(For Day 2 photos can be found
here)
There are two sides to Tucson – the day and the night.
During the day, there’s baseball, and it’s fantastic. At night, there’s…nothing. And sure, most of the University of Arizona students are out for Spring Break, but even if they were here, I don’t see where they could even go.
But first, the good stuff. Matt and I went to Tucson Electric Park at 9:30 to see practice, and we got there as they were warming up. We decided to throw the ball around the parking lot for a bit, because watching players jog from 175 yards away didn’t excite us greatly. (It would be nice if they set up fan seating closer to the field, but we were stuck watching through not one, but two chain-link fences.)
While walking around the grounds to see if we could get closer, we came across the players’ parking lot, which also had a chain-link fence covered in that green mesh netting. But looking through a couple holes, we think we might’ve seen a couple of cars owned by people we’re familiar with.
First, there was a
Chevy truck in the same model of the one Jermaine Dye received along with the World Series MVP trophy. There were no markings that would indicate that it belonged to Jermaine, but we couldn’t think of a reason to drive a car that ugly unless we got it for free. Next to it was
a Hummer with the license plate “KW.” Perhaps it wasn’t Kenny Williams’, but a Hummer sure seems to fit his persona.
Anyway, when we returned to the practice diamond disappointed that we couldn’t get closer than two football fields away from home plate, batting practice had started. Thanks to a hefty tailwind, a number of balls reached the parking lot, and Matt and I grabbed four of them. One was Jim Thome’s, another was Jermaine Dye’s, and the other two were hit by some faceless righty who I couldn’t identify from one county over. Matt had to fend off a tenacious 60-year-old for one of them.
Between the last batter and the start of the game, we returned to the hotel because we didn’t realize Arizona’s spring also meant “light jacket weather” like everywhere else, and came back to find out our seats were four rows behind the on-deck circle on the first-base side. But great seats aside, Tucson Electric Park would be enjoyable from any vantage point.
Hi Corbett was a nice minor-league field that got all the basics down right. Tucson Electric Park took it one step further, with better food (Chicken quesadillas were $8, but they filled me up better than two $3.50 hot dogs would’ve) and an awesome bullpen set-up where you could watch pitchers warm up from various angles. The seats themselves were a little cramped – especially after the quesadillas – but that was the only complaint. Aside from the score, of course.
After the game and writing the recap, we set out to try to find out what there is to like about Tucson. Yesterday, we felt we might’ve been a little premature in declaring Tucson a dump, for lack of a better word. After spending an evening driving and walking around to find a single place to eat, our stance hasn’t changed.
It wasn’t just the periphery that was troubling. For dinner, we searched a better part of the downtown area by both car and foot and found nothing. A couple of wine bars, a questionable-looking regular bar, a few chain eateries (closed, except for Subway), and that was it.
The downtown area reminded me of a Grand Theft Auto city. There were some tall buildings, but none were notable. City Hall itself was a bland establishment. Basically, just like in the video game, the tall buildings existed to make turning corners more difficult. We saw a tattoo parlor, a library, a movie theatre, the visitor’s bureau, and that’s all I can remember. That’s not fair to GTA cities – they actually had places to eat.
It took about 45 minutes of driving back and forth across the town to find a restaurant that was local to Tucson, since you can eat at chains anywhere. After driving by a strip joint, a store that sold goods related to strip joints next to it, and a C&W restaurant that we mistook for a gay bar called the “Bashful Bandit,” we finally found what appeared to be a reputable group of restaurants in a strip by the University. The local microbrewery there had decent food, but it’s a shame that we’ll have to return to eat there at least one more time due to a lack of other options.
Tomorrow we’ll head to Phoenix on I-10, which Matt said is just as thrilling of a ride as the one around Tucson today.