Fear and Loathing at Spring Training '11

When I imagine a journalist going into the field for a long and immersive trip, my mind always calls up images of Hunter S. Thompson lugging his huge typewriter along with him and setting it up in a dark corner of his hotel room during any rare quiet moment of his travels. Well, if I had to bring a typewriter with me on my trip to Phoenix to cover a long weekend of Spring Training Baseball, it would probably end up broken, succumbing to the same fate as my computer, whose hard drive unexpectedly and inexplicably crashed the night before we left. So now I'm out here in the blazing Arizona desert with nought but a notepad and my smartphone with which to document my adventures.

The baseball journalistic aspects of my trip (stories about all four games my colleague and I were scheduled to watch and how the individual performances of each player and team fit into the Grand Outlook of the Season as a Whole) were set to appear on my other blog, thoughtsaboutbaseball.blogspot.com, so I won't bore you with the technical stuff here. Thankfully I had signed up for Twitter just mere hours before my computer died, so I was still able to live-tweet some of my more colorful observations. You can follow my travels at @Hunter_S_Batman.

It's hard to focus on this tiny screen long enough to write even this brief post, even after today's baseball action is over; I'd much rather be poring over my scoresheet or analyzing some projected lineups. Maybe things would be different if I had a working computer, even though I previously wrote an entire full-length post using only my Android phone. The amount of information necessary to process before the start of a baseball season requires the computing power, speed, and convenience of a full O.S. - but then again a computer might have just provided me with more potential for distraction.

So I hope you'll forgive ne if I put my smartphone away in favor of my glove, cap, and Matt Kemp autographed baseball. I'm sure I'll find it more fun to welcome in the spring by hanging out in the sun than straining my eyes at this tiny little touchscreen in a dirty old hotel.room. I promise I'll be back with you once everything settles down.

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