I hope to have more in-depth thoughts and impressions of Astros Spring Training in the next few days on The Crawfish Boxes, but I wanted to give a couple quick thoughts here while I start work on processing pictures and putting together some audio and maybe some video from the trip.

Spring Training is no place for beards and one year olds
I got to meet and talk to three really awesome people in the Astros organization: Tyler Heineman, Kevin Goldstein and Aaron West (meet him last year, but talked to him a lot longer this year).
Spring Training is exactly what it is, training. And while we like to think there's some big epiphany waiting to happen for players in Spring Training, the truth is that players are, for the most part, exactly who we thought they were.
It took me three years to get four autographs at Spring Training. It took my daughter one to get five autographs and four baseballs. I'm still looking for my first baseball.

I saw this first on Astros County today and man what a great video by Evan Drellich over at the Houston Chronicle caught at the backfields of Osceola County Stadium.

Good buddy David G. Temple picked it up at NotGraphs and I have to agree with his assessment that it is just absolutely perfect. It's so perfect in fact that I've made it into a notification sound on my phone. I'll have more on that up at The Crawfish Boxes tomorrow morning.

I'll be making my annual trip to Kissimmee, Florida, soon to see the Astros play and visit the backfields and this year I've decided to capture some of the sounds of Spring Training and make a soundscape. It'll probably end up being a post at TCB, but I'll also be sure to add it here.