Disappointing trip to Daytona

We got to town about 4:30, parked the car, right next to the stadium, for free, right next to center field. Walked across the river to find a place to eat, and found Stravos, which was a NYC style pizza place. Good food. I had a stromboli, the boys pizza, and Bette had a kids spaghetti.

Walked back over to the stadium, and sat in our seats, section 10, 2nd row. Found that they have a big thick chain link fence that almost obstructed our view of the game, and prevented any real contact with the players, and cut out chances for getting balls hit/thrown to you. In addition, we were sitting right next to the Daytona player's dressing room, and lots of little kids and a few grown ups kept coming over pestering the players to sign things or asking for balls, and generally being a nusiance.

Biggest complaint of the night was that Cooper signed up for a chance to go on the field to run the bases with the mascot, and got screwed out of his chance, due to the major incompetency of the team's fan services people. There was confusion from the start on when and how he was supposed to go to the field, and they wound up doing the schtick with some other kid in the 5th inning, not the sixth as we had been told.

I fired off an email to the general manager at 1130 pm when I got home, and to his credit, answered it at 0230 this morning. His answer was ok, and he offered us free seats and a game ball on a future visit- Not sure when we'll be back down to Daytona to accept his offer, but I feel better that I pointed out a failure of his area of supervision, and it seems as he will look into it.

The boys got two balls, one from a young gal who sat in front of us and had two thrown to her, so she nicely gave one to Cooper, and then Brandon found one out in the parking lot that had obviously been dropped by someone, sadly.

I did get a Daytona Cubs ball, but they didn't have any pins.

The team was beaten 7-0. The quality of playing was not very good at all. Daytona has now not scored a run in its first 27 innings of baseball this year. They made several base running errors, and they made several throwing errors.

Looks like it might be a long season for them.

Tampa Bay spanked the Yankees last night- They are now 3-1! They put 32,000 in Tropicana last night.