The Pre-Season runup

Well, its that time again. Heading for the ballpark on Sat. March 27th to do a little pre-season prep work. Most of the guys should be there today and we'll get a good look at the progress being made on the new facility. The last time I was there was the Monday after I returned from Florida. Progress was being made, but, to me, it looked like they had a long, long way to go. Would it be ready for opening night on April 15th. Maybe yes, maybe no. I have to admit, I had doubts. As I Pulled in I saw several of the guys there already. Doug, Alan and Knute, Tim and Ben. We all gathered in the back parking lot to catch up amid the the construction chaos. And chaos it was. There was crap everywhere and nothing looked anything like it used to. The only thing that was remotely the same was the annex behind the stadium. After a few minutes Frank arrived and the entourage was complete. We carried on for a few minutes and then headed to the field for some work. On the agenda for today: Field edging and batting cage construction. Tim assigned Knute and Alan to edging the field and Doug, Frank, and myself to the batting cage. The old batting cage had outlived its usefulness. About 5 years ago. That cage had been there since the Senators had first returned to City Island in 1987 so it had served its time well. It survived all those winters outside and lived through 3 floods.The time had come. The new cage was one of those fancy fold down models, the kind you see in big league ball parks. It showed up in about 20 packages. It did come with some assembly instructions and some pictures. Were they good assembly instructions? No. They were written in English, but they might have well been written in Swahili, because they weren't very helpful. We initially thought it might take about 4 hours to put it all together. Boy were we ever wrong. By lunch time, we didn't even have the basic frame together yet. After a short break and some food and drink, we were back at it. This time things started to come together pretty quickly. we got it all together by 3 o'clock. After that we decided to take the 50 cent tour. We traipsed around checking out the view from every level. The view from the suite level was quite impressive. Once everything is finished and cleaned up, it is going to be a very nice ballpark. Looks like we'll be back next Saturday to finish up the cage and a few other things. Until then, later.