Every summer I take a four or five day baseball trip. The calculus is normally fairly simple – where can my airline points get me and where is there a decent deal on a nice hotel. As long as there’s baseball and summer nights with a cold beer in my hand, the teams and the city don’t matter too much. While I was planning my trip this year, I had more trouble than normal finding a combination that would work in my schedule. I went through permutations for Milwaukee, St. Louis, Denver, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and a host of other cities until I found that the only place my about to expire United points would get me to was Baltimore. Never really had any desire to visit Baltimore, but Camden Yards and the promise of four days of fresh crab was too good to pass up.

After flying on a red-eye flight through Toronto and sleeping in Pearson for a couple of hours (using points isn’t always glamorous), I arrived in Baltimore slightly jet-lagged, but happy to walk into Camden Yards – a temple of baseball on a scorching hot Saturday night. She’s a beauty ballpark.

My ticket for night one was a nose-bleed el-cheapo seat in case something happened with my travel from Saskatoon. As it was the only night I’d be in the upper deck, I wandered around pre-game a bit. The view from up here is pretty nice too.

My seat for the first night was only just barely inside the ballpark down the left field line.

But from here I had a perfect view of two no-doubter Mike Trout home runs in his first two at bats. Even if I was a bit far away from the action, I enjoyed the atmosphere from up here.

A sudden thunderstorm in the seventh inning sent most of the 44,000 fans home and opened up a much nicer seat for me to take in the final innings. Not a bad way to start my baseball trip. The Orioles fans wouldn’t agree with me as their team lost 5-1.

After a much needed great night of sleep, I was back at Camden Yards for the Sunday afternoon series finale between the Orioles and Angels. Like all my baseball trips, I rocked my Expos shirt for a couple of games here. Interestingly, near the end of this game someone approached me not because of my shirt, but because of my Roughriders hat asking “Are you from Saskatchewan?” I did a double-take not understanding how I knew this guy until he pointed at my hat. He had been a huge Baltimore Stallions fan when they were in the CFL. I was not expecting someone to know about Saskatchewan, but he had remained a Montreal Alouettes fan when the team left Baltimore and moved back to the proper side of our border (my view, not his).

I had picked a much nicer seat for the Sunday game in the infield in the lower level. With the temperatures pushing 35C, I was glad to have picked a seat in the shade. The Orioles lost their second game of my trip 5-4 in a close back and forth game that had lots of late inning drama.

With so much time spent at the ballpark over four days, I had a decent chance to sample some Camden Yard delicacies. Crab cakes, crab waffle fries with cheese sauce and Old Bay (amazing, spicy, probably took a year off my life) and their famous Boog’s pit beef sandwich helped sustain me through the games.

 

Monday night saw a change of teams with the Oakland A’s visiting. Here’s where you can tell I’m a bit of a baseball nerd. The A’s were well out of the playoff picture with a team of guys I had never heard of… but I was still jazzed to be here and was hanging on every pitch, especially with this vantage point where I could watch the movement and location of pitches.

The Orioles dominated, crushing four home runs in a 7-3 win. Adam Jones had two including this one that had the Orioles mascot dancing on the dugout as Jones rounded the bases.

With the game’s result mostly not in doubt, I watched the final inning from the left field bleachers, mostly because in all my baseball travels, I haven’t spent much time watching games from this vantage point. In the ninth inning, I was fascinated by how many handfuls of sunflower seeds the Orioles left fielder crushed. Baseball is probably the only professional sport where you can snack while playing.

Day four, game four, and I had saved my best seat for last. About 20 rows behind the A’s dugout, I was going to be close enough to hear the batters curse out the home plate umpire.

Compared to last year’s baseball trip to Minneapolis where three of the five games were complete blow-outs, I got another entertaining game as a finale. After Oakland jumped out to a 5-0 lead, the Orioles chipped away to get it back to a one run deficit, and even got the tying runs on base late before losing 6-4.

Four days and four entertaining games in one of the most beautiful settings for baseball in America… My yet to be determined 2018 baseball trip has a lot to live up to.