There was only one entry from me during the off-season, and I know that wasn’t right. My mind was just really, really far from baseball during the off-season, but now that it is coming back I’m starting this up again. I noticed that most of the people who visit this blog are new visitors, so I’ll introduce myself.

Hello, my name is Alex, and my family has season tickets at Yankee Stadium. Last year I snagged 329 baseballs, but I don’t just snag balls; I get autographs and collect game-used memorabilia from games also (as you will see later). Now onto the day…

We had just come down from New York on the train, and we arrived in the morning, so we didn’t plan to attend any games today. But we didn’t know what to do, so we just decided to go check out what was happening at some of the stadiums near us. The first stadium we checked out was George M. Steinbrenner Field aka the spring training home of the Yankees.

 

First we went directly to the stadium, and looked around at the practice fields. The only thing going on was a college or high school game on one of the pratice fields, which I didn’t take a photo of. There seemed to be nothing going on, so we started turning around. But while we were driving away we saw a practice field a bit out of the way that had some players on it. It turns out that it was a scrimmage between the Triple-A Pirates and the Double-A Yankees.

The two teams were playing back-to-back to each other, and here is one of the fields:

This game finished up quicker, and I wasn’t really paying that much attention to that game. The other game had a bigger draw, like in the other game #19 Pedro Alvarez was playing.

And then they had ambidextrous pitcher Pat Venditte pitch for a bit. It was a sight seeing the same guy on the mound pitch to one batter left handed…

And then pitch to the next batter right handed…

The game was growing to a close, and nothing was happening, so I decided to start heading over to another field where some players were taking BP. When the game on the other field wrapped up the Pirates stayed on the bench waiting for the other game to finish, while some Yankees went to take BP while the others went inside. But before I could get to the BP field, the game with Pat and Pedro finished. The Pirates started heading out to their buses, so I ran back to see if there was anything to get. I did get a photo with Pedro Alvarez:

And then I got a bat. I wasn’t even expecting it; I mean I wasn’t even trying to get a baseball or an autograph, but sure I’ll take a bat. The person who gave it to me was Brian Myrow, and for those who don’t know him he is a 33 year old minor leaguer who has had a couple cups of coffee in the majors before.

The bat wasn’t his though, it was Dave Davidson who is a free-agent with a 30.00 ERA in the majors. You can see one of the cracks in the bat in this photo below; it’s splintering right under the label.

The other crack is on the handel and is similar to the one on my Johnny Damon bat that is in my bats post I did a couple months back. The Pirates left soon after I got the bat, and we decided to check out the others two stadiums in our area.

The Phillies stadium was boring; nothing was going on. The only thing happening was a little-league game, so we decided to head to the Blue Jays stadium. They had something happening, meaning that the players were coming back from their spring training game. I didn’t have any baseballs on me, as we were looking around, so I just took a photo with Cito Gaston.

That was it for the day, the first game of spring training is tomorrow, the Pirates at the Phillies. Weather isn’t looking too good.