More than just baseball

February 19, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

My spring training trip down to the Phoenix area last year wasn’t just about baseball. Ok… so it was pretty much all about baseball. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t find some other fun things to get up to over a week of dashing between ballparks in Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale and downtown Phoenix.

Immediately after arriving in the city and with a few hours to spare before I could check into the apartment I rented for the week, I popped into Walter Station Brewery and lucky for me there was some live music on their patio. After arriving from cold Saskatoon it was a treat to feel a warm breeze while listening to some country music.

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An early start to baseball season

February 4, 2024 / Greg / 2 Comments

As I get itchy for the start of the 2024 baseball season, I have been thinking back to the jump I got on this past 2023 baseball season by finally taking a long-desired trip to Arizona for a week of spring training baseball. As a lifelong baseball nerd (with a significant pause to recover from the loss of my Montreal Expos in the early 2000s) I had long thought about spending a week of lazy days under the spring sun in Florida or Arizona, going from park to park to get a close up view of the game I love. With my move to Saskatchewan eight years ago, Arizona became a more obvious choice for this trip and last year at long last I made it a reality.

Cubs-Brewers game at Sloan Park in Mesa, AZ

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Back from Arizona… finally

March 25, 2023March 24, 2023 / Greg / Leave a comment

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, there was no way I wasn’t going to be head over heels for finally making it to Spring Training in Arizona. Thanks to the pandemic, my baseball nerd dreams of lounging in the Arizona sun watching baseball got shelved in 2020 and it took until last week to finally make that trip. It was a trip that, truthfully, I’ve wanted to take for a much longer time.

The hook for the trip was spring training baseball – small stadiums, lazy afternoons and getting a close up view of the game I love so much. This year, as scheduling luck would have it, the World Baseball Classic was happening with a round of games in downtown Phoenix at the Diamondbacks stadium. I got the schedules for all of those games, a map, and got to work planning out the kind of visit my baseball loving heart has always dreamed of.

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Patio beers in November

July 19, 2020July 19, 2020 / Greg / 2 Comments

I was sitting on the tarmac in Saskatoon shortly after boarding when I started to hear a constant patter of freezing rain striking the body of my plane. Looking out the window into the dark of a November morning, hoping that we’d get loaded and de-iced before the weather got too bad to take off, my mind drifted to where I’d be landing later that day and my plans for my first night in Phoenix. As the freezing rain intensified, all I could think about was escaping winter and having a beer on a patio.

Leaving behind a few days of -15C weather and then a just in time escape from a freezing rain storm, I landed in Phoenix in 30C weather. It took remarkably little time for me to drop my bags at my hotel, change into shorts, and make my way to the Arizona Wilderness outdoor beer garden just on the north edge of downtown.