baseball

Root, root, root for the home team

/ Greg / 5 Comments

How’s this for a laid back Sunday on the west coast – sleep in, go for a long beach walk (with a delicious mid-stroll stop for a feed of crab), then an early evening baseball game… pretty good vacation day eh?  I’m always excited to visit a new stadium, and Petco Park in San Diego is one of the nicest I’ve been to.   Like usual, we arrived early to wander around, but unfortunately, there was no batting practice to watch.   As you can see by my face, that didn’t faze me too much.

Me and my wife at the Padres game

Like most of the newer ballparks, Petco doesn’t really have a bad seat anywhere.  At least on our exploring, we didn’t come across one.   Deep down the first base line, these seats would be ok by me:

Petco Park from right field seats

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The trip I most want to take

/ Greg / 3 Comments

This weekend, Montreal is playing host to a couple of preseason baseball games and more than 90,000 people will show up to watch. They’ll do that not because they’re fans of meaningless Blue Jays exhibition games, but because going to a baseball game in that city means something deeper to them.  Although I won’t be there for the games this weekend, I count myself in that group.

The trip I most want to take is to travel to Montreal with my Dad to see the first home opener of our resurrected and beloved Expos.   My Dad is turning 76 this year and although there’s renewed interest in Montreal as a possible site for a team, it’s still a long, long way off, if it ever happens at all. So at this point, it’s a bit of a fantasy trip, but the optimist in me holds out hope of living it someday.

My first experiences of traveling were back in the early 1980s when Dad took me to see some Expos games a couple of summers in a row. We had a lot of fun in the city getting away with things Mom would never have allowed at home: eating deep fried food, having ice cream for breakfast, chasing pigeons in city parks (I was only 8 at the time and I had never seen so many pigeons in one place before), Dad partaking in an afternoon beer and passing his bottle of Budweiser beer to me to hold while he took a picture of me.  To this day the smell of a Bud takes me back to that very moment.   Good times.  But most of all from those trips, I remember the baseball. I remember the bright lights and the event of it all.

At my first Expos game

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A summer night at Fenway

/ Greg / 3 Comments

This has been a great baseball year for me.  At the time of visiting Boston in July, I had already been to a Cubs game, White Sox game, and three Blue Jays games.  All of those were incredibly fun, but I think I saved the best for last for my first visit to Fenway to see a Red Sox game.  I’m a baseball fan and will always go to a game if I’m visiting a city during its team’s home stand, but seeing a game at Fenway is something particularly special that I had wanted to do for a long, long time.

On a very humid July evening, my wife and I arrived at Fenway to get inside as early as possible.  Lots of others had the same idea:

Waiting outside Fenway Park

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Jays games with Dad

/ Greg / 3 Comments

I’m having a pretty good year of seeing baseball so far – a couple of early season games in Chicago, a recent game in Boston, and back in May, my Dad and I took in three Blue Jays games in Toronto.   This is the second time over the past few years that we’ve moved into my sister’s downtown apartment while she was away, stocked up the fridge with a few days supply of Steam Whistle, and then spent most of our time down at the place formerly known as SkyDome.

For the first of the three games, the Phillies were in town to start a short two game series.   Dad and I were camped out way up in the 500 level with vertigo-inducing seats:

With Dad at Jays game

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A night on the south side

/ Greg / 4 Comments

I’ll admit something that may not be kosher with traditional baseball fans.   I greatly preferred the experience of watching baseball on the south side of Chicago in the home of the White Sox compared to taking in a game at Wrigley.   Not that Wrigley is without its charms – far from it.   But a game at Wrigley is a bit like watching baseball in a theme park dedicated to what it was like to watch baseball fifty years ago.

The White Sox play at the much more modern and comfortable US Cellular Field about a fifteen minute train ride south of downtown Chicago.  Given the relative lack of popularity of the White Sox, I was able to snag a prime seat right behind home for the game.  I made a beeline to my seat to get a sense of how good I’d have it for the night.  I was pretty happy with my selection:

Me at the White Sox game

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Another return from Toronto

/ Greg / Leave a comment

It’s not quite an annual tradition, but my Dad and I try to make it up to Toronto as often as we can to take in some Blue Jays games and check out a few sights from around the city.   Lately, we’ve been pretty solid good luck charms for the Jays, and it was no different on this trip with the home team winning two of the three games we saw.  We also seem to inspire the best in Edwin Encarnacion on our visits.  He might want to include some free tickets and a plush downtown condo for us in his next contract negotiations.  Here he is circling the bases after one of three monster home runs he hit while we looked on:

Blue Jays game at Rogers Centre

A second trip to Toronto in 2014 for me, this was a really nice three days with my Dad.  There was a lot of time at Rogers Centre for the games, a trip to the new aquarium at the base of the CN Tower, some time over on the Toronto Islands on a pleasant spring day, a visit to the St. Lawrence Market and more than a couple of ice cold Steam Whistle beers enjoyed while just generally hanging out.  I’ll write more in the coming weeks on a few new to me experiences in Toronto.

Feeling like Ferris Bueller

/ Greg / 6 Comments

I didn’t have a Ferrari at my disposal, and wouldn’t make it to the Art Institute until later in the trip, but spending a midweek afternoon at Wrigley Field had me feeling at least a little bit like Ferris on his famous day off.  Ferris certainly had a much nicer day to take in a ballgame than I ended up with.  But I was on vacation, the rain mostly held off, and in all honesty, it’s pretty hard to have a bad time taking in a game at the virtually 100 year old Wrigley Field.

Shortly after the gates opened on a very blustery and damp early April day, I took a seat to catch a bit of Pittsburgh’s batting practice:

Batting practice at Wrigley

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Behind the scenes at Wrigley

/ Greg / Leave a comment

As I get ready for my upcoming trip to Chicago in a couple of weeks, one of the things I’m really looking forward to is (weather permitting) getting to my second Cubs game at Wrigley field.   Four years ago, my wife and I snagged upper deck seats for a late season afternoon game against the Cardinals and had a great time.   We also carved out some time to do a tour of Wrigley Field to see it in a quieter setting and to get a bit of a behind the scenes peek.

The morning tour started in the famed bleachers, and from here, you can fairly easily feel the history of the place:

Bleachers at Wrigley Field

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Ok Blue Jays, Let’s Play Ball!

/ Greg / Leave a comment

A confluence of events brought my Dad and I to Toronto.  I had a few vacation days to burn, my sister was traveling which left her condo available for us, Dad had the points for a free flight, and the Blue Jays were wrapping up a home stand against Seattle and Texas.  That made plans for a three day trip come together very quickly.

Saturday:  Three days, three baseball games, and a steady diet of cardiac arrest inducing food and drink kicked off shortly after arrival at mid day.   After touching down on separate flights, we met up at the condo, quickly unpacked and made our way down to the stadium.    Before entering, we pass underneath this sculpture outside Rogers Centre (“The Audience” by Michael Snow) which always makes me smile:

Not knowing much about the Seattle Mariners, we take in batting practice to try and learn about some of their hitters:

We make our way up to our seats for the Saturday afternoon game.  Not too shabby for $14.  I have to pinch myself that I can see professional sport for less than the cost of a junior hockey game in Halifax.  Jays win 7-0 in a very entertaining game:

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