Scenes from Gainesville: The Diary of Danny Figueroa

May 31, 2002

Game time. That’s the first thing I thought of this morning. As I’ve said, this will be my first tournament and I’m looking forward to it. It’s now 9:30 am and I’m getting ready to head over to team breakfast. From here, we’ll be leaving to the stadium for pre-game. That should start at around 12:45. We’ll do a round of BP in the cages, and then take infield. Nothing out of the ordinary. I’ll write back once we get back from the game. We play at 3 pm, so I should be back here at the hotel by about 7 pm.

Ok, so maybe I was wrong about 7 pm. From what they told me, it hasn’t rained here in about 2 months. We’ll, I think we got 2 months worth of rain today. The game started great. We were up 7-0 by the 4th inning. Danny Touchet was pitching a heck of a game. Our defense was sharp, and our batters were making great contact with the ball. Then, the rain started. Just when I thought it had stopped, it started pouring again. After being in a delay for about 1 hour, they told us that it would still rain for about another hour and a half. Then, they’d have to prep the field. At about 6:30, we decided to get all the players together and go get something to eat. From what they told us, FIU did the same thing. We got back to the stadium at about 7:45, where we started the game again at about 8 pm.

There were a lot of UF fans out in the parking lot waiting to get it. Since the UF vs. Bethune Cookman game was supposed to start at 7 pm; I think they realized that it would take quite a while before they got in.

Vince Bongiovanni picked up where Dan Touchet left off. He did a great job of keeping the FIU hitters guessing. By about 9 pm, the game was finally over. The Hurricanes beat the Golden Panthers 9-1. My first Regional game is now under my belt. I had a pretty good game, going 2-4. Danny Matienzo hit his 15th home run of the season and it was a pretty good shot off the scoreboard. Overall, it was a good effort on our parts.

When we got back to the hotel, there were about 20 Hurricanes fans waiting for us in the parking lot. I’ve got to say that our fans are great. There were a ton of them there at the game tonight, and it was nice to come back to the hotel to their cheers.

Tomorrow, we face the winner of tonight’s UF vs. Bethune Cookman. The game starts at 4 pm, but we’ll be up by around 9:30. Wish us luck.