Last weekend, as I have previously written, was a baseball weekend with Josh. On Friday night, we went to Milwaukee and had great seats. We sat in the third row just off to the third base side of home plate. We were so close, we could almost reach out and touch the guys in the on deck circle. The Brewers beat the Giants 4-2. The game was fairly uneventful until the top of the 9th inning when the Giants’ catcher (Nick Hundley) and manager (Bruce Bochy) were both tossed from the game because they were arguing balls and strikes. This is the first time on our tour that someone got tossed from the game. The other interesting thing was that scoreboard showed a batters OPS rather than his batting average. I didn’t care for it, but I guess I am a dinosaur. The roof stayed open all night.
Saturday we went to see the White Sox at Comiskey err, I mean Guaranteed Rate Field. (Really? Only the White Sox could manage to move away from US Cellular Field as their name and find a worse one.) The temperature was 68 degrees, but there was a bitter wind blowing off the lake. We sat four rows behind the Angels’ dugout. Trout clobbered two home runs and Ohtani, who was DH’ing, went 2 for 4. I was surprised at how tall Ohtani is; he is as tall or taller than Trout. The game was close until the top of the first when Angels’ scored three runs. The White Sox put up one in the bottom of the first to keep it respectable. The Angels put up another three in the third and we pulled out our forks because the Sox were done. In the 9th, the Angels put up another 6 runs to make the final score 12-2. Ohtani scored one of those runs by coming home on a wild pitch. The play was close, but he was safe.
While I love to travel with Sue, traveling for work is less enjoyable. I had a couple of trips this week. On Sunday afternoon, I drove down to Indianapolis for a Monday morning meeting. I came home Monday afternoon and then back out to Minnesota on Tuesday night. I flew to Minneapolis then drove about 2.5 hours southwest to a small town. I arrived at 9:10 pm and found out that all the restaurants in town were closed by that time. Oh well, no dinner. I had meetings all day on Wednesday and then retraced my steps to Minneapolis for an 8 pm flight home. Back in the house at about 10:30 pm. A long couple of days of no-fun work travel.
Yup. Another post about the best game in the world. Baseball. For those of you who missed the last installment of as the baseball spins, I will bring you up to date. Our intrepid baseball stadium travelers (Josh & Steven) visited Pittsburgh’s PNC Park in August to get to the midway mark in the stadium tour(*). This weekend we are doing a two-fer by visiting Miller Park in Milwaukee and the southern of the two Chicago stadiums.
Friday night we are going to Miller Park in Milwaukee. It is about a 90-minute drive and knowing Josh, we will need to be there 2 hours early in order to wander the stadium. It was 90 degrees here today, but by Friday, the high is expected to be about 70. Since it is a night game…we might be wearing jackets…Oh the winter is upon us! Miller Park is cool. It was one of the first retractable-roof baseball stadiums and the roof is a fan shape, so both sides open/close at the same time. Hopefully it will start out open and then at some point during the game they will close it. They used to open and close it after every game just because it is is cool to watch. We will see if they still do that.
Saturday night we are going to the stadium currently known as Guarantee Rate field. It used be called US Cellular Park, but everyone in Chicago still calls it Comiskey Park. It is an underwhelming stadium, build in the early 1990s. The original Comiskey Park was built in 1910, and in the late 1980s the owner of the White Sox convinced Tampa/St. Pete that he would move the team there if they built him a stadium. They built the incredibly awful Tropicana Field, but while they were building it, Chicago agreed to build the new Comiskey and the team stayed here. This led directly to the expansion of baseball with the Tampa Rays (at the time they were called the Devil Rays, but now it is just the Rays). Either way, the White Sox managed to move into a slightly less awful stadium in Chicago which seems to change names every 10 years.
Doing It On The Road 