Camp Notes, March 20, 2023

I arrive and see new players!

As I touched down yesterday in Phoenix, I glanced at my watch with satisfaction, and a fleeting thought raced through my mind: “plenty of time to get through baggage and car rental and out to the fields before the games start.” If you’d had my brain under a CAT scan at the time, the neural pathways would still have been faintly glowing when the full weight of my extraordinarily jinx-provoking thought hit me. I didn’t know how or when the jinx hammer would fall, but I knew something awful was certainly on its way. So when I found, at the rental car counter, that my wallet was no longer attached to my person, I was hardly surprised. “Had it coming,” I knew.

Have no fear, my friends. The offending item was found and returned to me eventually, but rest assured, I did not, in fact, have “plenty of time.” The moral of this tale is to guard, with perpetual vigilance, against involuntary outbursts of optimism on travel days!

There R Giants, my friends! Not just baseball — subscribe for the Travel Tips! Speaking of which, today’s post is chock-full of video and a few observations from yesterday’s action at the minor league complex, which makes this a great time to take advantage of our Spring Training special and become a There R Giants’ subscriber.