For the 4th straight year my 8 year old son Jordan and I have made the trip down to Ft. Myers to watch the Boston Red Sox in Spring Training.  Our tradition began when he was only 3 and the games here weren't sold out until at least the day of the game. Now they're all gone the 1st couple hours they are put on sale on the internet. Luckily I have a friend who lives here in Ft. Myers who's nice enough to stand in line and get me tickets the day they go on sale.

I made the mistake of beginning our tradition by bribing my then 5 year old son with a 1 day stop on the way at Disney World which he holds me to to this day, though we did mix it up with a stop at Universal last year.

It was a tough time to deal with the time change as we didn't get back from Disney until about 11pm and had to get up at 7am which was really 6am. Ft. Myers is about 3 1/2 hours from Disney but can be a little longer with traffic and add another 30 or 40 minutes to the ballpark and to park.

We left our condo about 7:45 and got to The City of Palms Park about 11:20. Unfortunatly we got there right after The Sox had finished bating practice so we proceeded to the gift shop. Last year the hot ticket item was Coco Crisp merchandise, this year it's all about Dice-K. The Red Sox 100 million dollar man, pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka. Everwhere you looked were shirts, jerseys and even Dice-K dice. No surprise Jordan snached up a Dice-K shirt right off the bat.

Luckily for us we got a chance to see for ourselves what all the fuss was about because Sunday's starting pitcher was, The Dice-K man himself. The news was even better as we stood outside waiting to see the starting line-ups posted and to our delight the entire projected starting lineup was there and starting Sunday.

It didn't take long for Dice-K to make an impression with us. With his wild wind up and delivery he struck out 2 of the first 3 Oriole batters with a mixture of 90 + mph fastballs and nasty  breaking balls more than selling me and Jordan on his hype. He did prove he was human later giving up a pair of HR's but I still say watch out for the Dice-K man this year.

Also worth mentioning was in attendance Sunday, the genius behind The New England Patriots 3 Super Bowls, Bill Belichick. The Red Sox lost the game 5-4 but I have learned Spring Training records are no indication of what the team will do the regualer season.

The weather has been great and hopefully will stay that way tomorrow as we plan to play golf with my buddy Reid in the morning and then head back to the ballpark Monday night as The Red Sox take on The Yankees at 7:00.  You can disregard my earlier statement about these games not being important at least for this one. Well, another big day lies ahead. Will update this Tuesday to let you know how the Red Sox/Yankees game turns out.