I have been somewhat of a hiatus from the blogosphere. Sue has been doing all the heavy lifting of keeping our blog up to date and all of you informed of our travels. I am deeply grateful that she has been shouldering that burden, but the time has come for me to do some scribbling again.

Back in 2013 my son, Josh, and I decided to try and visit all the baseball stadiums. We expected it would take 4 or 5 years. Eleven years later, it seems that life has slowed us down, but we are still committed to the goal. At the start of the year, we had visited 21 of the 30 stadiums that were open when we started. This year we found time to visit two more.

A couple of weekends ago, Josh and his family were visiting friends in Denver and we took the opportunity to catch a game. Denver is a unique city in the U.S. because it is at 5,000 feet and the so the air is significantly thinner than any other baseball stadium. This means that the pitchers have more difficulty getting the ball to move when it is thrown, and that the ball flies farther when it is hit. Both are bad for the defensive team, but often lead to high scoring games.

We planned to fly in on Saturday morning and catch a game Saturday night. I booked a 9:30 am flight that was supposed to get me in around noon. However, there was a worldwide computer outage that was caused by a Security company called Crowdstrike. I hadn’t paid too much attention to the outage, until I watched as my flight time kept getting pushed back 10:30, 11:30, 12:30… When it got to 1:30 I started to get nervous. I knew that it would take 30-45 minutes to get from the airport to my hotel, and other 15-20 minutes to get to the stadium. The game was scheduled to start at 6:40, so I kept doing the math and tried not lose my mind. My flight finally took off at 2:30, I arrived at the hotel by 5:00, I quickly changed and walked to the stadium and found Josh already hanging out and watching the pre-game festivities.  

We lucked out and got tickets to Star Wars night and so many people were dressed in costume and they did a bunch of fun stuff to play into the theme. It is all in good fun. It was a very enjoyable game, with the home team winning 4-3. 

Two weeks later, we went to the Oakland Coliseum, primarily because it is scheduled to be the last year that the stadium is open. The Oakland baseball team, the Athletics, is moving to Las Vegas because their stadium is quite old and the city was unwilling to rebuild it to the team’s requirements. We decided to go to a Friday night game, and we flew in early in the day and went  to the game in the evening. Luckily both our flights left were on time and we met up at the airport.

Because the team is leaving Oakland (or perhaps to some degree they are leaving because) the attendance at their games has been very poor. In general, they draw about 9,000 fans per game (the major league baseball average is about 30,000), but we were lucky enough to see them play the Los Angeles Dodgers who have one of the best players in the league, Shohei Ohtani. The Dodger fans came in force and easily outnumbered the home team’s fans. It was another really enjoyable game. The Athletics jumped out to a 4-run lead and held until the top of the 7^th inning, when Ohtani came up with bases loaded and two outs. Unfortunately, he flew out, ending the inning. In 9^th he came up again and this time, hit a three-run home run, to bring them to within one run. Alas it was not to be, the next batter made and out and the game ended.

Josh headed right back to the airport for a red eye back to his family and I headed to my hotel and an early morning flight home to the empty apartment.