On Friday, the Cardinals had an away game against the Astros in Kissimmee. We didn't want to drive all the way there so we spent the day just resting. I did take a run in the morning. I ended up running by the Cardinals practice fields. They were about a mile from our hotel. The setup resembles a little league complex. There are a bunch of fields strewn about for the Cardinals to practice on. They open the gates in the morning to let fans in. There are bleachers around the fields that they allow the fans to watch from. I sat down to watch for bit. Mike Leake (the newly acquired free agent pitcher) was throwing batting practice. It took me a few minutes to realize that Yadi was catching him. Given that he'd had two hand ligament surgeries over the winter, that was good news. Several players such as Adam Wainwright and Michael Wacha were watching. I stayed around until they were done.
We had the usual issue of where we wanted to get lunch from. We discussed it for a while and finally decided to get food from a place called Pollo Tropical. It's Caribbean type place with grilled chicken and sides like black beans and rice. It was excellent. I ended up later going to Publix and grabbing some sodas and cookies to snack on.
I got up on Saturday and ran. With our Saturday tickets, we were able to go in and watch the teams have batting practice. The gates for that opened at 10:30. I went over by myself to watch them. I got to watch the Marlins take batting practice. Giancarlo Stanton smacked several long home runs. Unfortunately, the Cardinals didn't take batting practice on the field. Donna took the hotel shuttle and got there about thirty minutes before the game started. The Cardinals ended up pulling out a win 3-2.
We had passes to a post game meal where several Cardinal players would come over and answer questions. We got over there and were treated to a really good buffet meal. Tommy Pham and Mitch Harris along with announcer Mike Claiborne were there. Mike Matheny came over a few minutes later. They took questions from the crowd and Donna got to ask a question. She asked Mitch Harris (a pitcher) what it was like to work with Yadi (she had to of course get in a question about her favorite player). Mitch of course talked about how wonderful he was. We were then allowed to get autographs. I fortunately had bought a couple of baseballs for us to get signatures on. Mike Matheny signed Donna's hat (which will of course go to Josh). We told him how he was our son Josh's favorite player when he was young and had even bought a Mike Matheny shirt. Mike seemed genuinely happy to hear that and told us to thank Josh for that. It was a very enjoyable time. We went back to the hotel and rested and went to bed.
In my next post, I'll let you know about our busy Sunday and how the rest of the games went.
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