It is always great fun coming to Nationals Spring Training. For those of you who have never done so, I would recommend it (either for the Nationals if that is your favorite baseball team, or for whichever team is).
The weather is pretty nice, especially the further north you live, the pace is informal, the fields much smaller and intimate and the opportunity to run into players either at the game or in restaurants or similar locations much higher.
We flew down Wednesday morning. I actually had some business to transact for our first stop.
University of Central Florida/AMARC. One of the key academic partners for the Advanced Mobility Academic Management Center (AMARC), the non-profit I have helped stand-up, is the University of Central Florida (UCF), located about 20 minutes from the Orlando Airport. UCF has become the second largest University in the US, with over 65,000 students.
We are most closely tied to the Institute for Simulation & Training which is one of the research institutes associated with UCF. The Institute is a leader in mobility application development and as its name implies is performing interesting work in a variety of simulation and modeling areas of study including virtual world’s utilization and robotics.
Nationals. From there it was over to Viera and one of the Nationals split squad games, this one against the Mets, they won that one 8-5 as well as winning the other one against the Astros.
Yesterday they played the Astro’s in Viera winning that one 6-3. I do not plan to discuss the games much since there is much written elsewhere already.
The few observations I have is to reconfirm how deep the Nationals are. We saw pitchers and batters who looked pretty good, understanding that Spring Training is not always the place to gauge such things, who have no chance to be on the roster opening day. Bryce Harper evidently does not actually believe in Spring Training, beating out a routine grounder to thirdbase for an infield hit.
With the fans so close to the field they get to yell at (and talk to) the players, who often, though not always respond. Some of it can be pretty funny. There is a group that does a Lom – bar – doz – i cheer every time Steve Lombardozzi comes up. There is a somewhat older group of women and a few men who sit right behind home plate, drink a lot of beer, and get louder and louder commenting on the players as the game goes on.
Ellen, who did none of those things, was able to talk to Bo Porter through the netting during the Astro’s batting practice and thank him for his time in Washington. Porter is a very gracious guy and though he probably had no idea who we were, stopped and talked with us and shook both