{"id":428,"date":"2012-03-19T20:48:05","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T04:48:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/?p=428"},"modified":"2012-03-19T21:03:18","modified_gmt":"2012-03-20T05:03:18","slug":"spring-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/2012\/03\/19\/spring-training\/","title":{"rendered":"Spring Training"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I’m caught up with baseball outings from 2011, we can finally get ready for the regular season. In 2011 we saw the Diamondbacks vs. Giants at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona<\/a>, the Phillies vs. Braves<\/a>, Phillies vs. Rangers<\/a> and Phillies vs. Cubs<\/a> at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, and the Yankees vs. Red Sox<\/a> at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.<\/p>\n

It occurs to me that we saw some pretty good teams in 2011 — I definitely didn’t expect the D-Backs to be that good when we saw them back in April. We saw four playoff teams play. In fact, I challenge anyone to have seen teams with a better combined record than we saw in 2011 (minimum five games? can we create a variable to take into account how many total games one saw?). Let’s tease this out:<\/p>\n

Arizona Diamondbacks: 94-68
\nSan Francisco Giants: 86-76
\nPhiladelphia Phillies: 102-60
\nAtlanta Braves: 89\u00e2\u20ac\u201c73
\nTexas Rangers: 96-66
\nChicago Cubs: 71-91 (you can always depend on the Cubs to screw up at least one thing a season)
\nNew York Yankees: 97-65
\nBoston Red Sox: 90-72<\/p>\n

Total win-loss record: 725-571 for a .559 winning percentage.<\/p>\n

Well, did any of you do any better?<\/p>\n

Mom and Dad were in town while the Red Sox were playing the Yankees and they had never been to see the new stadium, so we went early. I had never seen Monument Park<\/a>, and neither had they, so we got to see that. Much has been said about the giant Steinbrenner plaque in the center of everything. Here it is:<\/p>\n

\"Monument<\/p>\n

\"George<\/p>\n

We also had time to visit the Yankees Museum<\/a> with all the hardware:<\/p>\n

\"World<\/p>\n

The collection of signed baseballs from everyone who ever played for the organization is actually very cool. Here’s Cory Lidle, who crashed the plane he was flying into an Upper East Side building in 2006<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Signed<\/p>\n

And I searched out Ian Kennedy’s ball:<\/p>\n

\"Ian<\/p>\n

This was the first full season after Steinbrenner died, so there were a lot of tributes to him around the park (in addition to the oversized plaque in Monument Park:<\/p>\n

\"Right<\/p>\n

\"Remembering<\/p>\n

Oh, and we had good seats, for once:<\/p>\n

\"New<\/p>\n

This was Jorge Posada’s last season, which we didn’t know at the time:<\/p>\n

\"Frieze<\/p>\n

And “We Want Pie” is a shoutout to A.J. Burnett, if I’m not mistaken (yup, that’s it)<\/a>; that’s all behind us now as well:<\/p>\n

\"Frieze<\/p>\n

The Red Sox won, by the way; A-Rod struck out to end the game:<\/p>\n

\"Alex<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that I’m caught up with baseball outings from 2011, we can finally get ready for the regular season. In 2011 we saw the Diamondbacks vs. Giants at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, the Phillies vs. Braves, Phillies vs. Rangers and Phillies vs. Cubs at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, and the Yankees vs. Red […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the_bronx"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":430,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/bigmap\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}