Back in 2004, a leaner Delino journeyed with Steve Sax on a baseball road trip that spanned from Philadelphia to Chicago, leaving a wake of booze, beef, and broads (I think one girl talked to us). This time around, we smartly avoided lesser parks like Wrigley and PNC to witness the league's hottest clubs - The Nationals! The Pirates! The Devil Rays! The Marlins! Describing the trip was often greeted with mocking - "You're purposely going to Tropicana Field?" "Do you even know what the F%&^ baseball is?" But as Edward Albee once said "Sometimes you go a long distance out of the way to come back a short distance correctly." In other words, after seeing the desolate Marlin land, Dodgers Stadium feels like Mecca! The chaos began on our red eye flight to FLL, as I was stuck on a window seat next to the two biggest drunks this side of David Hasselhoff. 
Apparently, AirTran only cuts you off after you pick fights with an entire row. One of the borrachos next to me wore a gold Z around his neck and mentioned a dozen times that he had a limo waiting. His more portly friend struggled mightily with even the simplest task - plugging in headphones, asking for a soda two seconds after the plane took off, and repeatedly hitting the woman in front of him in the head. It all added up to the funniest flight I've ever seen, and NO SLEEP.
After finally passing out, I went down to the other ocean for my favorite tropical pastime - massive sunburns. A week later, I still look like a pink zebra.
I'm all about finding bargains at games, 
and consider my self a friend of the scalper (which doesn't exist for the Marlins). Dolphin Stadium reminded me of the sets in Baseketball... except those stadiums were filled. It's a shame that the Miami/Ft Lauderdale crowd chose the JLo/Crocketts/Tubbs/Grand Theft Auto nightlife over their own World Champion Marlins. The game turned out to be one of those little league battles where everyone and their mother got a hit. Dontrelle "Beetlejuice" Willis could have pitched underhanded with more success. One of the few real Marlin fans sat next to us, lamenting how hard it is to be the only person in the city who knows they have a team. 
I had a Gyro, which seemed like a smart move to make in a Florida ballpark. The Marlins began to rally, but two runs by the Nationals in the seventh marked our early exit for South Beach nightlife (featuring a bar where the staff caused THREE major spills and breaks in twenty minutes). And the rest of our Miami night will have to remain a secret, until SoSG gets new sponsors.
1 comments:
Good stuff!
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