring training and minor league facilities. I’ve only been to spring training games, but not any Flying Tigers games. I’ll have to see if I can fix that one of these days.

I don’t remember anyone ever mentioning the minor league team when I was going to school and working in Lakeland. Back then, they were called the Lakeland Tigers and in the early years they played at Henley Field, a ballpark down the road from Joker Marchant. Some college games were played at Henley as well, some high school football too, but I never went to any games there. 

A variety of caps for the minor league Lakeland Flying Tigers.

When I was in college, I saw our team, the Florida Southern College Striking Moccasins, when they played at Joker Marchant. They were a good team, winning several small college national championships. Back then the space behind the wooden bleachers was dirt and grass, which was a good thing on that day a friend talked me into trying chewing tobacco. Let’s just say the experiment did not end well.

Although I was at school in Lakeland four years, taught at FSC one year and lived and worked in town another year and a half, I don’t remember going to a Tigers spring training game back then. Once I went to the annual Tiger Barbecue, an all-you-eat-and-drink extravaganza set up under a tent. I can still see the row of wall-to-wall tables piled high with boiled shrimp, and I still have the smallish glass beer mug that was included in the price of your ticket. 

A squad of Tigers players working out during the game on a practice field beyond the outfield scoreboard. The same thing was happening on three or four other practice field.

The new stadium has a lot of the amenities found at other modern ballparks. There’s a 360-degree concourse that includes the Runway, a wide terrace from center to right field with a long rail shelf for your snacks and drinks. There’s also a grassy berm under the scoreboard on the left field side and a bar and a number of party areas for group rental. The Runway and the Flying Tigers are named as a tribute to the fighter pilot school that was located here during World War II.

It’s too bad the concessions are still located behind the stands, which means you miss some of the game if you need to get food or drink. But the concourse under the stands is spacious and it’s easy to navigate, even when there are long lines at the food stalls. I found a delicious chili dog at Coney Dogs, where there was almost no line, and I grabbed a big iced tea at an express drinks line. 

It's a good thing the Tigers didn't paint over this mural. Florida State League
and other historic minor league names are back in 2022. And class Low-A is now
Single A. No more Low-A Southeast. An update might be needed.
The Florida Firefrogs and the Charlotte Stone Crabs no longer exist.

How was the game? Well, it’s spring training, so we saw a lot of players including some of the big league stars. The highlight was back-to-back home runs for the Tigers with Miguel Cabrera on deck. He grounded out, but for a few moments, all eyes were ready for liftoff. The lead changed several times during the game, but the Phillies tied it up for good at 6 runs apiece with a two-run homer in the 7th. That’s how the game ended after 9 innings. No winner, no loser, just a good day of baseball under the Central Florida sun.

The Spoils of Summer

Minor league baseball is just around the corner.

I intended to post a final report on my amazing baseball summer of 2021, but it took longer than I expected to sort things out, and baseball found itself on the back burner. Now, as the earth slowly turns its face away from the cold emptiness of winter’s dark night sky, I’m getting ready for the new season. Major League Baseball’s opening day has been cancelled, but AAA minor league teams are preparing for first pitch on April 5th and the rest of the minor leagues three days later.

I have an ambitious schedule in the works, but the details will depend on when Major League Baseball returns, if at all. One thing for sure, I’ll be visiting several new and historic stadiums on the Savannah Bananas Bananaball World Tour, with games in Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Kansas. I’ll also see a number of minor league teams along the way. Join me as we go back to the ballpark in 2022. 

1. The Final Tally For me, it was great just to be back in the ballparks in 2021. Little did I realize that I would see 65 baseball games in 20 states from coast to coast. That’s just over half the states that have minor league baseball teams. I’ve now been to 63 minor league ballparks, which is more than half of the 119 stadiums scattered across the land. I’ve also been to quite a few others that host other types of baseball, like spring training or college games, and several that were home to former minor league teams.

I was lucky to catch a AAA game at one such oddball, the stadium in Trenton, N.J. The Buffalo Bisons played some home games there as the Trenton Thunder while the stadium in Buffalo was on loan to the Toronto Blue Jays. I had hoped to see a major league game in Buffalo earlier in the season, but tickets were limited and sold out fast.

Bobbleheads, shirts, pins, etc.

By the end of the season I had made my first visit to 36 other stadiums, all home to affiliated minor league teams. In the process, I accumulated a lot of baseball gear and memorabilia, from T-shirts to jerseys and bobbleheads to baseballs. I added a lot of lapel pins to my collection from most, but not all, of the stadiums I visited. I picked up more baseball caps than I’ll ever need. There was so much stuff, it filled my dining room table and spilled over onto the chairs, and that didn’t include several items n Florida. A lot of the things were free giveaways, some were gifts, and most of the rest were discounted.

One big mystery remains. I snagged a foul ball at the Brooklyn Cyclones and I picked up a ball in the outfield during batting practice at the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Railriders. But I seem to have a third minor league ball. Where did I get it? Does anyone have a clue?

I wonder how long the scoreboard outside the National Baseball Hall of Fame
will be stuck on the World Series results.

2. The Champions

I’d like to congratulate all the minor league champions from 2021. I was hoping to catch some minor league postseason action, but none of the teams near me qualified. I did get to see some good late-season games involved in various minor league pennant races.

The AAA leagues didn’t have post-season and championship games. Instead, the teams with the best records at the end of the regular season claimed bragging rights as AAA East and West Champions. All 30 teams participated in a two-week round-robin kind of tournament that was called the Final Stretch. Each team played five games at home against one opponent and five on the road against another. The team with the best record, the Durham Bulls (Tampa Bay), was declared the Final Stretch winner.

All the other minor league champions were decided in best-of-five series between the top two teams in each of the nine leagues.

AAA East and AAA overall — Durham Bulls (TB)

AAA West Tacoma — Rainiers (SEA)

AAA Final Stretch — Durham Bulls

AA Central

Northwest Arkansas Naturals (KC) 3-0 over Wichita Wind Surge (MIN)

AA Northeast

Akron Rubber Ducks (CLE) 3-0 over Bowie Baysox (BAL)

AA South

Mississippi Braves (ATL) 3-2 over Montgomery Biscuits (TB)

High-A

East Bowling Green Hot Rods (TB) 3-2 Greensboro Grasshoppers (PIT)

High-A

Central Cedar Rapids Kernels (MIN) 3-2 over Quad Cities River Bandits (KC)

High-A

West Eugene Emeralds (SF) 3-1 over Spokane Indians (COL)

Low-A East

Charleston Riverdogs (TB) 3-2 over Down East Wood Ducks (Tex)

Low-A

Southeast Bradenton Marauders (PIT) 3-0 over Tampa Tarpons (NYY)

Low-A

West San Jose Giants (SF) 3-0 over Fresno Grizzlies (COL)

It’s worth noting that the Tampa Bay Rays teams were represented in the postseason or championships at all levels from Major League Baseball to Low-A minor league. The Rays let me and their fans down by not making it all the way to World Series, but three of Tampa Bay’s four farm teams claimed their league championships. The Bulls dominated AAA, the Bowling Green Hot Bods defeated the Greensboro Grasshoppers (Pittsburgh) 3-2 in the High-A East championship and the Charleston Riverdogs defeated the Down East Wood Ducks (Texas) 3-2 in the Low-A East series. The Montgomery Biscuits came close, losing to the Mississippi Braves in game 5 of the AA championship.

3. Stars, One and All

I want to thank everyone who helped make my baseball summer so much fun: my All-Star team. I was able to catch up with so many friends and relatives as I made my way around the country. Some made it to games with me, others did not, but it was great to see so many in visits that were long overdue. Special thanks to all of you who opened your spare bedrooms to give me a break from all the one-night hotel stops along the way.