6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

How Marriott Ate My WiFi

We've been going to spring training now for four years, and this is the first one that we haven't spent at the Days Inn Mesa. Instead, we're at the Springhill Suites Marriott in Tempe, not too far away from the Angels' home park. Looking strictly at the lodging, the quarters here are noticeably superior to Days Inn: not only do we have the usual bed/bathroom/TV/minimal furniture combo, but we also get a sizable desk and chair, a kitchenette with a fridge, microwave, and single-basin sink, and a little cupboard to boot. However, there's one thing here, one peculiar absence, that's made itself felt especially strongly that needs mention.

Internet access.

What we took for granted at the relatively middle-of-the-road (and frankly, quite affordable) Days Inn is now an extra-charge item at the Marriott. In Mesa, you got free WiFi in all the rooms; here, no WiFi in the rooms, only the lobby, and more, 10BaseT Ethernet that's free only for the first day and only up to 384kbps, not nearly enough to stream, and just adequate to make you wonder whether you were having latency issues. If you want 1.5 Mbps, you've gotta pay something like $30 for the week per MAC address, which means both the wifey and I (inadvertently) ended up spending $60 on access only one of us could use at a time. Sure, you can slip down to the lobby and use their free WiFi there, but that's an inconvenience if you've also gotta haul around your camera bag and (as I do) breakfast in the morning, or you just plain want to work in the privacy of your own hotel room.

I can sort of understand the decision-making process here; at some point, you have to go with a particular technology to support your guests. Probably at the time the Marriott people did so, 10BaseT made sense and was perfectly reasonable, especially considering downlink speeds from the Internet, and the costs involved in wiring every freakin' room. So, they figure, let's pencil it out for a few years and see how long it takes to get back all those labor costs. "A while", I suspect was the answer, and so now we have 10BaseT in our room.

One of the most annoying things I ever encountered while traveling was Hyatt's policy of nickle-and-diming you to death for every last thing; at the downtown Chicago hotel near UI, they had mandatory valet parking with a daily surcharge, and maybe the greatest insult of all, obscene rates for calling 800 numbers (this was in the days before national cellphone coverage was ubiquitous and cheap, i.e., about 1997). It left such a bad taste in my mouth, I vowed never to stay at a Hyatt again.

I'm not quite there with Marriott, but I'm definitely at the "if we can avoid them, do" stage. The chain has seen better days, as witness an event that happened at LOSCON 33 at the LAX hotel. I went with three others into the hotel restaurant and waited 20 minutes without even being offered so much as a glass of water. Compounding matters, the shift manager did inform us that she emphatically was not our waitress as she came by to take our silverware. We left without ordering.

Fry's Imagination Runs Dry

So it seems like Marriott lately is just misfiring in some rather visible areas. Next year, we're back at the Days Inn, I think, but in the meantime, we're booked here, and we're not sufficiently upset to cancel the rest of our stay and try to find lodging elsewhere. So, in order to set things up so we can both use the network at once, we went over to the Fry's Electronics in Tempe, just across the 101, to pick up a cheapie WiFi router to attach to the hotel's wired network.

Those used to the California Fry's will be in for a huge disappointment. One of the best things about Fry's was their theme designs; Anaheim is space exploration, Fountain Valley is ancient Rome, Burbank is 50's B-movie space invaders, Manhattan Beach is tiki, and so on.

But then Fry's bought Incredible Universe, a failed venture of Tandy, parent of Radio Shack. The store is simply ginormous — if I had to guess, two or three times the size of even the largest Southern California Fry's — but dull as dishwater.

We took our $30 router and got out of there before we spent more money. I hate Fry's. I love Fry's.

Bringing A Knife To A Gunfight

Back to the game. We found ourselves ensconced at Hohokam again, this time under the awning for a laugher between the B-team Mariners and the (mostly) A-team Cubs. The Cubbies trotted out Wade Miller, the former Astro now hopefully recovered from arthroscopic shoulder surgery, and likely now after a solid spring to get the job of fifth starter in Wrigleyville.

The M's, on the other hand, started Ryan Feierabend, the M's fifth-best prospect according to Baseball America, a 22-year-old southpaw control specialist with 88-92 MPH heat hot enough to save him from the "soft-tossing lefty" sobriquet. His specialty is a circle change that he sets up with a sinker or cut fastball. Feierabend has a couple breaking pitches, but neither of them are major league ready — something we got to find out rather presently.

Now, at this point I should probably admit to two things:

1. The family that lived next to us until I was about 12 or so had the last name of Feierabend. Their oldest son was the neighborhood bully, giving me years of trouble until they finally moved away. Years later, we heard rumors about a dishonorable discharge from some branch of the service, news which tickled my schadenfreude funny bone.
2. Our former neighbors pronounced their surname FIRE-ah-bend; Ryan, FEAR-bend.

Well, if there was any fear, it was the Mariners quaking and not the Cubs, as Feierabend — however you want to pronounce it — gave up eight runs, six of them on homers, and two of those taters in the first inning as the Cubbies batted around. They weren't cheapies, either, as the balls struck against him mostly cleared the left field berms. Mostly, it was because he was leaving his pitches up in the zone, but once he managed to get some down, round about the end of the second inning, he accumulated more than a few meek tappers.

But the high-octane results weren't unexpected; setting a mostly major league lineup against a guy who's never pitched at a level higher than AA is asking for detonations. The most exciting screwup by the Cubs was a two-base error by Cliff Floyd that the M's turned into an unearned run; and Adrian Beltre clouted a ball to left that Floyd drifted back, back, back on, until finally it snuck, warm and dry, over the fence. But by then, the game was long lost, and affairs dragged on through a parade of name changes and linebacker numbers without names on the uniforms for the Mariners. It was enough, and for those remaining in the ninth, the early exiters — I guess even Cubs fans are willing to leave in the seventh when they see a spring training blowout — provided us with an easy egress of our own.

Recap/Box

Labels: cubs, mariners, spring training