One of my favorite discoveries thus far is spring training. For those who are not fans of Major League Baseball, each year several teams come down to Florida beginning in February and play against each other in exhibition games. Every day until the beginning of April, the teams take to fields across central and south Florida. Each team has its own small stadium, its spring training home. The city of Kissimmee hosts two teams. The Atlanta Braves play at Champions Stadium at Disney World, and the Houston Astros play at Osceola County Stadium.
I like Osceola County Stadium the best. It is only about a 10 minute drive from my house, and it is quite small. When I walked up to the booth to buy a ticket to the Astros versus the New York Mets in mid March, the game was sold out except for standing room only. But even with my standing room only ticket, I felt like I was right on top of the field. It was rather amazing to me to be that close to the players in an actual game. It was a much more casual and relaxed atmosphere than the crowd and security one encounters at a regular season game.
Right next to the stadium on Highway 192 is a small and colorful restaurant called “The Cheesesteak Factory,” which I guess is a play on the title of delicious chain restaurant, “The Cheesecake Factory.” The Cheesesteak Factory is not a chain, though. I’ve seen the person I assume to be the owner hard at work getting things ready just before it opened at 11am, and he is there every day personally cooking the meals. The restaurant boasts that it has the best cheesesteaks south of Philadelphia. After eating there, I have no reason to doubt it. They also serve a terrific chicken cheesesteak sandwich. A lady who works there told me that they get really busy this time of year, especially when the Philadelphia Phillies are in for a game. One day during the work week when I stopped there to grab a quick lunch, Milt Thompson, a former player for the Phillies and now a coach in the Houston Astros organization was collecting a whole pile of cheesesteak sandwiches for the players as they took on the Washington Nationals.
Unfortunately, tickets to a spring training game are just as expensive (if not more so) than for a regular season game. Atlanta played Detroit on March 30 at Disneyword, and I paid close to $30 just to have spot on the grass down the left field line. Obviously, the crowds at these games are well-to-do. It is mainly young professionals who bring out their families, or retired folks.
At the Astros/Mets game at Osceola County Stadium where I mentioned I bought a standing room only ticket, I also had one of the most interesting conversations of my life with a stranger.
He told me he was an independent computer consultant for most of his career in New York City, though now he worked for IBM. He stood beside me and we talked for almost the entire game. He had a reserved seat behind the Astros dugout, but where I was standing was shaded. He preferred this to roasting in the sun with his family. A lifelong Mets fan, his son lived in Tampa and had just become father to a little girl. The man was down from New York visiting his new granddaughter.
Among the things we talked about were how the computer industry had changed over his career, the Mets chances for this year, the passing of former Mets catcher Gary Carter (who was one of my first baseball heroes. I remember Gary Carter was in my very first pack of baseball cards- 1984 Topps. It was an All-Star card for the Montreal Expos).
The conversation became extremely interesting for me when the man told me that he was inside the World Trade Center on September 11.
Not many people had arrived yet at his office on the 90th floor that morning, he said. He told me that the first plane came in and struck the tower three floors above him. He was not near a window, but he heard a loud boom, and the building moved about eight feet, then came back.
“What the hell was that?” he asked a coworker.
“Never mind what it was,” the coworker replied. “Let’s get out of here.”
They walked the 90 floors down to the ground level.
I asked him if he heard when the second plane hit, and he said no. The stairwell they used to exit the tower was its own independent structure. “It was a concrete tomb,” he said. “You couldn’t hear anything on the outside.”
By the time the he reached the ground floor, both buildings were burning and people were jumping from the upper floors. He was directed to an alternate exit, one he had never used before, to avoid the jumpers.
I asked him how many people died that he knew, and he said three. One was a police captain that he said hello to each morning as he entered the building. She stood a post at the World Trade Center. He remembered thinking that it was odd that a police captain would stand a post each day, but there she was.
On September 11, she was helping direct people from the entrance lobby out of the building. Too many people were trying to crowd through a door of a glass wall in the lobby, so she used her side arm to shoot out the glass wall.
That police captain was one of the people who died when the building collapsed.
I asked the man if he got caught up in in the tremendous dust cloud after the buildings collapsed, and he said no. When the first tower collapsed, he ran for two or three blocks. The dust never reached him.
The man must have seen the skeptical look on my face when he said he ran two or three blocks. To be honest, he was quite fat.
“Yeah,” he said, “if it happened today I would just have to let all that stuff envelope me.”
He lived in a suburb of New York City, but he walked all the way home on September 11. The hours after the planes hit and the buildings collapsed showed New York City at its finest, he said. Restaurants and businesses were giving out free food and water to people as they walked away from Ground Zero.
I could see that telling the story to me had taken some energy out of him, and he said he needed to find his family. I congratulated him again on becoming a grandfather. We said goodbye without knowing each other’s name…
The baseball game itself was quite enjoyable. The Astros won, 9-5, and the weather was fantastic.
Almost every day the weather is fantastic here in Kissimmee. This is a great place to live.
-Nathan Marshburn
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