Four weekends, five spring training visits.
This year, with a tight personal life schedule, four of the five visits were to the New York Mets facility in Port St Lucie, Florida. The New York Mets PR crew was gracious in allowing myself and some from The Real Dirty Mets Blog to have Field Passes to those games. This allowed us to get a ton of great pictures (album links will be posted later), a couple quick player interactions, and an experience that makes any baseball fan excited for the season, no matter who you root for.
We most recently saw Carlos Beltran participating in a minor league game, playing Right Field and rehabbing his knee. While watching how he has progressed, we were lucky enough to meet Michael Baron, who writes for MetsBlog and takes fantastic photos (much better than mine), as well as Howard Megdal a fantastic writer for multiple sites. Very enjoyable watching the game and talkin’ baseball with these two.
We made our way back to the main field to see the middle innings of a Mets Spring Training win versus a mainly B squad which traveled for the Braves, but saw some bright spots for the Mets with Emaus, and a cameo by Wilmer Flores late in the game. He is a big guy! (pictures in album links below)
Finally, we attended another Terry Collins post game and with some help again by Michael Baron, we got a couple more great pics and heard and twitter’d some news regarding the Mets 2B situation at the time.
Not to be missed, I also made a short trip over to Wide World of Sports on Sunday to take in some Phillies and Braves baseball. The facility is beautiful, although the traffic getting in and out was quite annoying. Besides seeing Kawakami go for the Braves, who since has been sent to the minors , we saw a fun game and even saw what looked like regular season fan interaction. Many Phillies fans were quite excited about Spring training play against a minor league pitcher, but hey.. its almost that time, so who can really blame them?
It was a great spring, each weekend filled with great baseball. I will be heading down to Miami for the opening game of the Mets and Marlins season on Friday as well, armed with my camera, and my phone for some twitter posts.
Here are all the albums from this spring:
March 6, 2011 Red Sox @ Mets
March 13,2011 Cardinals @ Mets
March 19, 2011 Nats @ Mets
March 26,2011 Braves @ Mets
March 26,2011 Phillies @ Braves
I’m also looking forward to another growing year for NLEC and all the blogs underneath it. With that said, we are still looking for new bloggers for the Marlins and Braves and additional writers for Centerfield Gate, NL East Chatter and Phillies Phandom. Please contact me at mrose@nleastchatter.com and follow @nleastchatter on twitter.
