Weather:
73 degrees, sunny [quite warm out in the sun, pleasant in the shade where I was
sitting]
Wind: 13
mph, In from RF.
T: 2:57.
Att:
7,930.
Umpires:
HP: Will Little. 1B: John Hirschbeck. 2B: Gabe Morales. 3B: Paul Emmel.
Infield
Box 4, Row 15, Seat 13 (about one section to the right of home plate)
McKechnie
Field, which first opened in 1923 (well before I was born), is the oldest
stadium used for Spring Training. It’s been renovated a couple of times, so
facilities are reasonably good, as are the sight lines. It wasn’t especially
clear where to enter the seating area to get to particular sections, though.
The dugouts were small enough that some of the staff had to overflow into
temporary seats to the home plate side of each dugout.
Programs
were $5.00 (a buck more than in Clearwater), and unfortunately the section in
the center for keeping score was on the same slick paper as the rest of the
program, so it was almost impossible to write on. If I ever get to Bradenton
again (unlikely, see below), I’ll have to remember to bring my NASA
write-on-anything Space Pen.
Cheapest
beer I saw was $6.00 (so also more expensive than Clearwater), and bottled
sodas were a major-league $4.50, but the grilled chicken sandwich ($7.00, if I
remember correctly) was good.
Despite
the absence of any discernable Michael Morse connection, they played “Take on
Me” between the top and bottom of the first inning. They get bonus points for
putting on “Born to Run” after the fourth, but lose a few for still using “Y.M.C.A.”
for the seventh-inning stretch.
Was
interested to see that the silent auction was not limited to Pirates items, but
included a Jim Bunning jersey and other Phillies memorabilia (as well as that
from some other teams).
Unfortunately,
the field is located in the middle of Bradenton, meaning that the traffic
getting in and out can be a huge mess. Traffic crawled into Bradenton on the
way there, which along with construction on U.S. 19 and the toll plaza backup
on the Sunshine Skyway made for a total of 75 minutes to get from my hotel in
Clearwater to the field. Getting back, and especially escaping from Bradenton,
was even worse. Getting out of the parking lot (around 4:18) was not too bad,
but things deteriorated quickly from there. It was almost 5:00 until I got in
line to pay the toll at the south end of the skyway, and nearly 6:00 until I
was back at the hotel. (I did spend a few minutes recovering from an erroneous
early exit from I-275 – have to remember that 54th Avenue South is
NOT the same thing as 54th Avenue North.)
Baseball-wise,
the Phils jumped off to a short-lived lead when Tony Gwynn Jr. led off the game
by bunting right in front of the plate and reaching when Bucs catcher Tony
Sanchez made a bad throw to first. Gwynn then stole second and scored on
successive ground balls by Rollins (finally back in the lineup) and Utley. The
Pirates quickly tied it in the bottom of the first when Phils starting-rotation
candidate Jeff Manship (!) fell behind to Andrew McCutcheon, who deposited the
next pitch into the left-field bleachers. Pittsburgh scored a second run in the
bottom of the third, but the Phils plated single runs in each of the next three
innings on an RBI double by Darin Ruf, an RBI single by Utley, and the first
homer of the spring by Ryan Howard, who made everyone especially happy by
hitting it to the opposite field.
Meanwhile,
Manship and the Phillies bullpen held the Bucs scoreless through the seventh.
The stint by Phils southpaw Jake Diekman was particularly impressive. Diekman entered
in the sixth after a McCutcheon leadoff single to face two Pirates lefthanded
hitters. He struck out Pedro Alvarez and induced Travis Snider to ground into a
twin-killing to end the inning.
Things
completely unraveled in the bottom of the eighth, however, when B.J. Rosenberg
went out for his second inning of work and was able to retire only one of the
six batters he faced. By this point the Bucs regulars were out of the lineup,
so the damage was done by Robert Andino (single), Brent Morel (single), beloved former Phillie Michael Martinez (single), Mel Rojas Jr. (walk), Junior Sosa
(sac fly), and Willy Garcia (two-run single).
In the top
of the ninth, Pittsburgh brought in Yao-Hsun Yang, a 31-year-old Taiwanese
lefthander whom they signed to a minor-league contract about a month ago. He
promptly issued walks to the first two Philly batters (including one pitch that
hit the backstop), then hit Gwynn to load the bases, at which point the Pirates
mercifully lifted him in favor of Josh Kinney. The Phils did pull within a run
when Cesar Hernandez drew a bases-loaded walk, but Wil Nieves followed by
grounding into a game-ending double play.
No comments:
Post a Comment