Friday, March 25, 2011

Grapefruit League Tour 2011: Braves vs Blue Jays



(This post originally appeared on Bus Leagues Baseball.com)

Even though I riffed on Spring Training in my last post, I'm still a baseball fan and can't resist the allure of sitting in the stands and seeing the game I love. So I ventured from my place in Tampa to Dunedin, Florida for my second attempt to see the Blue Jays warm up for the season.

(My first attempt did not go well. I drove 45 minutes just to be told the game against the Rays was sold out. Luckily, I got my parking fee back as I was only parked for 10 minutes. But I did buy a ticket for this game against the Braves.)

As expected, both the Blue Jays and the visiting Braves played a majority of their starters for the first few innings. The only major star I did not see for the Braves was Brian McCann. But on the field was Jason Heyward, Dan Uggla, Freddie Freeman, Alex Gonzalez, and on the mound was Jair Jurrjens. The Blue Jays played Jose Bautista, Adam Lind, Yunel Escobar, and on the bump was Brett Cecil.

What should have been good pitching match-up quickly vanished after Jurrjens was pulled after one inning. I later read it was due to a health concern - you can never be too cautious in spring. Following Jurrjens was Peter Boylan, who pitched well, and Scott Proctor, who couldn't find home plate with a GPS. After overthrowing the first baseman on a routine grounder back to the mound, Proctor allowed the runner to steal third uncontested, threw a wild pitch, then allowed a home run to Jose Bautista. Not good if he was on the roster bubble.

(Note: the Braves allowed two uncontested steals of third. Two! That is unforgivable. That has to be the fault of the pitchers. They are lucky they pitched out of those jams.)

Brett Cecil, on the other hand, pitched very well for the first four innings. He had Braves hitters off balance and caught a few looking at strike three. Then the fifth inning happened and the wheels came off. After the Braves scored one, Heyward followed up with an RBI single, and then Uggla smacked his first home run of the spring, a three run shot over the left-center wall. After the smoke cleared, Cecil had allowed five runs and was saddled with the loss.

A few final notes:

- Attendance was 4,285. That's a good crowd for a game in Dunedin. It was roughly 40% Braves fans, 50% Blue Jays fans, and 10% fans of baseball.

- A local sports bar gives a you free beer if you present a used ticket worth more than $18. Although it's only good for game day, that's a great deal. Especially after paying crazy prices for beer in the ballpark.

- Speaking of beer, there is a vendor at the ballpark in Dunedin with an amazing voice. It is one of those deep baritone "radio friendly voices", kinda like the homeless guy in Ohio. When he made a beer call, everyone heard it.

- The Blue Jays spring uniforms don't have names on the back. That makes it tough to identify the players, especially the non-major leaguers.

- Simple spring training math: Subtract the player's number from 100. That is usually the percentage chance the player has of making the team. Take the highest 25 percentages and there is the major league roster.

- There was a memorabilia silent auction at the ballpark that didn't make a wit of sense. They had a table full of autographed baseballs. The bidding for Nolan Ryan's autograph started at $150, Cliff Lee started at $100, Tom Seaver for $80, and Roy Halladay for $250. $250 dollars for Roy Halladay! As much as Lee and Ryan combined! Or more than three times the value of Seaver! How does that make sense? I'm starting to rank memorabilia sellers down there with paparazzi and lawyers on my own approval ratings.

- Boxscore via Yahoo! sports.