Welcome to the City of Palms

After a canceled Friday night flight, a 4:30 AM wakeup call, a flight to Atlanta and a connecting flight to Fort Myers, I did successfully arrive in Florida around 10:00 AM, with plenty of time to spare before the first pitch of the Pirates/Red Sox game at City of Palms Park in Fort Myers, which also goes down in my personal history as my First Spring Training Game Ever.

With a slew of Lackey family members in attendence and my brain already a little bit fried from the long travel day, I didn’t do a whole lot of wandering around the park in the name of amateur blog photography or deep baseball analysis, but I do, of course, have a few things to share. (Note: The pictures here aren’t hi-res, as I’m working on slow hotel internet and I’m also trying to keep the page loading time down. I’ll upload the full versions to a picture sharing site in the near future.)

It’s been almost three years since I’ve been able to regularly attend Pirates games, so just seeing the guys in black and gold up close was a welcome sight, even if a bunch of minor leaguers were mixed in.

I think this may have been the first time I’ve seen Garrett Jones somewhere other than a TV screen. He’s huge. Now I understand why JR and the coaching staff were raving about his size and power last spring.

As the pre-game warmups ended, Dave Kerwin and his braintrust left the bullpen for the dugout.

He and Maholm were having a pretty good conversation, from what I could see.

Maholm threw well, too, tossing three shutout innings at the Sox, though the sharp wind blowing across the field held fly balls up in the air in left field all day for both teams.

From my spot on the right field lawn, I was within shouting distance of Brandon Moss. Moss hit a couple balls on the nose, but they stayed up in the wind and nothing came of either of them.

Jose Tabata was patrolling center field, and he really does seem to have slimmed down quite a bit since the end of last season.

With the wind, the game was more or less a pitcher’s duel. Maholm and Javier Lopez threw well and Jack Taschner got himself into and out of a big jam in the fifth, and Delwyn Young launched a long homer in the top of the sixth to give the Pirates a 1-0 lead. Then Chris Jakubauskas came in and laid an egg, giving the Sox three runs in the seventh. By that point, mass substitutions had already started.

Gorkys Hernandez covers a lot of turf in the outfield and made a really nice throw from center, though he had no chance at the runner at the plate.

Andy LaRoche really played a slick third base, and Pedro Alvarez was a late sub. He’s a big guy.

And just for the heck of it, here’s a shot of a bunch of the late-game Pirates taking the field.

I know these last couple pictures don’t look so hot so small, so I’ll do my best to get the hi-res stuff up soon. But for now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to pass out for about 16 hours. I don’t have tickets to tomorrow’s game against the Yankees, but I do have them for the other three games during the week and so we’ll be doing this again soon.