It’s been a while since I made a day trip like this, but despite the fact that I really actually don’t like Miami all that much, the allure of watching World Baseball Classic baseball inside of a ballpark that I had never been to before made it all worth taking a very short trip down to South Florida for an afternoon.
I mean literally, I was off the airplane at 9:30 a.m., took a cab into Little Havana, walked around for a few hours and had some amazing Nicaraguan food, before heading into the park. New Marlins Park is actually pretty nice for something that’s in Miami, and I guess all those disgruntled taxpayer dollars at least made something pretty nice and a great place to watch baseball. But due to the risk of getting stuck in Miami overnight, I opted to bail from the game in the 7th inning, and with a little bit of luck, I was back on a flight to Atlanta by 4:30 p.m. Not too shabby of a way to spend a day, and not a bad way to make Miami a little bit more tolerable – by hardly staying.
As for the experience of watching baseball went, it was pretty incredible. It was nothing like the USA vs. Canada game I saw in Canada back in 2009; although there were similar parallels; watching Canada on their home soil, and watching both the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico on their home soil (see what I did there?). But despite the fact that the game really didn’t have a whole lot of purpose other than to determine seeds for the WBC semi-finals, it’s hard to say that the people that showed up were actually there to watch baseball. It seemed more like “my Latin country is better than your Latin country,” and was more like a gigantic excuse for Dominicans and Puerto Ricans to gather and fly their flags.
And play musical instruments. Jesus Cristo, it was like a fucking concert in the left field stands, all game long.
But it was still overall a fun experience, and I’m glad that I was lucky enough to have a successful day trip outright.
