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Thursday March 11, 2010 It is raining in Viera, Florida. It was cloudy and drizzly at 8:30 this morning when I got to the ballpark and the weather has gone downhill since. At about 11 o'clock, the Weatherbug App on my Blackberry started blinking red. I asked, rhetorically in the press box what that meant. "Blinking red? That's bad. Very bad" came the informed answer from a local writer.
I clicked on the icon which connected me to the weather bureau alert site. A tornado watch is what the alert is for. A TORNADO watch! Here's what it said:
I Am Not Certain Why The Weather Service Software Capitalizes Every Word but, it's close enough, as the saying goes, for gummint work.
I am on the line between Melbourne and Viera so I think this puts me in, or thirty miles to either side of, the line of fire if a tornado actually forms.
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There is a rule in the press box that you are not supposed to root for one team or another. That includes cheering for your guys, yelling at the umpires for a call that goes for the other guys, or wearing any article of clothing which would indicate a preference.
I'm not sure when this tradition began, or what would happen if someone came in wearing a bright red NATIONAL'S jersey, but it is easier to go along with the prevailing customs.
I tell you all that because the hat I threw into my bag is a Nats cap with DC on the front which, I have not been able to wear here in the press box. This only matters because the glare off the field (when the sun is shining) makes it difficult to see my computer screen so having a billed cap would be of some use.
To solve the problem, I went to the radio booth and begged for a strip of gaffer's tape which the engineer gave me. I blacked out the DC logo and, thus, had an press-box-acceptable cap.
The Barry Signs, Inc scoreboard clock has just clicked over to 12:00. We are discussing the number of rain delays the Nationals had to sit through last season. One of the Nats comms guys calculated that there were 33 hours of rain delays last year. I don't think that even included spring training.
Major League ballparks are engineered to drain quickly. At Nationals Park the area in short right field is the main drainage area. We have seen six inches of water drain off the outfield like it is going down a Charybdis-induced whirlpool …
Dear Mr. Mullings:
Signed,
I did not know it. I was looking for a good simile for the way the water drains in the outfield at Nats Park and came across Charybdis. Now I understand the origin of the phrase to be "between Scylla and Charybdis." See what you can learn during a rain delay?
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The scoreboard guy is playing "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head" over the stadium loudspeakers causing a, how to put this … harsh … reaction from the press corps. Someone suggested we go over and kill him, but someone else pointed out - properly - that if he died everyone would have to change their lede from: "Thursday's game against the Astros was rained out …" to "An angry mob of sportswriters attacked and killed the scoreboard operator …"
So his life was spared, but only just.
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Bill Gluvna, press coordinator, just poked his head into the press box to announce that today's game has been officially cancelled and "no make-up is scheduled" so everyone's original lede is safe. The scoreboard guy turned off the music, so he is safe as well.
This is what the field looked like through the press box windows:
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The weather for tomorrow's game against the Yankees is supposed to be even worse than today, so it is quite likely my game reporting from Florida is over for the year. I am scheduled to go home on Saturday, but if the weather report for tomorrow is as bad as it looks now, I may just go back to Old Town Alexandria, VA and look for whirlpools in the Potomac River.
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