Category: Yankee Camp (Page 6 of 9)

Opening day last Saturday, June 2, was exciting. The crowds of people I was expecting to show up didn’t materialize, only about 150 or so. However, there were still quite a few dignitaries and fans on hand, as well as a navy band to play the Dominican Republic national anthem and the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Here’s a shot of the team paying their respect to the Dominican National Anthem.

A few of the VIPs made speeches and the Championship Trophy for the 2006 Dominican Summer League was presented to the management and players from that season. Miss Dominican Republic was also in attendance, and the players enjoyed getting their photos taken with her. It turns out, unbelievably, that she is the sister of one of the players here!

Roy Gomez poses with Miss Dominican Republic.

The Yanks accept the Championship Cup.

To top it off, the Yanks squad downed the visiting Cubs 7-3. They are now standing at 5-2 (or 4-2–eesh, can’t remember) and are in first place in the 2007 DSL. Unfortunately, so far, the Bombers team is at 2-4. On Monday, the players from last year’s winning team received their championship rings. Had a nice, big cake, too. Yummmmmm.

The Big Team is starting to show their stuff, going 9-2 in their last eleven games. They still have a ways to go to make a race of it for the pennant with the resurgent (from last year) Red Sox, but hope springs eternal . . .

[EDITED on 6/12–Skip this part unless you’ve already read it. I’m not really happy about what I did, and it was written in the heat of the moment, too.] I went on an email rant last night about forwarded messages sent to me by various relatives and friends, mindlessly sent, I might add, the rather condescending thinking being that I REALLY REALLY need to read this. You know the kind–pass this important patriotic message along to everyone you know if you want to save America–if you don’t, you’re an unpatriotic scum bag, or the heart-tugging story of the poor little boy whose father lost his life defending American freedom in Iraq, fighting to keep the “American way of life” alive, but who still courageously flies the American flag outside his home everyday to remind Americans of the sacrifice of ………., etc., blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum. These and more, all unverified and unsourced because all of them are untrue, with no actual basis in reality, clogging up the broadband with their breathless missives, started by some lonely person in some forgotten hamlet at some ungodly hour of a desperate night. I finally had enough of these robotic mass emails and posted my diatribe to all of the recipients of this persons mailing list. Turnabout is fair play. (But it was the wrong thing to do.) It was fun to let off steam about this, especially being the normally humble milquetoast that I am. 🙄 So far, I’ve received some supportive emails and some decidedly, well, thoughtless scathing ones. Just what I expected from the ones who are less than thoughtful about the subject, to put it politely. (Actually, I should have expected scathing replies from these people because they were coming to the defense of their relative.)

I threatened to block anyone’s email who continued to send me this unsolicited junk, but I’ll probably, instead, refute their idiocy them (they’re not really idiots–perhaps a bit lazy for forwarding this stuff rather than expressing their own thoughts) by asking for sources or pointing out urban (internet) myths and falsehoods. That should be fun, too, since most of this stuff is right-wing, pseudo-patriotic, false-Christian misinformation and propaganda that is easily put down. We’re poles apart.

Four weeks and counting until I return to Montana for a short visit and then it’s off to Thailand, Laos and Singapore for two months. (Good golly, Ron, you might be thinking. Laos is a Red Commie country, and you’d rather be THERE than in the Good Ole US of A? Yup. And you really haven’t a clue if that’s what you’re thinking and what you believe about the gentle country and people of Laos, though I am immensely distraught about the Lao government’s treatment of its Hmong people.) Can I wait? Hardly. More later.

I forgot to mention in the previous post that a few Sundays ago I woke up at 8 a.m., checked my email, called Nai and then looked out my bathroom window about 9 o’clock to see if the taxi was there. Felix is the unofficial Yankee taxi driver and I wanted to go into Boca Chica for a hearty western style breakfast, something I usually do on Sundays. He wasn’t there, but three vehicles pulled into camp, waved through by the security guards. Unusual, I thought, because Sunday mornings are very quiet here. I wonder what’s going on. So, for the first time that day, I poked my head out the front door and was fairly stunned to see 30 or 40 people congregating near one of the far fields, unprecedented activity for a Sunday morning.

I wandered down to the field and talked to some of the Yankee coaches who were there. It seems that a very hot prospect from Panama, flown in from that country just for this occasion, I presume, was showing his skills to the many scouts from the various major league clubs in attendance. The kid must have something to attract this many scouts, I thought. Indeed, he did. He was a lanky 16-year-old pitcher with a natural, fluid motion and a 92 mph fast ball, pretty impressive speed for his age. I watched him throw for a while, then grabbed a taxi for Boca Chica. From what I saw, he is, indeed, a hot prospect.

Don’t turn that dial. If you have the Direct TV satellite system, you might be able to view yours truly in about a month on channel 366, the Current Network. Their reporter and a cameraman were here recently filming a report on baseball in the Dominican Republic. I was interviewed about the English program and they filmed a large portion of one of my classes that afternoon. I’ll post more about this as soon as I hear (or see) when it’s going to be aired.

Finally, Canada. One of the nicest, most polite countries in the world. Can we talk about a country being polite, nice and agreeable. I think so. It’s Canada, The Great White North. Well, their national junior team (18 and under) is touring the D.R. and one of the Yankee squads played them last week. I talked a bit with their coach as they were arriving at the camp. A nice guy, but all the time I was thinking about how humiliated they were going to be after the upcoming slaughter. There was a slaughter all right, but they weren’t on the receiving end. They mopped the floor with the Yankee team, beating us 10-3 or some such nonsense (EDIT: looking at their website above, it was actually 11-4.) At the same time, the Arizona Diamondbacks team played the other Yankee squad on one of the other fields. We lost that one, too, 6-0 or so. Not a memorable doubleheader. O’, Baseball. More later.

A view of the Canadian Junior National Team before the game.

Canadian players gathered around the cage during batting practice

A confident Yankee squad . . . before the game

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