A few years back, when Jason Heyward as a rookie in Braves camp, he hit a bunch of home runs over the right field fence at the Braves’ spring training facility, denting the hoods and breaking the windshields of the cars of Braves employees. It was a lot of fun for everyone who didn’t park in that area. The Braves had fun with it as an organization too. They made a big show of putting up a canopy over the parking places to keep that from happening again and everything.
Since then, coinciding with the rise of social media, it has become a regular spring thing to get reports of similar batting practice home run-on-parked-car violence. Tweeted pictures and the like. This year is no different. We saw some of it at Cubs camp the other day in Mesa. Today we see it at Phillies camp down in Clearwater:
The only question I have is why, after all of these windshield incidents, do players and team employees still park their cars where they do? We have a general idea, after 150 years, of how far home runs can fly, do we not? We know where the foul balls go too. Maybe fans don’t have a choice of where they park all the time, but if I had a nice car and a choice, I think I’d park a minimum of 600 feet from home plate.
Maybe that means I walk farther, but it beats having to call the windshield guys.
