Today, we continue our series Weekend Road Trips with a look at how far two cities with famous minor league baseball teams are from each other. The two cities are Pawtucket, RI, where the Pawtucket Red Sox play, (triple-A team for the Boston Red Sox) and Las Vegas, Nev., where one can see both a Las Vegas 51s game and an expensive-as-all-get-out show from Wayne Newton on the same night.
We are actually going to measure the distance between Modern Diner in Pawtucket, which has been featured in the great "Zippy the Pinhead" comic strip, and Ibo Turkish Restaurant, which we assume serves our favorite meat dish Adana kebab, on West Flamingo Road in Las Vegas. According to the "Providence Phoenix," the Modern Diner serves very good pumpkin pancakes!
The Pawsox are currently on the road in Syracuse, NY, today, where they are playing the Syracuse Chiefs. The team's web site reported that they were winning 2-1 in the bottom of the fifth inning. The Pawsox are playing the Chiefs on a double-bill as we speak. They return to Rhode Island on Saturday to host the Buffalo Bisons. On April 30, the Pawsox will have a special fireworks display after their game with the Toledo Mudhens.
While we were looking at the PawSox's web site, we saw that Yamaico Navarro, a shortstop from the Dominican Republican, was at bat for the road team. The team also consists of his countrymen Tony Pena Jr., a 30-year-old pitcher for the PawSox whose father Tony Pena was a major-league all-star who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and five other teams.
As for the Las Vegas 51s, they are named for Area 51 which is a military base that is 80 miles north of town; it is also where UFO believers feel that ETs have passed by so perhaps it serves as their Atlanta (forgive the airline passenger humor).
Actor Billy Bob Thornton once wore a 51s team hat on a late-night talk show. The next home game for the team will be against the Fresno Grizzlies tommorow night at 7:05 p.m. local time.
Brad Mills, a pitcher who is almost exactly 15 years younger than me (he is 26, his birthday March 5 is a day after mine), was pitching for the 51s today in a road game at Sacramento. Mills played college baseball for the University of Arizona.
Though the two teams are in different Triple-A leagues and could only play each other in the Minor League World Series, today we are asking how far from each other these two zip codes are.
Is the answer:
A) 39 hours, 57 minutes
B) 40 hours, 57 minutes
C) 41 hours, 57 minutes
D) 42 hours, 57 minutes
PS_ The answer to last week's road quiz was A) 26 hours is the distance between New Haven, Conn., and Colorado Springs, Colo.
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scary pic
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