A Grand Night Out

With my recent visit from Chuck still fresh in my memory (and now having to find a way to scrabble my way out from underneath a medical bill even bigger than my car repair surprise from last summer), it was a welcome relief to have a carefree, breezy late spring evening off to take in a Tribe/White Sox game at beautiful Jacob's Field.

This event was actually an unplanned surprise: Sarah had lucked her way into a pair of tickets at work a couple of days earlier (the original ticketholder's friend could not make the game and he simply gave the tickets away) and with only a minor amount of scrabbling about, I was able to get Brian to cover the evening hours on short notice. I met Sarah outside of her place of work, and we caught the RTA to Tower City, and made it to the park a little ways into the first inning.

Yes, Cleveland won the game, but that was secondary to the whole experience of the evening. I had been to a couple of games at the Jake back in the '90s that I took in from the upper bleachers (kind of like looking down on the first base line from about three stories up), but these seats were located about 30 rows behind home plate and that completely changed the entire affair. Instead of watching the game, it feels like you are right in the middle of it, especially with killer foul balls zooming bullet-like through the air around you (note to self: next time, bring a mitt for self-defense/possible souvenir acquisition).

Foul balls aside, it's a far more immersive trip to be able to call balls and strikes from your line of sight than having to trust the scoreboard. Being seated at a low angle to the playing field also gives a lot more depth to home run hits (or pop-flys, which happen to look a lot like home run balls from the bleachers), and the view of the city around that mammoth scoreboard is a beaut, especially as the sun set and the lights came on.



(While we were closer than the above picture suggests, this was the closest approximation of our view that I could find from image-searching on Google.)

Of course, half the fun of the ballpark is the food, the smells, and the sounds (jeez, why so much Kiss on the ballpark PA?) and everything else that sounds so hopelessly cliched but is 100% true. While it was rather darkly amusing that the concessions stands overlapped each other in offered foods (yet the booth you were at always seemed to be lacking one item you just saw at the previous stand), the snacks were ragingly yummy. Having been on a largely water-and-salad diet lately, it was sinfully fun to indulge in a few hot dogs, a tall Pepsi, a hot pretzel, a bag of Cracker Jacks, and a deee-licious Stricklands ice cream waffle cone. As the game was winding down, we headed over to the team shop where I scored a couple of snazzy t-shirts, and scoped out a few other knick-knacks and doo-dads that just might tempt me the next time we head down there. Hopefully, it won't be another decade.


NP Kate Bush Aerial