Odds and Ends

Yesterday the Kansas City Royals hosted the squad from Venezuela as part of the World Baseball Classic. These international teams are primarily made up of MLB players who hail from particular countries. As one KC fan told me, the Royals would be lost without Venezuelan players as a couple of the KC stars were playing for their country team as they whooped the Royals 11-0. Ouch! Guess if we build a wall we need to still find a way to let great athletes across the border but I'd hazard a guess they don't get here trudging through the desert or swimming the Rio Grande.

Team Venezuela plays at Surprise Stadium again today, this time hosted by the Texas Rangers. We'll see if the domestic team does better than the hapless Royals. Tomorrow is the first game under the lights and we've been told to bring some warm clothing as when the sun goes down behind the mountains to the west the temperatures plummet. Plummet being a relative term of course as the day time temps now are pushing the low to mid 80's. Still a 20 degree drop is noticeable and can feel downright cold after sweltering in the Arizona heat.

I'm still camped out at Lake Pleasant which I've concluded draws more of a local crowd than some of the other parks I've stayed in. It's a louder Park for sure as folks don't quite seem to grasp the notion of "quiet hours".  Most of the folks I'm working with are "workampers" (www.workamper.com) and are staying in RV's in local RV parks. Monthly rates at these parks appear to range from $350 to $800 a month. I'm paying $20/day at Lake Pleasant or roughly $600/month but despite the sometimes noisy neighbors I'd still rather be out at the lake than parked close enough to the next door RV to shake hands when stepping out the door.

There is a broad mix of folks working Spring Training. A fair number are my age and are retired but interestingly there are some young folks in their late 20's and early 30's who have opted out of the corporate grind and travel the country working one workamping gig after another making ends meet. For me it wasn't the money that drew me but rather the chance to do something new in the warm Arizona sun. As long as what they pay me covers  my camping costs I'm pretty good to go. A lot of the other workampers are still working to live so they talk about working at places at Amazon fulfillment centers, Walmart, etc. clearly there's no fun in that but I respect that people have to earn a living. I also admire their alternative lifestyle and the ability to lead a nomadic way of life (heck, the name of this blog is "The Road That Beckons") but I believe these folks in their quest for freedom end up working far harder than the average cubicle jockey in an office.

I'm stationed in the store along the 3rd base line and get to work on a regular basis with two guys that's present the spectrum of workampers. Bob  is in his 75th year on this planet, has been retired for many years and has worked post-retirement in places like Yellowstone as well as Spring Training. He and his wife own a home in Sun City which is just  north of Surprise but spend their summers working and living in nice places across the western U.S.  Larry is 30 years younger than Bob, is twice divorced and apparently gave up a corporate banking job to roam the country. He's a baseball and sports fanatic and can recite trivia about many things ("who sang that song?", "name a MLB player who played every position in one game..."). Not independently wealthy he's also working at Walmart on top of the Spring Traing job so Larry is putting in some long days to make ends meet. One thing that all these workampers share is that they all seem to be very nice people. I've concluded that taking people out of the pressures of the typical corporate job really does allow people to be themselves and in most instances their innate goodness will come through. Hey, maybe we need to elect some workampers and send them to Washington. Spring Training ends in just a couple of weeks and their looking for a new opportunity...