Phoenix Wrapup

I may be in no shape to do this since I'm so exhausted and all. But the longer I wait, the more the details will fade I guess.

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It was all baseball, all the time. Neither wife was impressed by the fact that we didn't even so much as order a dirty movie in the hotel room. Hood's wife told him, "You want praise for not doing something you shouldn't have been doing anyway?"

There are just some things a wife does not understand, and there's no way to bridge that gap. The wives are missing the point. Two very hetero guys who left town to have fun sans wives were utterly and completely clean-cut the whole time. We were baseball-obsessed to the point that even our libidos took a back seat. When we weren't sleeping, we were wrapped up in baseball pursuits. We watched batting practice, fielding practice, bunt drills, catchers working on pickoff moves, intra-squad games and bullpen sessions. Oh, and we squeezed in four major league and two college games.

So the point isn't that we want praise for not being bad. The point is that it's astounding, to us at least, that we managed to indulge our baseball jones to that extent.

Guys reading this will understand. Can I get an amen?

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I bumped into Terry Bradshaw in the Phoenix airport. He was alone, just walking around pretty much unnoticed. I heard someone say no one was bothering him because "he doesn't look like money." Pretty accurate I'd say. He was just another schmo in jeans and a gimme cap.

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We showed up at Phoenix Municipal Ballpark without even having checked into our hotel room. Oakland was facing Chicago, Rich Harden vs. Greg Maddux. It was standing-room-only, but we didn't mind much. We coughed up our $5 each and just sort of soaked it in. I didn't have my camera with me, I'm sorry to say. But I think my memories of watching future HOF member Maddux tuning up in a green St. Paddy's Day cap will remain pretty vivid.

The park itself is about 40 years old, if I recall. Had its own charm, but it was dated.

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Meeting Mike Lopez for dinner was nice indeed. I had "Texas Shrimp" at the Black Angus. Afterwards Mike happily drove us around Phoenix, showing us the big venues and landmarks. Cutting through the TGI Fridays to see the Bank One Ballpark was pretty doggone cool. They have real grass in there, and overnight they run these bright lights on parts of the field that don't get light even when the roof is open. Mike said it doesn't help much.

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When you're at the hotel after an exhausting first day like that, trying to post a quick blog update and you discover you've left the g out of the word "Angus," well, it seems much funnier than it ought to.

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Second day we saw the Rangers at Padres in Peoria. That was a very nice facility, and we seized the opportunity to get a fairly early start and watch the players get in some work across the back fields.

And our seats were just great. We were first row behind the Rangers dugout. I was close enough to the players that I felt a little uneasy pointing my camera at them long enough to adjust the focus. But I managed. I'll have photos posted here or on our photo site in a few days with any luck. I'm shooting for Thursday night.

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We zipped down to the Arizona State U campus in Tempe after that to lend a hand to Chuck Kelly, the Sooners' radio man. He's usually solo for the broadcasts, hooking up his own gear and calling the game alone. He was sick with a cold, and clearly glad to see Erik, the man he called "the best audio engineer in Texas." They worked together last fall on Carrollton High School football broadcasts.

Lo and behold, the stats man (whom I know only as Mike) from those broadcasts also happened to be in Tempe. He took in the game and kept stats (what else?) for fun, offering nuggets of info for the broadcast several times. Pretty sweet setup for Chuck I'd say.

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And what would a Briscoe vacation be without music, right?

Eh, don't get too excited. After the ASU game we hit a sports bar. It was midnight or so, and we were starving. A three-piece band was in there, wailing away. They were... something.

Is it worth grabbing my thesaurus to look up synonyms for "suckass"?

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The next day we caught the Rangers hosting the Angels in Surprise. Watching the Royals on their back fields, doing their work was quite cool. I've already covered that and how much we enjoyed watching the Angels taking BP. Guerrero is just UNREAL.

Guerrero is Spanish for "warrior," in case you didn't know.

We didn't get good seats for that game, unfortunately. We treated it as an SRO deal after a while. Food service was awfully slow. Best not to revisit that.

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More ASU action that night, and it was COLD! We had better food afterwards at least: Mexican at a joint called Garcia's.

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And yesterday, of course, was Royals/Rockies in Surprise again. We had terrific seats for that one: First row on the upper deck. Nice leg room, beautiful weather, and hardly a care in the world, save for the approaching flight time... dang.

Seeing Todd Helton and Mike Sweeney was probably the highlight of the afternoon. KC pitcher Mike Wood looked quite good, going hitless through three.

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Two or three times we caught part of a movie on HBO called Bounce. Seems it stars everyone on the planet. It was... not so great from what I could see. And one of the characters uttered the line, "Sometimes you get so alone that it just makes sense."

Okay, putting the title of a Charles Bukowski book in your screenplay like that isn't clever; it's cheeky and annoying to the very few of us who'll get the reference.

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So there it is. Our trip wrapped up in one nice, neat, tidy, overlong package...

We'd like to go again, of course. One year soon I'll have to start taking THEBOY. Next year? Dunno. Will see.

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By the way, Danny's site is up and running now.