Doolittle-A principled man.

The president invited the world champion Washington Nationals to the White House for a photo op for himself (me-me-me!) Monday--but the team's closer Sean Doolittle personally declined because he disagrees with the president's policies on immigration (aka family separation) and many other issues.  He is the conscience of the team, a highly intellectual, respected individual, a UVA grad (like me) who is active in the area of animal rights, gay rights, autism and other causes.  The soul of the team has rejected a photo op for the faux president in a principled stand in which he clearly and eloquently elaborated his rationale.

From the Washington Post's article on Doolittle's reasoned, principled decision not undertaken lightly:  "There's a lot of things, policies that I disagree with, but it has more to do with the divisive rhetoric and the enabling of conspiracy theories and widening the divide in this country.  My wife and I stand for inclusion and acceptance and we've done work with refugees, people that, you know, come from the s*hole countries," mimicking the president's comments during a meeting in 2018.  He wanted to be there with his teammates but "I feel very strongly about his issues on race relations," Doolittle said and listed as examples the Fair Housing Act, the Central Park 5 and the president's comments following the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017.  Remember, Doolittle went to UVA and took the Neo-Nazi murderous riot there in 2017 personally, as do I.  To mention also the FHA [Trump was fined for discriminating against minority renters] and the Central Park 5 [Trump wanted them executed and wouldn't apologize for his incendiary comments long after they were exonerated] shows that he utilizes the critical-thinking attributes he learned or honed at UVA.  He's no dumb, reflexive jock but a deep, reflective thinker.

Doolittle continued that his wife Eireann Dolan has two mothers who are deeply involved in the LGBTQ community.  "I want to show support for them. I think that's an important part of allyship, and I don't want to turn my back on them.  I have a brother in law who has autism, and [Trump] mocked a disabled reporter.  How would I explain that to him, that I hung out with somebody who mocked the way he talked or the way he moves his hands?  I can't get past that stuff."

Furthermore, Doolittle elaborated on the knotty problem of showing respect for the office of the presidency.   "People say you should go because it's about respecting the office of the presidency.  I think over the course of his time in the office he's done a lot of things that maybe don't respect the office.  The rhetoric, time and time again, has enabled those kinds of behaviors," referring to racism and white supremacy, "that never really went away, but it feels like now people with those beliefs maybe feel a little bit more empowered.  They feel like they have a path, maybe. I don't want to hang out with somebody who talks like that. ...   I want people to know that I put a lot of thought into this, and at the end of the day, I just can't go."  Much of the above, especially the quotes, are from the article by Jesse Dougherty.   I deeply respect Doolittle, and admire his intellectual acumen in thinking these things through, by being informed.   He stands in stark contrast to the back-up catcher Kurt Suzuki, who couldn't throw out a single baserunner all season, clownishly donning a MAGA hat at the photo-op, at which the president of course talked deploringly about impeachment.  Suzuki earned himself a chest-grabbing hug from behind by Le Grande Orange for his mindless antics, politicizing the event.  (Yuck!)

Other players did not appear at the president's photo-op, such as the National League's and World Series RBI leader Anthony Rendon.   The Doctor, as they call Doolittle, is an exemplary principled man, in his early thirties.  I could only wish that my children, about the same age, were so principled or at least close to it, but I fear they are not. 

Bring me a ball...

The reason doesn't matter, but when I went with a friend on a Sunday afternoon this month to a minor league baseball game in Maryland at a lovely baseball park in Waldorf, the Regency Furniture Stadium, I was presented with a request by my friend for us to get her an actual baseball that had been used in play.  This request was repeated several times, practically every inning as the game progressed, so I paid attention to it, for sure.

I have never in my life captured a ball in the stands that came off the field of play, and I have been attending baseball games for over sixty years at almost every major league and many minor league parks.  This was going to be challenging.

I studied the stadium with an eye towards how the ball might come off a hitter's bat and make it out of the field of play.  We were in assigned seats that weren't going to work because we were on the third base side behind the safety netting that keeps foul balls out of the stands.

We had to get beyond the netting for sure; and also most foul balls that go into the stands past the netting slice off the bat of late swinging hitters to his front side, and most hitters are right-handed so they typically send a curving foul ball into the stands on the first base side which is the side they face when they assume their batting stance.

The park looked like it could seat about 3,000 spectators, with plenty of room on a grassy stretch with park benches past the outfield walls for standing-room-only people.  There were less than 300 people present, including ball players and stadium staff, so there were tons of empty seats and no one was in the outfield area.

First we tried sitting out past the outfield walls all by ourselves in the broiling sun, hoping a home run ball would come our way.  After a few innings it seemed to me that no hitter present had the power to put a ball over the outfield wall so we drifted over to the first base side of the stands, checking out the scarcely used fenced kiddie park out there past the seats.  The children's playground had one adult attendant and only a couple of children present but was full of cool looking structures like a climbing wall, a playhouse, a row of seesaws and a carousel.

There were several young children in the stands over on the first base side, and the few times a ball landed in the stands it looked like a horde of locusts on the move as they swarmed up the aisles to the area where the ball landed and jumped over the seats in a mad dash to get to the ball first.  I took note of the narrowness of the lines of stepped concrete walkways between the rows of empty seats, watched the nimble agility of the children jumping over seats, considered my age, closer to seventy than sixty, and decided that I could not outrace that horde.

I would have to get to any foul ball in the stands first without being amongst the children, which dictated sitting in a mostly vacant spot in the largely empty stadium.  We returned to the more desolate third base side and sat further out towards the foul pole, past the netting, down near the field by the home team bullpen who all had seats along the wall in foul territory in the field of play.

The game itself was entertaining, high scoring with a sparkling defensive play or two.  At my age and with my diminished vision, it was hard to track balls, they just disappeared into the haze that was the sky.  My friend noticed, as did I, that three or four balls had gone over the grandstand behind home plate to land either on its roof or soar over it into the parking lot.

My friend came up with a strategy.  "If a ball comes over here," she said, "you block any kid running for it and I'll go get the ball."

"Oh," I said, "and then I can fight the father when he shows up in support of his child."

"Okay," my friend replied, "I'll block any kid and you go get the ball."

I could foresee an adult fight in either instance but fortunately, no ball came our way.

It was so hot that we retired from our seats without shade and sat at a table in the causeway with a view of the game.  We bought a bottle of water for $4 to cool off and slake our thirst and once we had guzzled it, I filled it up again at a water fountain, which was not refrigerated so the water was tepid.  We asked the counter person where everybody was if they weren't at this wonderful park on such a beautiful day.  "Church," was the laconic reply.  At 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon.

The last inning arrived as we sat at our table.  My head was down and I didn't see it but an opponent hit a home run out of the park.  I heard the crack of the bat and looked up but couldn't pick up the ball but I recognized the batter's slow home run trot and knew that the ball had traveled over the outfield wall somewhere.  There was no one out there.

I got up and walked down the causeway into the grassy area beyond the outfield fences.  My friend remained behind.  There was an attendant in the closed lounge out there, and another one at the pool beyond left field.  Perhaps one of them retrieved the ball before I got out there, or perhaps the ball was hidden somewhere in the grass, but I circumvented the outer area past the fences and without seeing any ball.

Now it was the bottom of the ninth and, barring a huge comeback given the 11-5 score, I had only three more outs to work with to try to secure a ball used in the field of play.  I paused on the causeway by the right field foul pole beside the kiddie park with its blue split rail fence, beyond the arc of seats by first base and beyond.  The playground was now closed.  There were several children along the first row of seats down there, perhaps two hundred feet away.  A right-hander was up.  I closely watched his at bat.

Crack!  A foul ball twisted off his bat and sliced towards the right field foul pole.  It stuck the cement walkway 40 feet behind me and bounded into the kiddie park.  I intently watched it crazily spin around in there, sluicing wildly until it finally came to rest under a kiddie structure with short legs.

I looked back towards the seats.  The horde of locusts appearing as children was boiling upwards towards me, now 150 feet away.  I didn't have time to run towards them to reach the kiddie park entranceway and then backtrack to the ball.  

I ran over to the 4-foot tall split rail fence surrounding the kiddie park and tried to slither through the split rails.  The rails were too close together for me to squeeze through, after all the purpose of the fence was to keep small children in.  I had to go over it, and quickly as the kids were nearby by now.  I threw a leg over the top rail, hefted my torso onto the rail, heard and felt an ominous crack beneath me, threw myself over it intending to land on my leading foot and gain the ground, but instead I just fell off the fence and landed flat on my back in the kiddie park.  Fortunately the ground was soft with straw and wood chips, appropriate for a children's playground, covering the surface.

Still, I lay there stunned and helpless for a second, feeling like an overturned turtle.  But I was on a mission, and its conclusion lay nearby in the form of a baseball that mere dozens of feet away.

I scrambled up and went to the structure I thought the ball was under.  Several predatory children, all seeming to be aged six to eleven years old, were in the park already, running towards me.  They all seemed to have navigated the fence much better than me.

I looked, and there was no ball!  I was at the wrong structure.  The kids swept by me fanning out throughout the kiddie park.  I went to the nearest adjacent structure and scanned under it but no ball.  I looked at the further structure, on the other side of the first structure I'd looked under, and there it was, pretty much in plain sight.  Trying to look dignified, I went over to the plaything, reached under it and snatched my treasure.

An eleven year old boy immediately appeared beside me. "Are you going to keep that ball?" he asked.

Burning with shame I said apologetically, "I'm sorry, but I have a friend who wants it so I'm going to keep it."

The boy shrugged and said, "That's cool."

Next appearing magically beside me was a six year old girl.  "Are you going to keep that ball?" she asked.

My faced flushed a deeper crimson as I said, "I'm sorry, but I have a friend who wants it so I'm going to keep it."

The little girl took it harder than the boy and gave me a look that combined incredulity and impetuosity before she skipped away without a further word.  I palmed the ball as I emerged from the kiddie park, hoping the whole stadium wasn't watching me, an adult, denying a ball souvenir to cute small kids.  I determined at that moment that the only way I could feel worse was if I had been so close to getting a ball-used-in-play, without impeding any child trying to get there first, and I hadn't gotten it.  I slunk through the back concourse behind home plate without looking anyone in the face.

My friend was on the third base concourse where I'd left her.  Since the game was over, she said forlornly that it looked like her wish for a ball wasn't going to happen after all.  She had spent the last twenty minutes out in the parking lot, watching the stadium's superstructure hoping for a ball to come over.  No luck.

I pressed the ball into her hand and said, "Here's your game ball."

She looked down, turned the ball over in her hand and exclaimed, "You bought this!"

"No, no," I said, "the stadium baseball store doesn't even sell used baseballs," and launched into a long description/explanation of how I'd acquired the ball, showing her the muddy stain on the back of my tee shirt and the small scrapes on my elbow from where I'd fallen off the fence.

I pointed out the abrasions on the ball where it had hit the concrete causeway, the brown stain where it had struck the muddy kiddie park surface after the first bounce, and another stain that might have been from the bat striking the ball.

I told her of my struggle to get into the kiddie park to get the ball, telling how I came within a hairsbreadth of crashing through the top rail of the fence, which would have provided the spectacle of an adult not only denying children a baseball but tearing down the kiddie park fence to get it.

It was incredible, to me, that I had been presented in a tongue in cheek way with this impossible task and incredibly, I had fulfilled it.  On the very last foul ball of the game.  I felt really good about it.

My friend loves the ball.  She offered to let me keep it, given how hard I'd worked for it but I said, "No, no, it's yours, believe me, if you hadn't wanted a ball so badly I would never have gotten it in the first place."  Ask, and I'll do my best.

Georgia

On the fourth day of my car trip, I left behind the kind generosity of my two long-time friends who played host to me the three previous nights and headed out towards Atlanta so I could see a ball game at the Braves' new suburban baseball park they plunked down in the far northwestern suburbs of the Atlanta metro area, far, far from downtown with no public transportation there to get there except by car driving up the beltway so they could better serve who they perceive as their clients, white suburbanites.  Good luck going forward on tat one, it was a nightmare in honking, slow traffic on Atlanta's Interstate system to get there, trying to make split level decisions as to which fork in the multilane roadways to take as Siri gave out vague directions on these similar-to-wet-spaghetti-strewn-out-on-a-table exits that came up multiple times as I tried to work my way to this new stadium that couldn't be seen from any roadway.  (The Battery outside SunTrust Park.)

I made it, however, and then faced my next new-age challenge, gaining admittance using the phantom ticket I'd bought online without its physical presence like a ticket I could have picked up at the Will Call window.  Nope, that option was "unavailable" even while it cost $5 more (the stadium does have a Will Call window) and once I purchased the ticket I was directed to Ticketmaster so I could create an account and bring up the ticket's QR image, whatever that is, on  my "handheld device" to show the ticket taker. Well, that didn't work because I got locked out of Ticketmaster when I couldn't enter my Apple ID and password (?!) and I was just SOL.  Grr.  (A statue outside the Braves' new park of the legendary Warren Spahn, a figure whose pitching heyday was in Milwaukee, bespeaking of the Braves' longstanding ties till now to three cities, Boston, Milwaukee and Atlanta.)

I got in after 30 minutes in the "Ticket Resolution" office while a 30-something bored park employee hardly listened to my I'm-an-old-guy-with-no-kids spiel while she poked my I-phone with her index finger and voila, suddenly brought up my ticket's bar code.  Inside SunTrust Park, the sight lines were good everywhere and passage around all aspects of the park was easily gained, but it's a stadium totally removed from anything Atlanta and it might as well be plunked down in Any Suburb, USA.  It's strictly a money-maker as the team obtained generous terms from Cobb County, brought their partners in to develop "The Battery" in the stadium's immediate environs with restaurants, hotels and business parks, and control the parking revenues at this drive-only park.  (My $11 dinner at the ballpark, it was quite good.)

The Braves beat the Phillies 9-2, Bryce Harper, recently of the Washington Nationals, hit a home run and after a night at a nearby Motel 6 ($66.13) and drove away the next morning to spend July 4th at the Andersonville Civil War POW camp to reflect upon true heroes of our country at the National Cemetery there rather than listen to some BS history lesson from a colossal and dangerous fool flanked by tanks on the National Mall.  I won't ever be back to see a game at the Atlanta' Braves SunTrust Park, it''s a nice park but so totally outside the fabric of venerable baseball that it's not appealing to me in the least.  (The view from SunTrust Park, of corporate America,)

Corolla

On the first full day of my summer vacation, I arose early to watch the sunrise from the Vandemere town dock.  Then my host Jimmy and I took the free ferry across the Pamlico River and drove up to Corolla on the very northern tip of the Outer Banks to visit my sister who was vacationing there with her family.

I took a dip in the ocean.  There are wicked currents at play on the beach there and the surf was up so being in the water was a bit of an adventure.

Then we visited the brick Currituck Lighthouse.  For $10, you can climb its 220 steps.

We missed the last Pamlico River ferry so we had to drive the long way around throughWashington, North Carolina (little Washington, they call it) to get back to Vandemere.  After a dinner of a fried flounder sandwich ($2.99 at a local Stop 'n Go) I retired because I had to get up early the next day to drive to Atlanta to see a Braves game at the new SunTrust baseball stadium in Atlanta's northwestern suburbs, far, far from downtown and not even remotely served by MARTA.

PeoplesBank Park

When I was in York last week, I took in a game at the PeoplesBank Park to see the York Revolution, an unaffiliated minor league baseball team take on the Sugar Land Skeeters.  The park was built in 2009 or thereabouts and is nestled in right between the river running through downtown and the railroad station.

I eschewed the "cheapest seat in the park," a so-called $10 "lawn seating" ticket out in the grass beyond the left field fence, for a $15 seat by third base under the shadow of the luxury boxes upstairs.  Combined with $3 for parking and a $2.50 hotdog (I brought my own water bottle in), it was a cheap outing to the ballpark.

After checking out my seat, I meandered around the park all game long and sat wherever I wanted.  It's a nice expansive ballpark, very underutilized as several food courts were shuttered, but it has a kids playground out by left field with a merry-go-round and its food offering are many and varied, from $11 hoagies to $5 jumbo dogs with funnel cakes, Italian ices, pizza, White Castle hamburgers and boardwalk fries in between.

The game was interesting, as minor league ballgames often are, with a 400 foot single smacked off the top of the tall wall in left field that caromed right back to the left fielder, many pitching changes, flamethrowers serving up 88 mph fastballs and best of all, the Revolution's costumed colonial mascot firing off a loud cannon in centerfield when a Rev player hit a homer run.  The decibel level inside the park, with its excellent speakers mounted everywhere, came to be annoying by the end of the game, with non-stop PA chatter, advertising ditties and between-innings breathlessly reported upon challenges on-field amongst randomly-selected spectators,  and I discovered that it was literally impossible to engage in a cell-phone conversation from anywhere inside the park.

The Kansas City Royals

I thought it was unfair that the KC Royals, after surviving a 1-game wildcard playoff game in extra innings, got to play only a five game series next with the team with the best record in the majors, the Angels, whom they swept 3-0.  A hot team on a roll ousted the best team coming out of a 162-game grind in a short series where anything can happen.  (KC is where "Bird Lives.")

But maybe not so unfair as it seemed.  The Royals then went on to sweep the Orioles, who won the AL East and hit the most home runs in baseball, in a 7-game series.  They swept them 4-0.  (Great black baseball teams were in KC before integration in the big leagues, and there is a Negro Leagues Museum there now.)

Break up the Royals!  8-0 in the playoffs, already in the World Series, waiting for the survivor of the Giants-Cardinals series.  (KC barbecue is unparalleled.)

I saw a game at Kauffman Stadium in 2010.  They have a great view of I-70 traffic endlessly rolling by, the vehicles' presence just beyond the outfield fences made known by reverberating backfires, the chatter of compression releases going off, and the general whine of high speed ceaseless traffic.  (If you like to watch trucks as a major league baseball game unfolds, KC is for you.)

Minor League Baseball in West Virginia

After my second day of rafting on the New River last summer, I drove to Princeton in West Virginia to catch a doubleheader where the Princeton Rays were hosting the Bluefield Bluejays in the Rookie Short Season league, an entry-level class of minor league baseball that is one step below Class A.  The stadium, as it were, was hard to find as there were no signs anywhere indicating where it was.

The ballpark was hard to see until you were right on it because it was basically a chain link fence enclosing a field with a few bench seats in the traditional horseshoe pattern enclosing the backstop from third base to first base with a low concrete causeway behind that. The two teams split the games, I don't remember much of the game beyond that, although I recall that sundown as seen from the stadium was nice.

I did have my picture taken with Roscoe the Rays' Rooster and that was fun.  The only other thing I remember is a motorcycle endlessly and noisily circled the stadium on the street outside all game long during the second game and that grew to be annoying.

After the games I drove down to Wytheville, Virginia to spend the night in a motel there.  The next day I arose to a misty mountain viewing splendor right outside my front door.

Best Trip Ever

I went to Miami in the spring and it was the worst trip ever because of the traffic, the tolls, the lodging, the parking and the new ballpark's location.  It was also the best trip ever.  (Below:  Fireworks explode over the Marlins Stadium on my second night.  The Marlins beat the Mets!)

When I couldn't check into my hotel upon my early afternoon arrival downtown from the airport, because the hotel didn't have parking, valet service or even a traffic circle in front and I didn't want to pay the $6 minimum street meter amount (for two hours parking, there's no such thing as a 15 minute errand in downtown Miami), I needed something to do for a few hours before I went to the Florida Marlins new baseball park to see the game that evening.  That was the purpose of my trip, to see a major league baseball game at my 44th different stadium, leaving only one extant stadium to go (new Yankees Stadium).  (Below:  Inside the gaudy new Marlins stadium.  The splashy colors inside belie the desolation of the neighborhoods outside.)

I headed for The River Bar & Seafood Restaurant and enjoyed happy hour there.  For a $19 tab I had several draft beers, three oysters on the half shell served with condiments on a bed of ice, crackers, interesting conversations and was offered several different opinions on the best way to drive to the ballpark from there.  Check out the picture of me enjoying myself, below.

Going to the ballpark, I found free parking by driving a couple of blocks into the surrounding neighborhood four blocks east of the stadium.  Despite the mean look of the streets I walked down to get to the park, free is good and my car was undisturbed when I got back to it around 11 pm.  (Below:  The fare outside the ball park was just as tasty as the fare inside, and a lot cheaper too.  The first night I bought a Cuban Sandwich and a beer for $16 inside; the second night I bought a jumbo loaded hot dog and a soda for $4 outside.)

Inside the ballpark I tried indigenous fare by ordering a Cuban Sandwhich for $7.  Although it wasn't exactly authentic in that it didn't have toasted bread for its outside, it took awhile to prepare (which was a good thing), its various cold cuts inside it were plentiful and tasty and I enjoyed it.  The accompanying $9 Heineken draft in a plastic cup not so much, or at all, asw it was flat warm and not filled to the top.  (Below:  Remember the Charlie Brown refrain that there's nothing better than a hot dog with a baseball game behind it?  There's nothing better than a Cuban Sandwhich with a Marlins game behind it, not even the tepid flat beer in a plastic cup for $9 could spoil that.)

I drove to Key West the next day to fulfill a longstanding goal of going to the southern most tip of the continental U.S.  The long drive down the Keys was fun (I sailed around the Keys for a week in 2009), I enjoyed walking around Key West, and I saw a double rainbow going into the sea on the way back.  (Below:  Every bit of the U.S. is in front of me in this picture.)

And I had a wonderful adventure my second night at the ballpark.  First I purchased my dinner from a vendor outside after the game and I got a fat and delicious kosher half-smoke for $3 which I ate while enjoying the postgame fireworks show.  Then I stopped in a Spanish bar and pool hall for a beer four blocks from the stadium as I walked bacfk to get my car which was two blocks further.  The bar maids were beautiful, no one spoke English, none of the tough looking young men playing pool looked at me even once and I well imagined that I was the first baseball patron they had seen in there since the stadium opened a year earlier.  But I eventually made the bar maid understand that I wanted a Corona ("Una servica, por favor."  "Que?"  "Como se dice Corona in Espanol?"  "Que?").  She finally brought me a cold Corona in a bottle for $3 and I enjoyed sucking it down while I took in the ambience of the Spanish pool hall.  When I was done I figured it was time to go and I left, but happily.  No one followed me as I returned to my car and I drove to the hotel one last time, happy about my excellent trip to Miami.  (Below:  I flew home the next morning and the plane went right over my running venues along the Potomac River as we landed.  That's Rosslyn in Arlington on the right.)

The worst trip ever.

A month ago I traveled to Miami for pleasure and it was the worst trip ever.  The parking, the traffic, the tolls, the Internet hotel and the location of the new ballpark all combined to generate a rancid aftertaste.  (Below:  The purpose of my trip was to attend a major league baseball game at the new Marlins Stadium, built upon the site of the razed Orange Bowl in the heart of Little Havana.)

Parking:  The downtown hotel I stayed at had no parking and the staff referred me to metered street parking.  The parking hours were in effect from 7 am to 2 am.  Really.  There was a three hour limit to the meters with a two hour minimum at three dollars an hour.  Really.  It was kiosk parking, I put funds into a central dispenser and it issued me a ticket with an expiration time for me to place on my dash.  I couldn't check into the hotel initially because I am too cheap to pay $6 parking to check in (two hour minimum).  When I returned to the hotel that night at 11:30 pm I improperly calculated the last 30 minutes of parking, from 1:30 to 2 am, and my ticket came out expiring at 1:47 am.  This left me with 13 minutes of expired parking shortly before 2 am, risking a ticket.  At that point, since I wasn't able to just add another quarter, I could start all over and pay the same $7 I'd just paid and add an additional four bits to get a new ticket that expired, hopefully shortly after 2 am.  Or I could return at 12 midnight and pay $6 (the two hour minimum) and get a new display tab that would expire at 2 am.  These  meterss are everywhere downtown Miami, and Miami can go to hell.  (Below:  There's no traffic circle where you can pull in to check in at the hotel I stayed at in Miami.)

The traffic:  When I returned to my hotel at 11:47 pm. a Miami Heat basketball playoff game had just let out at the nearby arena.  My public parking was in a long narrow lot between the northbound and southbound lanes of Route 1, a half block from my hotel. I chose that lot rather than parking on the streets amidst rows and rows of homeless people stretching out on the sidewalks watching your every move as you lugged your suitcase out of the trunk.  The trouble was, to accelerate the egress of the basketball patrons, they had turned off the cross signals on Route 1 so the signal lights flashed yellow for northbound and southbound cars and red for eastbound and westbound traffic.  Like me.  After watching southbound traffic zoom by uninterruptedly for ten minutes as the nearby Heat parking garage emptied out postgame, I took my life in my hands and ran, luggage and all, across the busy four lanes to the other side of the roadway.  It was harrowing.  Really.  Go to hell, Miami.  (Below:  Thus is the street I had to run across to get to my hotel, the small stone building behind the gleaming metal building.  Notice how the elevated tracks go right by the fourth story windows of it?  My room was on the fourth floor.)

The tolls:  This is a tale about a cashless society.  At the rental car counter they started in.  For $8 a day I could rent a transponder that would enable me to travel "free" on the toll roads in south Florida.  This included the road from the airport to downtown.  Otherwise, the roads didn't take cash or credit cards and if I didn't have the unique "Sunshine Pass" (EZ Pass doesn't work in Florida), the system would snap a picture of my license plate and later mail me a bill for the toll plus a $35 administrative fee for each trip.  My choices were to be extorted $8 a day by the rental car companies, buy a Sunshine Pass for two days, be extorted by the state for scores of dollars if I ventured on the throughways or be consigned to secondary roads where I would probably be lost in horrible traffic on roads that had non-synchronized signal lights at every intersection.  Which is exactly what happened to me the second day when it took me an hour to travel twenty miles on Route 1 south of Miami while a twenty minute ride beckoned me from the nearby elevated I-95.  I couldn't believe a tourism state had adopted this money-grubbing set-up.  (Below:  I had visions of a carefree two days in southern Florida when I arranged for the trip before I discovered that the traffic, parking, Internet hotel, tolls and location of the new baseball park would all become an incredible hassle.)

The Internet hotel:  Don't stay here.  It wasn't an adventure.  It was a hovel, in my opinion.  I purchased a two night stay in this downtown "quality"hotel on an Internet site that gave me a good price, $75 a night non-refundable, but told me nothing about the hotel beforehand, not even the name.  I had to trust them and make the purchase to get the "deal."  After making the purchase and being given the details, I found out the hotel didn't have parking.  Park on the street they said when I called to inquire.  (See above, Parking.)  This turned out to be a real problem (the parking meters were in effect from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m.).  The streets around the hotel were filled with homeless people.  I was on the fourth floor and the hotel was serviced by a single manned elevator that was antidiluvian.  It was more of a bother to locate the operator, who was usually outside smoking, than to take the stairs.  The service was slow.  It took me a half-hour to check in at 11:30 at night, even with a guaranteed reservation.  The hotel was noisy and the rooms were spartan.  The window coverings were vertically hanging thin plastic strips that didn't quite extend across the entire window.  Some part of the window was always uncovered.  Running by just outside my window, twenty feet away, were the elevated rails for the people-mover two car train that Miami uses for its downtown toy transportation loop (it's free).  When I rode that train the next morning after I fed my parking meter at 7 a.m., the train went by my room and I could look right in.  (Below:  Chilling away from my hotel at the Seven-Mile Bridge on the Keys.)

The new ballpark:  Meet the new ballpark.  Same as the old ballpark.  The Orange Bowl was a venerable football stadium in Miami that was in a bad part of town.  It was razed in 2008, and the Marlins new retractable-roof stadium was built on its site and opened last year, for a cost of $634 million, of which 80% was public money.  It's in the heart of residential Little Havana, which is not your typical baseball venue.  I'm pretty sure the scanty baseball crowds drive in, park on site, and drive away after the game.  I studied the maps before I went and was determined to find free (non-restricted residential) parking within walking distance, which could be anywhere within two miles.  Turns out that that type of parking starts within four blocks of the stadium, but it's not a situation where you want to leave your car in, or return alone after dark to it.  Both nights I attended a game at the new stadium I parked four to six blocks east, wherever I could find a spot on the curb amidst the low apartment buildings or bungalow houses lining the streets where people weren't hanging out on the sidewalk or watching the street below from their balconies or porches.  I was an obvious interloper, a freeloading baseball fan come into their neighborhood to park in front of their house, wearing blue jeans and a shirt whereas practically everyone else was wearing low-hanging jeans or shorts exposing plenty of their undershorts and t-shirts, mostly of the tank-top style.  The walk back to the car at 11:30 pm was much more exciting than the six block walk down litter-strewn streets and past abandoned buildings with broken windows five hours earlier in the daylight.  I wanted to get a feel for the neighborhoods surrounding the park and boy, did I.  I did not belong there and I was very wary of quickly getting in a situation way out of my control.  (Below:  The view of downtown Miami from the new Marlins baseball stadium, built on the footprint of the old Orange Bowl.  There are some mean streets between here and there.)