Notes from Red Sox Spring Training trip

Here's a review of day 1:

4:15 AM - depart home to go to Calgary airport.  For those of you that know me, you know how major of a commitment it is for me to get out of bed before 8 AM.  Very few things get me up before dawn. Baseball is on that shortlist. (Very short. It has exactly one item on it).

7:00 AM - Flight departs towards DFW (Dallas) where I'll catch a connection to RSW (Fort Myers)

6:00 PM - We arrive at RSW, after a pair of uneventful flights.
7:00 PM - after getting luggage and rental car check in at the hotel.

I check my phone, and see on my twitter feed that the Red Sox have an exhibition game against Puerto Rico's WBC team starting in 5 minutes.  Fenway South is about a 5 minute drive away.  Is the game sold out, will I be able to buy tix from a scalper?  I'm tired and hungry, but only one way to find out.

We head towards the game, and quickly buy a pair and make our way to our seats.  I'm going to be in Fort Myers less than 48 hours in total, but will get to watch the Red Sox play three times.  As Macklemore would say "This is ***ing Awesome!"

Playing Pepper Answers

As mentioned previously, the Cardinals blog C70 at the bat at Cardinal70.com hosts an annual series where bloggers from each team answer some specific questions in previewing their team's seasons.

To see how other Red Sox bloggers, Steve from BosoxInjection, Christine from Boston Red Thoughts and Rebecca from Fenway Fatales answered these questions, take a look at the Red Sox "Playing Pepper" page at C70 at the bat.

Below are the questions with the answers that I provided. As always, I welcome your comments, thoughts, hate mail....

Playing Pepper Preview

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled... oh, wait. I'm distracted by the title. Let me get back on track:

Every year, Daniel Shoptaw, who runs a Cardinals blog at C70 at the Bat, and is the former President of the Baseball Bloggers Alliance, does a project he calls Playing Pepper, where he gets other teams' bloggers to preview their team.   As a member of the Boston chapter of the BBA  I am honoured that once again he has asked for my input in previewing the Red Sox.

Last year I was eerily Nostradamus like in forecasting the 2012 version of the Red Sox. You don't need to look here to see for yourself how accurate me and my fellow Red Sox bloggers predictions were, you can trust me.

This year I will be answering the following questions:

1. How would you grade the offseason?
2. What are the expectations for this club throughout the fan base, besides much less drama than the last couple of years?
3. Who do you expect to be the most pleasant surprise to be for the coming year?
4. What rookie will make the biggest impact in 2013?
5. What will be the final record of the team and where will they finish in the division? 
6. What one thing from your team are you most looking forward to watching?

I expect that this will be posted sometime over the next couple of weeks.  Stay tuned and I'll update this post with my responses, or keep checking at C70 at the Bat as other team's previews start being posted.

UPDATE: my responses here