This past Wednesday, I shot the New York Yankees at Tampa Bay Rays spring training game in St. Petersburg. Shooting the game means standing on the warning track around the infield, generally from the outfield end of the dugout to around the first- or third-base bags.
It usually doesn’t involve a bench-clearing brawl. It also usually doesn’t mean a ball whizzes past my head.
But tensions built up between the two teams after the Yankees manager criticized the Rays for plowing into catchers when they score… and in the first inning, the Yankees’ starting pitcher was ejected for throwing at the Rays’ third baseman.
That raised some protests from the Yankee dugout, but not nearly as much as what happened in the second inning, when Yankee infielder Shelley Duncan slid, spikes high, into Rays second-baseman Akinori Iwamura.
Iwamura got a chunk of his leg removed with the spikes, reportedly. And outfielder Jonny Gomes raced in from right field to stick up for Aki. That cleared the Yankees bench, which cleared the Rays bench. Gomes was ejected, as was Duncan and two Yankees coaches.
I shot the game from the first-base area, so I saw the backs of Rays players as they ran to second base. By the way, I shot the slide at second with a F2.8 Nikkor 300 the paper owns (the hood adds another eight inches of length to it), then the fight with my Nikkor 80-300.
In the next inning, closer Troy Percival walked past me, and when a fan admonished him not to pitch inside, he responded with something like, “don’t bet on it.”
Percival pitched well. Someone else in the Rays bullpen, which is in first-base-side foul territory, didn’t, and missed my head by about two feet.
Still, shooting spring training games has been a challenge. It’s been fun. It’s also been something I haven’t done in a long, long time, and it’s one of the fun things about working at a small newspaper.
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