Hard to resist

In what I believe to be one of the best deals in all of professional sports, we took advantage of another of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays' Family Fun Day yesterday at Tropicana Field.

For $15 a ticket, we got to witness a disappointing 3-2 loss to crosstate rivals, the Florida Marlins, as well as each get a hot dog, soft drink and a bag of Cracker Jacks.

For Colin, however, the day was even better. The promotional giveaway yesterday was a Nokona TN1050 baseball glove (shown above). Though he's happy with his T-ball glove for now, I know this will be put to good use. A little research shows a suggested retail price of $40. That's a pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.

Granted, the team is racing headfirst toward yet another 100-loss season. But, with the team offering ticket packages like that, as well as pretty cool giveaways, I'm sure we'll get used to the team's less-than-victorious ways.

As an added bonus, we bumped into some of our hockey friends, Kathy and Kris, at the game. We would see them often before and at Lightning games, but I never had a chance to thank them for their generosity toward Colin this past season.

As for hounding, we took a pass for the Marlins. Other than pitcher Dontrelle Willis and, perhaps, Miguel Cabrera, there's very few players -- past or present -- that I'd want on a baseball. And we didn't hound the Rays either.

Now that Colin's on summer vacation, though, we will likely start ramping up our baseball hounding efforts. In fact, we might take a trip to the visiting team hotel later today. Seattle, and Ichiro, are in town. The Tigers, the defending American League champions, come to town next Monday.

Road trip

A quick business trip will keep me from adding an installment tomorrow. Given that the Rays are on a road trip, there's very little to write about.

One bit of news, though: We'll be watching the Florida Marlins play the Rays next Sunday. Maybe we'll make our first trip for the Rays and get in a little postgame hounding. We may even go Saturday night, too, with a crew from the paper.

Minnesota Twins

If I thought that making the transition to baseball from hockey would be easy, I'd be lying to myself. Though the process of obtaining an autograph doesn't change, the two sports are worlds apart.

The biggest hurdle, I realized, was not following my own advice. If I'd had the time to do more homework, as in doing a better job of memorizing faces, I'd probably have had better luck. I failed to do that for my one trip for the Twins. It was a lesson learned.

Transportation choices are different, too. Very few hockey players take a hotel courtesy van or a cab to the rink. Some walk, depending upon the hotel's location, but most take a team bus. Any way, though, the access to hockey players is pretty easy.

All of the Twins, or at least the ones I saw, took the hotel van. I did get close enough to Torii Hunter to ask for an autograph, and he looked like he was willing to sign, but the "friendly" van driver closed the door. Requests to Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer went unacknowledged.

Timing is another issue. Where hockey teams need to arrive two hours before game time, baseball players apparently arrive four hours before the first pitch. Though my work schedule helped out with trying to hound the Twins' players, it kept me from getting Twins broadcasters Bert Blyleven and Jack Morris. Apparently, the media types follow the two-hour rule.

Bottom line, hounding the Twins was nothing but a learning experience. And, in all honestly, there's nothing wrong with that.