Idiots Write About Sports

We bring you this post live from a nondescript part of Tempe, where one-half of the Idiots Who Write About Sports weblog is spending the next few days taking in the sights and sounds of Cactus League baseball. Oh sure, we’re without our speedy cable modem, forcing us to hook up to the Internet via a dial-up modem plugged into the phone jack here at the fabulous Red Roof Inn. But we spare no expense in bringing you, the reader of this fine Web-based publication, the latest baseball news and notes from the desert.

But first… as promised in the phone book-sized spring training guide published on this very site several weeks back, I finally attended a spring training game at Phoenix Municipal Stadium — Anaheim’s 17-4 thrashing of the Oakland Athletics. (Not that it bothers me on any cosmic level, but in seven years of attending Cactus League games, I have never actually witnessed an A’s victory.) And so, I can finally give my assessment of what it’s like to take in a game at Papago Park.

It’s… OK. The stadium is pretty compact, giving it that small, intimate spring training feel that most old-timers say the newer stadiums lack. We sat in row 16 behind the third base dugout, and we were close enough to watch Bartolo Colon jovially jawing at Eurbiel Durazo after Ruby worked an 0-2 count into an eight-pitch walk. (Rough translation: “Hey, Ruby: know any good restaurants around here? I just can’t stop eating!”) As small as Phoenix Municipal is, the walkways are wide enough to allow you to move freely and easily. You don’t wind up ping-ponging off of other fans when you try to get from your seats to the restrooms and back again.

The seats themselves are a bit too cramped for my tastes, lacking much in the way of legroom. I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-10 or 5-11, depending on how my spine is feeling that day, and I couldn’t move my legs forward without banging into the back of the bench in front of me. My father, who stands well over six feet tall, spent most of the game with his knees tucked up into his chest.

A reader — perhaps our only reader — wrote after the initial spring training guide, asking which of the Phoenix-Scottsdale stadiums were good for bringing kids to the game. (Short answer: Peoria, which has a maximum of lawn seating and not much in the way of drunken, horny twentysomethings.) I think I’d put Phoenix on the list of family-friendly yards. There’s no lawn seating in the outfield, but there is one of those inflatable jumping rooms and a fun-zone area just in case your wee ones are not enamored with watching the A’s and Angels’ third-stringers duke it out.

The food is adequate, though hardly anything to write epic poems about. I had a polish sausage, which served its intended purpose — sating hunger — without the unwelcome side-effect of making me feel like there was a lead weight in my tummy. The first beer I ordered — a normally delicious Fat Tire ale — was served to me warm, a quite unacceptable development that I blame entirely on the callow youth manning the concession stand. My second beer, bought from an older, more experienced vendor, was, thankfully, ice cold. And yes, I ordered that second beer for research purposes only. At least, that’s what I’ll be telling my A.A. sponsor.

Perhaps some other A’s fan out there can amplify or correct the following information, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of opportunity to watch workouts at A’s camp. Unlike the complexes out in Peoria or Surprise, Papago Park only seems to feature the stadium and an adjacent practice field. Since it would be too hard to shoo fans out once the workouts end, on game days, the A’s keep that field locked up tighter than a drum. At least, it was today when my father and I stopped by to see if we could catch any workouts prior to the A’s-Diamondbacks game. And therein lies a tale.

Since we couldn’t get inside the field, my dad and I decided to take a walk around the exterior of the ballpark just to stretch our legs, enjoy the 70-degree weather and see what we could see. And we couldn’t walk 20 feet in any direction without a security guard stopping us to ask us our business. Maybe they have a problem with people trying to sneak in at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Or maybe they thought we were trying to case the joint for a planned heist. Or maybe there’s some sort of Homeland Security warning about Al Qaeda using spring training facilities as the staging ground for a planned assault on our nation’s ballteams. Nevertheless, it might have been nice to be able to walk around the outside of a baseball stadium without being regarded as a likely felon.

To their credit, most of the security guards dealt with their rather thankless task courteously and professionally. But there was this one guard who apparently viewed himself as a modern-day Dirty Harry and us as the no-good punks threatening to tear away at the fabric of society. He had that thin mustache people grow when they aspire to a career in law enforcement and mirrored sunglasses. He also weighed pretty close to three bills, raising the question as to what exactly he would do if my dad and I were actually up to no good. Chase us for 30 feet until he got winded? Sit on us until the real cops arrived?

We were strolling toward the souvenir store to see if it was open, since it is my dream to buy my wife a Scott Hatteberg jersey when Dirty Harry spied us. And we weren’t going to get to that souvenir store, no sir — not so long as he was a sworn officer of the law, or at least, a close approximation of one.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” he asked in a tone of voice that couldn’t possibly have sounded less helpful.

Not bloody likely, I thought.

“Is the souvenir stand open?” my dad asked.

“No, he replied, staring at us, until we walked away so that law and order could triumph in the bright Arizona sun.

This really isn’t a big deal in the greater scheme of things. It takes more than one security guard with an attitude problem to ruin my good time. But it does leave a bad taste in my mouth. Because, really, how much effort does it take not to be a dick to people?

After all, spring training seems like it should be the one time of year when you go out of your way to welcome people back, to make them feel like their a valued part of the game. You don’t do that by treating grown adults like they’re shiftless teenagers loitering outside a 7-11. You treat people politely. You act as accommodating as possible. You try to be helpful where you can be and apologetic if you can’t. And I think it reflects poorly on the A’s organization that they failed to impart this advice to one of their employees, even a temporary one.

More spring training notes later once I get back from the Angels-Padres game…

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