The Official Scorer's Unofficial Spring Training Report (Day One)

Many of you remember this from last year, but our esteemed official scorer Pete Yarbro takes a trip to Spring Training every year.  He's currently down in the desert, and filing reports for this blog.  His reports discuss baseball and whatever else is going on in that crazy lawyer mind of his.  Below is his report from Saturday, and later today I'll post his report from Sunday.

If everything was on time I was supposed to get to the ballpark about an hour and a half before the game started. Between a delayed flight and two tries at getting a rental car, I sat down in the press box as the bottom of the third inning was starting in Saturday night's spring training game between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies.

I would complain in more detail about how much trouble I had getting here, but I suspect I would garner very little sympathy from the readers back in South Bend. The weather button at the top of my computer is still set to home, and it says it's 35 degrees with a windchill of 28. As I write this, it's almost 8pm here, the sun is all the way down, but it's still 73.

Since my last spring training dispatch in 2010, the Diamondbacks have moved their spring home from Tucson to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which is just outside of Scottsdale, on the east side of Phoenix. The stadium is called Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. There's a lot of room out here in the desert to spread out, so I guess that's why everything gets a long name. I'm sure I'll catch on to the shorthand soon enough.

From my seat in the press box, the stadium is beautiful. It's not as large as a major league ballpark, but it has the look and feel of a big league facility. The park seats 11,000, and can accommodate 4,000 on the outfield lawn. The largest high-definition scoreboard in the Cactus League, at 1,150 square feet is behind the left field wall. I no longer have the trigonometry skills to figure out what that makes the diagonal measurement in inches, but I am confident that it beats my 52-inch widescreen at home.

I was greeted by some familiar faces when I got to the park tonight. Although he didn't wave at me, when I took my seat, Jarrod Parker (SB '08) was warming up to start his second inning of the game. He convincingly struck out the first two batters I saw him face. Parker looks to be back in peak form after having been out since the end of July 2009, recovering from Tommy John elbow surgery. He finished his night with 2 innings, no hits, no runs, 3 strikeouts and no walks.

Also in the starting lineup tonight are former Silver Hawks Justin Upton (SB '06), Gerardo Parra (SB '07), and Chris Owings (SB '10).

I'm expecting a busy day tomorrow. I have plans to visit the minor league fields in the morning, where I'll check in with Mark Haley and see if I can get a look at some more past, and future, Silver Hawks. Then I'll be exploring this new stadium. At some point I have to track down the media dinning room. I might do that first.

In my rush to get to the game tonight I never got around to having dinner. So I'm going to go down to the concourse and check out the food offered by the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community here at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick.

There's got to be a shorter way to say that.