Catching A Jupiter Hammerheads Game - Not As Fun As I Had Hoped

My sister Susan and I attended the first home game of the season for the Jupiter Hammerheads at Roger Dean Stadium this past Tuesday evening, and I have to say, I was pretty underwhelmed by the whole thing. One problem was that two teams play there - the Hammerheads and the Palm Beach Cardinals, but there is only one official home opener, and that was the previous Friday when the Cardinals played the Fort Myers Mighty Mussels. And so, no festivities Tuesday night. My mistake. However, on the bright side, the stadium is in the Abacoa neighborhood of Jupiter, Florida, and across the street is the downtown area, with restaurants and shops and a village square, which makes for a very nice evening indeed.

We had dinner at DAS Beer Garden, a very lively neighborhood hangout. We sat outside, despite the cool temperatures (75 degrees and cloudy - it is a Florida mindset, after all). You order food at the bar at this place, and when I went in, I noticed that it was packed, mostly with a younger crowd. Outside, it was us older types, where I took the photograph of Susan on the right. The food was good, we each had a Jai Alai IPA, and then headed across the street into the stadium.  I had bought seats online, and printed them out to present at the gate, but when we got to the area our seats were in, I noticed the section was not listed. Which was no problem, since there were only 327 people at the game, and so we just sat in the first row of a vacant section, right behind home plate.

I was regretting not attending the actual home opener the previous Friday, which featured fireworks and a Friday night crowd, but when I looked it up later, the "crowd" was listed at 591, so how much livelier could it have been? In any case, the Hammerheads were awful. In 4 1/2 innings, which took over 2 hours, the Dunedin Blue Jays batted around in 3 of them. I started keeping score, but since so many players were batting twice an inning, it was difficult to do so. The Hammerhead pitchers were walking everyone, at least when they were not hitting the batter. Five pitchers in 4 innings could not throw a strike, and when we left, the score was 18-2. I checked the box scores later, and the final score was 19-5, with the Hammerheads allowing 22 walks, 3 batters hit by pitch, and 9 hits. And the game took almost 4 hours to complete. I think the manager needs to have a long talk with the pitching coach, if he ever shows up at the park again. Last summer when we attended a Palm Beach Cardinals - Jupiter Hammerheads game, there was a much bigger crowd and both teams actually played well. These guys are almost all just out of high school or college, and so perhaps you need to give these rookies a few months to adjust to professional baseball. Hopefully the next time I go to the park they can keep the walks under 20. One can always dream.