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Spring Training, Florida
And the bridges will burn at the end, at the end, at the end of the world, how will we cross the sea?
An all too short sixteen picture slideshow from an all too short five (or six) day trip to Florida begins at the FITTEAM Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, where your hometown, cheating Houston Astros took on the out of town, luckless New York Mets. In Florida, spring training consists of fifteen major league teams who share twelve stadiums in the Grapefruit League (as opposed to the Cactus League out in Arizona). On this all too short trip, we managed to visit a third of the stadiums and see the Mets winless in three games, which seems about right.
The FITTEAM Ballpark of the Palm Beaches is a shared stadium and training complex between the Astros and Nationals, and was actually a surprisingly nice stadium and complex. Almost all of these stadiums have a minor league baseball vibe to them- they’re smaller, usually the food is decent but not spectacular and the between inning entertainment is not quite ready for the majors. But none of that matters if your reason for going is to see the actual game. At almost any seat, you are close enough to get hit in the face with a baseball, and our seats, along the third base line, were a great place for kids to line up and get all sorts of autographs from all sorts of Astros who I never heard of.
Longtime fans of the slideshows know that for years and years and years I have been using my father’s birthday as an excuse to take him to an out of town hockey game. This is the 28th arena I have taken him to, with only three remaining (or four if you count eventual expansion Seattle team, which has yet to pick an actual name after thankfully denying reports that they wanted to call themselves the Kraken). A lot of the arena experiences have (honestly) been about the same. Every now and then there’s something crazy (a Civil War cannon that shoots off when a goal is scored, someone using a t-shirt cannon to shoot hot dogs into the crowd, a Zamboni with a fin on it), but most of the time it’s pretty much going to be the same. After seeing games from Vancouver to Boston, Montreal to Los Angeles, Minnesota to Phoenix, there’s just no good reason to raise your expectations too high going in. There just isn’t.
That said, this game and this arena (BB&T Center) were a revelation. The building was far nicer than I had heard or expected it would be, with great food including possibly the best pretzel of any NHL arena (that is somehow important to me) and they sold cheese popcorn with Cheetos, something everyone should be doing if you ask me. And the game between the Panthers and Boston Bruins was much better and far more competitive than we thought going in, ending in an overtime thriller.
This all too short trip wasn’t just hockey, baseball, baseball, baseball, baseball- although you could easily be forgiven for such an assumption. Most of the baseball games were day games, and there was almost always some driving between them, meaning that (other than breakfast or dinner) there wasn’t all that much time for all that much else. A rare exception was a free afternoon where we made a stop at Whitehall, the Henry M. Flagler House and Museum at Palm Beach, where there are actual palms and (I presume) beaches.
Our trip to Palm Beach took place at a rather interesting time, we left just as the President of Brazil’s entourage decided to visit nearby Mar-a-lago and infect just about everyone they could with the novel coronavirus. Every day during our travels the news got a little worse and a little more ominous, something not helped at all by the sight from our hotel room window of the uncomforting sight of Air Force One parked at the West Palm Beach Airport.
Whitehall is in fact white (as you might expect), and follows a fairly simple plan with a shockingly ornate entrance hall and a large ballroom separated by a private courtyard. Public rooms circle the courtyard on the ground level while upstairs corridors servicing a lot of bedrooms look down to a lone statue of Venus, complete with super creepy heads crawling up and gawking from the edges of the fountain.
The house (designed by Carrere and Hastings, the architects of the New York Public Library) is interesting and worth a visit. There is a separate building that houses Henry Flagler’s private rail car (he made his money first in Standard Oil and later in the Florida East Coast Railway), a sundial that is extremely accurate (after a suspicious amount of conditions) and a pleasant enough enclosed courtyard that was added after a ten story hotel addition was removed. The house and finishes are everything you would expect from a gilded age robber baron’s summer place, although in retrospect, maybe Flagler might have appreciated some different, softer finish choices in the end. He died here after falling down a marble staircase in 1913.
Enough about marble stairs and extremely accurate sundials and killer viruses. Let’s get back to baseball. Welcome to Port St Lucie and Clover Park, the spring training home of the New York Mets.
If I am a fan of a baseball team, it would have to be the Mets. Compared to every other team, they are the ones that (by far) I have been to the most home games of and the ones I would most likely end up watching on tv if given a choice. That said, I can probably name maybe two players right now (the truth is that I’m not a huge baseball fan) and since it’s the Mets, chances are that the two players I can probably name are probably hurt now anyway.
And even though I have not been to 28 of 31 (or 32) baseball stadiums, I have been to a fairly respectable 19 of 30 Major League Baseball stadiums, not including an additional four that have since been torn down and replaced. I am a fan of CitiField, a great place to watch a game despite it being a total pain in the ass to get to Queens. So as a qualified)\ fan of the Mets and an unqualified fan of CitiField, I had high expectations for Clover Field. Those expectations were not met.
The stadium experience was… fine… and even though the pretzel was not good (that is somehow important to me), the rest of the food seemed… fine. If I was ranking the four stadiums on overall fan experience (and it appears that I am), I would have to rank Clover Field fourth. And they would drop down to fifth if I included the Florida Panthers hockey game.
Part of my disappointment with the Clover Field experience was this. As you walk in you see Mr. Met’s weird brother or son or clone along with his sister or his wife, or possibly his sister and his wife- all of that inbreeding just might explain those giant weird ill-proportioned baseball heads. Upon seeing these Met people plastered all over the stadium at restrooms and walls, I expected to at least see them referenced during the game somewhere. Maybe on the video screen, maybe they would be walking around as mascots under the warm Florida sun, slightly off balance because of their giant weird ill-proportioned baseball heads. They were nowhere to be seen, not in person or on the video screens. In fact, it was well into the sixth inning before the stadium announcer even tried to get the laid back crowd to start a “Lets Go Mets” chant. All this in a stadium that felt far more like a third rate Shea than anything at all like a CitiField.
Three of the five Grapefruit League stadiums we visited were on the east coast of Florida, in fact due to scheduling concerns we ended up visiting all three east coast stadiums. The rest of them are scattered on the west coast, meaning that a cross peninsula drive was bound to happen sooner or later. From Port St Lucie to Fort Meyers (or more accurately Estero), you’re looking at a solid two and a half hour drive on at least nine different numbered highways ranging from Interstates to dead straight two lane back roads with terrifying passing zones. These roads cut through and across rural farmlands with giant ranches, past some small towns with an occasional trailer park and likely past countless unseen gators waiting patiently for their next move. Breaking up the monotony was a chance to stop midway, scale the levee and get a quick glimpse at an endless Lake Okeechobee, the tenth largest lake in the country (take that, Lake Pontchartrain) and the headwaters of the Everglades.
