Day 7: The Final Day

Last day here in Florida. It was another good day, but a sad day too. We don't want to go home. We hear it is snowing there. It was like 85 here today. We started off the day at practice as usual. Not a whole lot going on there. We almost got Joel Pineiro's autograph which would have given us the entire staring rotation. However we missed him by a couple people. Albert was a nice surprise. He was supposed to stay over in Ft Myers for the weekend but opted to come home for practice instead. We watched him a bit but then headed up to get in line for our berm seats. Of course later we found out that he stayed and signed for people when he was done. Not sure for how long but there were quite a few people there so I am sure we would not have gotten it even if we had stayed.

We got a prime spot right in the front of the berm in the middle. And it worked out even better for us when they put the water cooler right in front of us. Anyone who wanted water had to stand right in front of us. More on that in a minute. So much fun stuff happened while we were on the berm today. There was a little girl, about 4 years old, that pretty much had the entire bullpen wrapped around her little finger. She was super chatty and not at all shy. Everytime a new player would come out before the game she would go running over asking them to sign her ball. As the game went on she became more brave, just going up and starting random conversations with them. She was talking to Frankie about her gum. She was crying for some reason at one point and Brad Thompson and Jason Motte were very concerned, asking her if she was ok (no) and what was wrong. The best however was the LONG conversation she had with Jason Motte. He is very animated so she was really enjoying talking to him. Somehow they were talking about her cat, Felix. Jason was talking about his cat. She asked if his cat uses the bathroom outside. He told her no, it uses the litter box. Her response..."I want to used he litter box!" He was like "Well, if you were a cat then yes, you could use the litter box. But you are a person and people should really use the bathroom." Before she left Jason told her to tell Felix the cat hi for him. It was cute.

Other random stories from the day:
-While Kyle was signing my ball I asked him if the cooler scooter would be back this year. He kinda laughed and said no, it was being retired. I of course told him that made us sad as we all love the cooler scooter.
-We have a new member of the staring brigade. Jaime Garcia is now in on it. April noticed it the other day, but I just noticed today because it was really obvious. He was sitting like 5 feet from us so it was quite obvious when he was looking right at us. It was even worse when he was going to get water and standing right in front of us. We couldn't even look up at those points.
-Brad Thompson was going to pass a ball around the bullpen to sign for Sid the usher. His pen wasn't working so he turned back to us and asked "Can I borrow one of your pens we just used? I promise I will give it back." He had just signed for us a few minutes before and knew we had pens. April had hers handy so she tossed it to him. So April saved the day.
-The guys were giving Chris Perez a hard time because he tossed a foul ball into the stands and hit a little kid. It didn't hit him very hard and it just got his shoulder a bit. Not enough to hurt him, just enough to scare him and get his eyes to well up a bit on the verge of tear. Thompson and Motte were like "Way to go Chris! You made him cry! He didn't even want the ball and you hit him in the face! Look! Now he's bleeding!" etc. It was amusing.
-Joe is totally perfect for me. Why you ask? Because he seems to be a total klutz like me. Or at least he has been this week. Earlier this week he had the run in with the umbrella. Today he completely fell out of the dugout on his way up the stairs and nearly ate field. He caught himself with his arm on the way up after stumbling a bit.

Finally, our last Frankie run ins of the week. He didn't notice us there at first as he was late getting out on the field (shocking). Soon after the game started Marty Mason came over to get some water. He got back to his seat, sat down, said something to Frankie and next thing Frankie is hopping up with a sudden need for water. He stood in front of the cooler for several minutes dawdling. We were just waiting for him to say something. Finally he waved. We said hi and told him we fly home tomorrow. He gave us another pouty face. Then he said, "Well we are only here for another week, then we are back in STL." April said "Yeah, but that's another week that I could be here watching baseball instead of being at work." Frankie said "who needs work?" Later he came back for more water and while standing there he started pulling out random bags of sunflower seeds from their seed stash (they seriously have like 6 different kinds of seeds) and offereing them to us. We were like "No thank you, that's ok, we're good." Then he offered gum. We were like "Now that we will take you up on." He started to thrown it to us but then was like "Wait a minute..." and started digging through their stash and pulled out another kind of gum and was like "This is sugar free. It's better for you." He threw each of us a piece first. Then he grabbed a handful and threw it on our towel we were sitting on. We shared with a couple people beside us we had made friends with, some of the kids around us grabbed some (including the cute little girl....it was the gum she was discussing with Frankie as mentioned earlier), and I believe April still has some in her purse. The guy beside us was like "I think you 2 have a fan." We had to tell him the story.

Sadly the game was coming to a close and just as last year Frankie was the last pitcher we saw, closing out our vacation. Unfortunately we lost, but what are you gonna do. The first pitch he threw ended up being a home run, which was not good. We decided that he was just upset that we were leaving and he wasn't focused enough yet ;)

The last few hours have not gone so great. April's phone crapped out. We had to find an AT&T dealer and found out that it is her phone and she was like 3 weeks past her warranty so she has to pay for a new phone (or at least the part insurance doesn't cover) and won't get her new one for a couple days. So that was not good. However on the way there we did drive through an interesting site. For like a full mile down one road we were on we saw more "pimped rides" than I have ever seen in my entire life. The Spring Bling party with Flo Rida and Busta Rhymes was flowing out onto the streets. Spinner, big rims, cars jacked up so high people could almost walk under them, crazy paint jobs.....there was all kinds of stuff. My favorite was the car painted with the Smurfs. There were actual pictures of different Smurfs and Gargumel. I'm not sure exactly how that is supposed to look tough and cool, but I enjoyed it. Here is the pic I took of it with my phone...



We have to be up crazy early in the morning to catch our flight home. Hopefully all goes well and I will see you all soon.