Category: Baseball

Posted on

Flies, Leaders, and Devil Rays

At the end of the month we fish two days with Captain Court Douthit somewhere near Tampa. Captain Douthit inherited us, so I hope his Zen or at least his sense of humor is on. He’ll probably need it. Three or four months ago I tried to book with the Orvis-endorsed guide in Tampa.  I’ve had luck with Orvis guides, but no luck here: he was booked.  I found another guide with a boat I liked, booked the dates, and sent in the deposit.

Turns out I tried to pick a guide by his boat and instead picked a movie star.  In May he canceled our trip because of his schedule with Animal Planet. Who knew? It’s probably for the best, since on fishing videos you have to yell at your fish like Vikings taking scalps. We’re not much good at that.

Anyway when he canceled he was nice enough not to just drop me: I guess I’m not quite that prom date. He passed us on to Captain Court, and it looks ok. Captain Court has a cool boat, a 1994 Hewes, with a relatively new engine, and I like his website. I like that he took off a summer to hang out with his kiddo, which seems a long way from taking scalps, and he doesn’t seem to require that the clients in the photos on his website yell at their fish.

* * *

As it happens I’ve tied a lot of tarpon flies, all tied on 1/0 hooks for the smallish resident tarpon of Belize. That may be small for Tampa, or maybe not. I have no idea what fish want in Tampa, or what we may fish for.  To be honest I’d be perfectly happy puttering around mangroves looking for snook in the roots or redfish in the grass. Are there mangroves? Is there grass? I don’t know.  As to flies though I gather that if you put a fly into a tarpon’s zone, the tarpon’s not real selective about the fly. Maybe even a McGinty would work.

Of course there’s that whole casting-into-the-zone thing which is a problem, and so far even when I’ve had lucky casts the tarpon haven’t taken my fly. Maybe the casts weren’t lucky enough.

Dimock, Anthony Weston, The Book of the Tarpon, 1911, at 108.

Like the tarpon, tarpon folk don’t seem overly concerned with fly selection. Bill Bishop in High Rollers says he only carries three patterns in shades of dark and light, dark for clear water and light for cloudy. Or was it the other way around?  On a quick internet survey everybody seems to push at most four or five flies. Even by bass and redfish standards that’s sparse. For bass I’ve got more than three different kinds of poppers, not to mention various streamers, woolly buggers, frogs, and McGinties. You probably can fish for tarpon with a McGinty, but nobody knows it yet.

I tied a lot of tarpon flies during Hurricane Harvey.  I like tying tarpon flies because they’re big, and even in these late days I can still see them, and we were going back to Belize in November after Harvey. Our house didn’t flood, and we never lost power, but for three days our street was a storm drain.  There was nothing to do but watch the weather, watch the water rising, tie flies, and joke on Facebook that I was waiting for the tarpon to show up in our yard.  They never did. After a day or so even I stopped joking on Facebook.

What tarpon people are concerned with are leaders. On the internet you can find a dozen ways to tie a tarpon leader, and each leader’s proponents seem certain as to their efficacy. I didn’t know there was so much righteousness in the cause of leaders.

First off there’s the whole IGFA leader standard. Everyone agrees a 12-inch bite tippet is too short. I’m sure that somewhere deep in the heart of the IGFA tower in downtown Nantucket there are sincere discussions among high-level executives of how, if the bite tippet were lengthened, it would treat all those prior 12-inch tippet record holders unfairly. Get over it. Remember Roger Maris.

Meanwhile in Belize guides recommend a straight 6-foot 60-pound leader.  It’s not a good  idea. Tarpon are the prey of bull sharks and hammerheads, and sometimes you want to break the fish off.  That’s not going to happen with a 60-pound straight leader. You also want the leader to break if the line is wrapped around your leg, your neck, or your guide. Getting pulled into the water with the bull sharks and hammerheads seems a particularly bad idea.

Plus fly lines have a breakage strength of less than 40 pounds. I’d rather break my leader than a fly line, or a fly rod. So I’ve settled on a 20-pound class tippet. I’ve considered 16 pounds, but that seems pretentious. Anything less than 16 is just cruel.

I used a 60-pound nylon butt section because that’s what the guys at Bayou City Anglers wanted me to buy.  I went to Bayou City in the first place to buy hard 30, but I follow instructions. The whole leader’s about nine feet, +/- 12 inches. The six-foot 60-pound nylon butt is attached to the fly line with a perfection loop, and to the 20-pound fluorocarbon class tippet with an improved blood knot. The twenty-four inch 60-pound fluorocarbon bite tippet is attached to the fly with a Kreh loop knot and to the class tippet with an improved blood knot. All those knots seem impossibly small. I’m sure it’s a total failure, but not because I didn’t think about it.

Who wouldn’t be fascinated by such stuff? Who says fly fishing is arcane?

* * *

Monday we went to Minute Maid Park at Union Station, pronounced MUM-puss, to watch the team formerly known as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays play the Astros.  I wanted to  see the Rays before we went to Tampa. In 2008 the Devil Rays banished the devil, changed their name to the Tampa Bay Just Rays, and got rid of the fish logo and replaced it with a little patch of sunshine.

See that glimmer in the eye of the R? On Monday the Astros played the Tampa Bay Glimmers in the Eye.

I liked the old Devil Ray mascot, but hated their uniforms, now I like their uniforms but I’m dubious as to the little patch of sunshine. I also liked the way Tampa Bay Devil Rays fell off the tongue, though many people thought it clumsy. Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is clumsy. Dallas Rangers of Arlington is clumsy.  Tampa Bay Devil Rays has some Latin rhythm.

Turner-Turner, J., The Giant Fish of Florida, 1902.

As a team, the Tampa Bay Rays née Devil Rays are perennially a hard-luck lot. since their first season in 1998, they’ve won 1,500 games and lost 1,738, for a .462 winning percentage. The Astros have played since 1962 and have won 4,391 and lost 4,552 for a .493 percentage.  The ‘Stros were in striking distance of breaking .500 a few years back, but then went into their three 100-loss-season tailspin.  Did I mention that the Astros won the World Series last year?

The Astros at .491 are now about the median, with only nine teams at .500 or higher. The Rays lead only the San Diego Padres for the very bottom.  Of course they’re stuck in a division that includes the Red Sox and the Yankees, so life isn’t fair. They’re also in Tropicana Stadium, which is in St. Pete and apparently inconvenient to get to from Tampa.  Along with the Oakland Coliseum, Wrigley Field, and Fenway Park it’s judged one of the worst dumps in Major League Baseball. The Rays consequently don’t outdraw the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL. They don’t even play baseball in the NHL.

The Rays did have some great seasons ten years ago, when Andrew Friedman, now with the Dodgers, was their VP of baseball operations. I don’t know Andrew, but he’s a Houston boy, and I know his dad, Kenny. The Rays even made it to the World Serious, and Andrew got a lot of the credit. The Dodgers pay Andrew a lot of money for the lot of credit, but who don’t the Dodgers pay a lot of money? And if he’s anything like his dad he’s a bargain.

As is more common than not, this season is not going well for the Rays. Through Juneteenth they’re 33-39 for fourth in the AL East. They’re also doing some weird rotation maneuvers, starting relievers for two or three innings, because part of their rotation is weak. Monday’s game they had a great start, getting four runs early on Gerrit Cole. Cole came into the game 8-1 with a .240 ERA, and has pitched this season like a Cy Young winner.  Those four runs to the Rays may have been his worst three innings as a Stro.

Cole kept the ‘Stros in it though, finishing seven innings with no more runs. The Rays lost in the bottom of the 9th when their closer, Sergio Romo (with a 5.0 ERA but a pretty good June) gave up a two run walk-off double to Alex Bregman.  Heartbreaking for Rays’ fans, great stuff for Astros’ fans.  If you don’t know baseball know this: a team with a closer with a 5.0 ERA in a one-run game’s got a problem.

Of course the next night the Ray’s fine young pitcher, Blake Snell, pitched a gem against the Astros fine old pitcher, Justin Verlander, to take a one-run game and snap the Astros’ 12-game win streak. The previous evening’s goat, Sergio Romo, now with a 5.46 ERA, got the final two outs. That’s the other thing, if you don’t know baseball know this. The Baseball Gods are cruel, vicious, and capricious, and what goes around comes around.

 

Posted on

The Flagler Steakhouse

When you fly in on a Friday morning and fly out on Sunday morning, fish six hours, and go to two baseball games, you don’t see as much of a place as you’d like. I never visited the Flagler Museum, or stuck my toe in the Atlantic, or caught some weird exotic out of a canal. Part of the point of this exercise is not just fish. I could stay in Houston and not catch fish. Part of the point of this exercise is to get the sense of 50 states. It’s hard to get much sense in two days.

We were terrible spring trainers. We were in West Palm Beach for Astros’ spring training, but we never made it to a game before the second inning. It wasn’t our fault. We made it to the Budget rental line at the Fort Lauderdale airport by  11 am, and the game didn’t start until 1:30, but we stood in line for an hour for a car.  The drive’s another hour, and when we got to the new Ballpark at West Palm the signage is horrible.  We took two wrong turns before we got to where we could park and that took at least 30 minutes.  Then it’s a long walk to the stadium and another long line for ballpark food. Delicious.

This is the first thing I learned about Florida: It’s not just Donald Trump who goes there every weekend.  The lines for the rental cars on Friday morning are waiting for you.

We were late to the game on the second day too, and missed an excellent first two innings by McHugh, 1 hit, 1 walk, 5 strike outs. We kept fishing until we were late. Ok, that was our fault.

We stayed at a Bed and Breakfast, Hibiscus House, near downtown, a block off the main drag Clematis. Kris noted that she always feels cheated at Bed and Breakfasts because we never actually get to eat the breakfast. I didn’t find a bakery, but on the way back to the airport we found a good donut shop, Jupiter Donuts, which was neither in nor on Jupiter but near enough to both.

Skip the banana and chocolate. I can’t believe I preferred banana Moon Pies as a child.

We walked down Clematis Street Friday night, top to bottom to a good restaurant, Pistache. I had a martini, and some wine, and a good potato and leek soup which I’d wanted all winter, and the duck breast. I also learned something: everyone in nice restaurants in Florida really is old, as old as me at least. I asked the waitress (who was originally from New York) what we shouldn’t miss. The turtle rescue, she said. She was right, too, we shouldn’t have missed the turtle rescue but we did.

The second thing I learned about Florida: if you’re in Florida, it’s easy to miss the turtle rescue. There’s golf. There’s baseball. There’s fishing.

The third thing? It’s great to feel young again. There are all these old people in Florida and everything is relative.

The next night, after the fishing, after the game, after the two-hour nap and practicing the Sor “Variations on a Theme by Mozart” while Kris slept, we had dinner reservations at the Flagler Steakhouse. It’s easy to see why Henry Flagler is the patron saint of Florida. He came from New York in 1879 with unimaginable amounts of money, a different level of money, and he built the Florida East Coast Railway and the Florida Overseas Railway down the coast, from San Augustine in the north to Key West at the bottom of the world, all to serve his Florida resorts and real estate investments. He was Walt Disney before Walt Disney. He built the Ponce de Leon Hotel in San Augustine. He built Palm Beach to serve the rich and West Palm Beach to serve the not-rich. He built the Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach on the shores of Lake Worth (where the New York lady in yoga pants told us to stop bothering her dog). He built Miami and named it Miami instead of Flagler.  He built the Breakers.

We thought about staying at the Breakers. There was no reason to stay at any other resort on Palm Beach, so if we were going to stay on Palm Beach it would be the Breakers.  It is still the surviving heart of everything that Florida is: ridiculous, extraordinarily expensive, gorgeous from the Atlantic and at night from the land rimmed in light and shining.  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t spend that much money. But I thought eating at the Flagler Steakhouse in the Breakers would be a good compromise.  We could get there early, we could walk around and see the hotel, we could admire Flagler’s vision.

We got there early but here’s the thing, the Flagler Steakhouse is across the street on the golf course.  It’s part of the resort, it’s just not in the hotel.  We only saw the hotel at a distance, like that green light across the water or the Magic Kingdom, and then our Uber driver took us back around the guardhouse and across the street.

As for the Flagler Steakhouse, don’t. Just don’t.  We spent $350 on a pretty good steak with a steamed bake potato.  I had a martini, and two glasses of wine. I had some corn chowder with bits of lobster.  $350 for a steak and baked potato is obscene, even with a martini, and even if service is included. There was sour cream with the potato, so that was good. The place was packed. As our Uber driver said on the way back to our bed and breakfast, the rich are different.

The fourth thing? The rich are different.

I think Henry Flagler might have been proud. I think he reached his audience.

Posted on

Ted Williams

from the Boston Public Library

Florida’s population in  1850 was 87,445.  The population of Texas, also granted statehood in 1845, was 212,592 (which included at least one of my great grandfathers, Joseph M. McReynolds, and another great-great grandfather, Samuel Elliott).  As of 2015, Florida was estimated to have a population of 20.24 million, making it the third most populous state behind California and Texas. In 1900 the population of Florida was 528,542.  Between 1960 and 2010 the population grew from 6,789,443 to 18,801,310.

I don’t think I have any ancestors who landed in Florida, and Texans don’t go to Florida to retire, but that’s what I’m finding out about Florida.  People come to Texas for oil and gas, or maybe medicine, NASA, or agriculture; people go to California for tech and agriculture and to be stars; people go to the Sunshine State for, well, sunshine. The Boys are Where They Are for sunshine.  The 17% retiree population is in Florida for sunshine.  It is the state of land speculation and oranges and sunshine. South Florida is further south than Brownsville, Texas, which I thought was as far south as the world went.  The average temperature of West Palm Beach, which is where we’re a’heading for our fishing foray, is 75.35°, which is higher even than the average for Houston,  69.05°.  It better not be humid.

And there were plenty of carpetbaggers after sunshine, from Henry Flagler to Governor Rick Scott. Ernest Hemingway carpetbagged.  Tennessee Williams carpetbagged.  Jack Kerouac carpetbagged. It’s a thing.

Going to Florida for baseball and fishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the carpet baggerTed Williams.  There was never a purer hitter than Ted Williams.  He was the last player to hit .400, and maybe the last ever (though I have some vague hope for Jose Altuve).  He spent three prime seasons in military service as a navy fighter pilot in World War II and Korea.  He didn’t get along with Boston fans, for which one can hardly blame him, didn’t get along with his players when he managed, didn’t get along with the Boston press, was a 17-year All Star, a two-time MVP, and between 1941 and 1958 led the league in hitting six separate times. His head is frozen in a cryogenic lab, and I don’t think the lab has ever been paid. 

A generation bought Ted Williams sporting gear from Sears Roebuck: he was the paragon of the late mid-century sportsman. Williams’ had a 3,193-square-foot home on Upper Magecumbe Key on Islamorada.  There was a Sears Ted Williams model boat and motor, and Ted Williams shotguns and baseball gloves and weights. There was Ted Williams fishing gear. He was one of a group including Lefty Kreh, Joe Brooks, Chico Fernandez, and A.J. McClane who invented fly fishing for bonefish.  At one point Williams claimed to have caught 1000 bonefish and 1000 tarpon and 1000 Atlantic salmon, so he hit 1.000 for something.  He was obsessed with fly fishing. He was obsessed with fishing. I suspect he was as opinionated and fussy of an angler as he was a manager, if not a batter.

I’m not sure he would have been fun to fish with.  He would have been great to fish with.

Posted on

Florida

When I told Kris I was starting a blog, she asked me if it was about baseball. I’m a pretty obsessed baseball fan, but write about baseball? I’ll leave writing about baseball to people with some actual knowledge.

That said, the team of which I am a fan, the Houston Astros, won the World Series last year–you may have heard, but it never gets old in the telling.  Kris goes to most games with me, and we go to a lot of games. At games Kris stops watching by the third inning and reads magazines (pre-internet) or plays Words with Friends (post-internet). From April to October, if I’m not at the game, most nights I watch the television in my office and talk to my friends on the internet about the game’s progress.

A month or so ago Kris announced that we were going to West Palm Beach in February for the first games of spring training.  Kris now is not only a theoretical fan–she goes to games–she apparently wants to go to games.  I doubt she’ll give up Words with Friends though.

I never thought seriously about going to spring training, and I had already booked us to Tampa in June when the Astros play the Rays. It’s apparently the thick of tarpon season, and Kris has caught a tarpon but I haven’t.

We’re flying into Fort Lauderdale on Friday February 23 and flying out the next Sunday.  I’ve booked us a guide for a half day on Saturday morning, one Scott Hamilton at Fly Fishing Extremes.  It’s my first chance at a foreign fish since I started this, and since my January luck with Texas fish has been so poor, it may be my first chance for a fish.

*Actually, during two of the ‘Stros three 100+ loss seasons, 2011-2013, I wrote a weekly game recap on a local website.  They rarely had much to do with the games, but if I may say so myself they were pretty funny. Nothing else about those seasons was funny.