The Lake Effect: Three down, three to go

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Three down, three to go

posted by Kristina @ 12:22 AM

Sunday, June 15, 2008

We've seen three of our six regularly scheduled games (not counting the White Sox @ Wrigley game that we can't afford unless we sell Shalar's children). Some observations:

- Pirates fans are really rude to fans of the visiting team, and they oughta cut it out. I saw the Pirates at Nationals Park and I didn't say a single rude thing to any Pirates fans. Rather, I felt a sort of pity for them. Or maybe it was empathy.

- Blue Jays fans aren't that excited by all the fans of the visiting team infiltrating their stadium, and I really can't blame them, since I survived a Nationals game that was absolutely infested with Chicago Cubs fans, and it's quite an unnerving feeling.

- Still, those Blue Jays fans should not taunt Cubs fans after the game, saying nasty things and leveling rather inappropriate personal insults, especially when they'd just won.

- I have to confess that I did say some rude things to a Cubs fan at Nationals Park; this was because I was brimming with anger about how many of them were at my team's park, and about how we were losing the game, and also because my friends had forced me to shotgun a beer before the game and my judgment was impaired. Mind you, I did not make any personal attacks. I just gave him crap about how the Cubs had been beaten by the worst team in baseball (at that point in the standings) the night before. So really I was insulting my own team. Sort of self-deprecating taunts. Also note that I immediately felt bad and immediately made a peace offering by giving him five when the Cubs scored the next two of the 260 runs they would score against the Nationals that night. And by the end of the game we were pals, and he told me that he too had shotgunned a beer just before the game! We bonded over that and our mutual Midwesternism, and I told him I really did hope this was the year for the Cubs. (Here I must tell you all how one of my colleagues likes to say that he hopes the Cubs do win the World Series this year so the Cubs fans will finally quit whining about how it's their year to win. Hear, hear!)

- If you like a team, it is maybe not best to buy tickets several rows behind their dugout, because then you end up with a really great view of the other team's dugout and a really stupid view of the top of the dugout of the team you like.

- I really don't like dome stadiums. I am clearer on this than Shalar is with her vague distaste. They feel small and artificial. Toronto was my third (see photo of the inside of Toronto's roof), having attended games at Chase Field in Phoenix back when its name was still BOB and Miller Park in Milwaukee.

- At all three of my dome games, the roof has been closed. (All three are retractable.) On Tuesday we will be in my fourth dome, the Metrodome, where open ain't an option.

- Canada was nice but I was glad to get back to the US.

- Detroit's stadium is pretty and has jillions of amenities and also lots of statues of Tigers (and a whole carousel of tigers!) and it was so great to see my college pal Amy and her husband Jamie and their three most adorable girls. Good baseball, great company. A+ for Detroit.

- It has been pointed out by an observer that we have missed 9 innings of baseball on this trip. Let me just remind you all that we're not in it for the batting practice, we're not in it for the first pitch, we're not in it for anything but the experience. Part of the experience is being late, at least in our experience. And we stay until the end ... OK, it's true we left the game at Yankee Stadium last year a bit early, but it's also true that the Yankees were beating the Rays 406-3 and we wanted to beat the traffic. Also we were driving up to a hotel Connecticut that night, making our way to Boston, and we didn't know this yet but we were about to get very lost trying to find the hotel. And we also didn't know this yet, but the hotel would suck. Anyway, we almost never leave early.

- One of us has done all the driving. I won't say which one, but I will say that I'm tired from doing all that driving.

- We're averaging 47.6 mpg. Rock! We've driven (ha ha, "we") about 900 miles. On the first mini-leg of the trip, driving from Baltimore airport to Frederick, my mpgs were 53. Yes you read that right. 53.

- Please note that any money I have saved by driving a hybrid and achieving such stellar mileage has been completely undone by buying a tank of gas in Canada, where they charge you about $14.50 a gallon, but they break the price down to Canadian dollars per liter, so you have no chance of figuring out what you're really paying unless you happen to be really smart, which I don't happen to be.

- It's getting to be time to sleep so that we can wake up early and then we can drive (ha ha, "we") to Chicago and see the Rockies @ White Sox game.

- Oh! A note to the two curmudgeonly readers who pointed out that my genius graphic is inaccurate because the home teams should be listed second in a vs. formation: Shut Up. I was trying to achieve an effect where the home teams are listed at a glance down the column on the left. GOSH.

-PS: My Nationals are, at this writing, enjoying their longest winning streak of the month: 2 straight games. Go Nats!

1 Comments:

At June 15, 2008 at 8:21 PM, Unknown said…

Wow, Shalar must really be putting down the hot dogs if your mileage has dropped 5 mpg.

Perhaps you could have satisfied both purists and the more casual fan if the format of the graphic had been:

PITTSBURGH - Nationals vs. Pirates
TORONTO - Cubs vs. Blue Jays.

'Course there's no pleasing some curmudgeons :) and you've correctly made it very, very clear that it's your trip and your blog and you can be wry if you want to...