Spring training

Did you know that there are other blogs besides this one? I was reading the one that lives next-door to this one, and the author had written about how excited he was about baseball spring training. He lives in Florida where many Major League teams hold their preseason camps, and he was planning to attend a friendly game between two out-of-state teams. Sounds like a nice time. In his post about spring training, he included a map that shows where teams are holding their camps in the southern part of the state. This map was originally created for women who wanted to serve baseball players with paternity suits:

It occurred to me that spring training must not be nearly as much fun for Florida-based teams as for the others. The New York Mets are excited to get away from the rainy weather of the northeast. The Detroit Tigers are excited to get away from Detroit. Players from Pittsburgh to Minneapolis are tweeting: "OMG, road trip! So stoked to start working on my tan, yo!" But for Florida players it's like, "great, we have to go play baseball in a smaller stadium that's an hour away from our regular stadium. Great, I have no valid excuse to get me out of going to dinner with those people tonight, because I'm still in Florida. Awesome."

It's like when your cousins come to visit from Arizona when you're a little kid, and for them it's a vacation, because they're in a completely different place than where their everyday lives are based. And you try to jump on the vacation train and your mom's like, "have you finished your chores? You can't play with your cousins until you've finished your chores." And you say, "but they're going swimming!" And your mom says, "go get ready for your piano lesson."

I feel badly for Florida's professional baseball players because while all the other players in the country are on vacation, they're stuck at a piano lesson.