The second leg of my Spring Training baseball travels took me from busy touristy Orlando, down to the sleepy, seemingly retirement community of Port St. Lucie, Florida. It was a pleasant reprieve from the traffic and endless gauntlet of toll roads in Orlando.
Despite the fact that Tradition Field is the home to the stinking Mets, I actually really liked the place, even over the Braves’ Champion Stadium. This really isn’t that big of a surprise, considering the exorbitant extravagance that was a ballpark in Orlando, compared to a smallish baseball venue out in Port St. Lucie.
The funniest thing about Tradition Field is that being home to the Mets, the general area around Port St. Lucie appears to be crawling with northern transplants, and lots of tourists from New Jersey and New York. And despite being in a sleepy old Florida coastal town, we were subjected to some very New York-like mannerisms, like having to actually pay to park in a deserted grass field, and being accosted by ticket scalpers, at a Spring Training exhibition game that doesn’t actually count. You can take the scumbags out of New York but you can’t take the New York out of the scumbags.
Regardless, the visit to PSL was pretty awesome. My boy James and I got blitzed, and spent an inordinate amount of time yelling at retired Livan Hernandez, but it about made our days that he was cool enough to roll with the punches and banter back. He may have been a Braves killer for the vast majority of his career (both against, and as a member of the team), but I’ll be damned if I’m not a Livo fan for life.
