Category: brpa

Official Baseball-Related Program Activities, that is, Levi and Jim going to a baseball game together.

More trip preparations

1. I used the L.A. Times web site to stop my subscription for the two weeks I’m going to be out of town. As Levi might have expected, I’m fully intending to buy a local paper every day of the trip, except perhaps when we’re at my aunt and uncle’s house (because I think they get the Philadelphia Inquirer) and when we’re at his parents’ house (because they get the Carmi Times).

2. I finally remembered to call the Hilton Pittsburgh to request a rollaway bed, so that Levi doesn’t have to sleep in the bathtub, or curled up in a dresser drawer. Up to this point, I had been a little worried about the ability of the AAA web site hotel booking interface to actually communicate successfully with the various hotels’ computer reservation systems, but the Hilton did have my reservation in their system, so I guess we’re all set. “See you August 28th,” said the woman on the phone. Maybe I should have requested a room facing PNC Park, too, but I’m not sure they even have such a thing. (I think this is the only hotel on the trip within possible sight distance of a ballpark…I think the Holiday Inn Express in Detroit is a little too far from Comerica Park, with too many tall buildings in between.)

Original comments…

Toby: That’s the first time in the history of the U.S. that The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Carmi Times have been mentioned in the same paragraph.

thatbob: Actually, Jim, there is an ordinance that allows you to burn down tall buildings in Detroit if they obstruct a view and haven’t been used for anything in 50 years, so, you know, bring some matches.

Levi: Knowing Jim, I expect him any time we travel together, to have exact change for any tolls.

I’ll be more impressed if he also has exact change for any newspaper honor boxes he needs to use along the way.

And Toby, if you can schedule the pull-out section of the Times about Baseball Related Program Activities for the Monday, August 23rd edition, that would be great.

Toby: OK, but I’m going to need you to proofread it. In my last section (on the local summer baseball and softball teams), I forgot to mention the names of two of the businesses that sponsor the 40-some-odd teams in their respective cutlines and got a call from one of the omitted businesses, during which I was reminded (in a threatening manner) how much advertising that business buys with our paper.

I’m sure the same thing’s happened a million times at The Philadelphia Inquirer, don’t you think?

Jim: What the Philadelphia Inquirer has is the CEO of Citizens Bank calling the CEO of Knight-Ridder every time they don’t use the full name of the Phillies’ ballpark, I’m sure. But then it takes a while to trickle down to the people who actually work at the newspaper.

Preparations continue at a fever pitch

With all the excitement over the songs earlier today, I forgot to post something else that’s related to the trip. Today, I bought a rain poncho. Sorry, Levi, it’s blue, not red, so if it rains at the Cardinals game, I will stick out like a sore thumb, or perhaps I should say a bruised thumb. But I’m all set for rain at the Expos game.

I also bought a new set of luggage. My former luggage was a high school graduation present, and if you remember luggage technology from 1992, this will sound familiar to you: the two big suitcases from the old set have tiny little wheels on the bottom, and I’ve never been able to adequately roll them along when loaded because they have a tendency to tip sideways, and the attached straps you’re supposed to lead them with are way too short. So I pretty much ignored the wheels after a while.

But thanks to the great strides in luggage technology over the last 12 years, the new set is of the type with the big wheels and the telescoping handle, and from trying them out on the way to the cash register at Target, and then through the parking lot to my car, they seem to be working great. However, we’ll see what happens after American Airlines gets their grubby hands, and their grubby conveyor belts, all over them.

My only regret is that if I was going to buy a new set of luggage, I should have bought it before my trip to New York last month, where I had to schlep my possessions through such scenic locales as the stretch of 8th Avenue in Manhattan between 50th Street and 48th Street, Grand Central Terminal, and the halls of the Marriott in Trumbull, Connecticut (okay, Grand Central actually is scenic, but it’s better when you don’t have to carry two pieces of baggage from the subway station to Lower Level Track 107 via the men’s room). There’s going to be much less walking with luggage on the baseball trip, I predict, unless the car breaks down and we decide to abandon it and walk to the next baseball game, rather than waiting for Hertz to send a mechanic out.

Anyway, the new set of luggage includes one bag that’s the perfect size to hold all the materials from AAA, it turns out, although it is still to be determined what exact configuration of luggage is going to accompany me on the trip. I realize I’d better leave some room for souvenirs, for one thing.

Original comments…

Levi: Jim, you mean those old suitcases weren’t specifically designed to tip over? I can’t imagine what else they were designed for, since they must have failed perfectly in every laboratory test.

I can hear music

First of all, Maura passes along this awesome link from ESPN.com’s Page 3, in which they list the at-bat songs for many MLB players. (Page 3? How many numbered pages does ESPN.com have now, anyway?)

And to fulfill a request by Cushie, here are the songs on the “baseball” playlist on my iPod, conveniently in one list. Levi and hangers-on, don’t click on the link if you want to be surprised in the car, although many of the songs have been named on this blog in the past, in several different entries that I don’t feel like going back and looking up.

Original comments…

Cushie: Awesome!

Luke, hanger-on: Here are some songs on the BRPA 2004 playlist I’ve been assembling since becoming a hanger-on (most of which you have already, and some of which have relationships to baseball and roadtrips that are tenuous at best):

Catfish, Bob Dylan
Two Bass Hit, Dizzy Gillespie
Bang the Drum Slowly, Emmylou Harris
Mrs. Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel
Pirate Jenny, Nina Simone
Yanqui Go Home, Camper Van Beethoven
I Could Drive Forever, Smog
On the Road Again, Bob Dylan
On the Road Again, Willie Nelson
This is Not a Song About a Train, Andrew Bird

Plus a CD’s worth of Bob Edwards-Red Barber chats and Barber highlights that I’ve been saving for the trip.

Jim, you have iPodRip, right?

Jim: I don’t have iPodRip or anything similar, mainly because I’ve never had a need to get music from my iPod onto my computer. Although if iPodRip can export playlists into HTML or XML, and it looks like it can, it probably would have come in handy when I was creating the song list!

thatbob: If you’re doing spoken word pieces, you really need to find the famous Lee Elia rant against Cub fans. And if you can find Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly singing “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg” then… then… then that’ll be awesome!

Dan: And if you need the Lee Elia rant, lemme know, I’ve got it in MP3.

Piked!

Maybe we should have picked the first or second itinerary options, because then we would have beat the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll increase that takes effect Sunday.

But at least we’re not going to be driving a vehicle weighing 100,001 pounds or more! I think our Pennsylvania Turnpike toll is going to be $16.25; the heaviest of trucks would pay $636.00 between the same two interchanges. Actually, based on my previous experiences, if that toll rate keeps a few trucks off the turnpike, it’s good, because driving between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh gets very tedious when you’re having to pass hundreds of trucks that are going very slowly up the hills.

Original comments…

Luke: Ah, fond memories of how Sandy and I decided to take the turnpike to get to Maryland. (Sorry the display is all munged up, and I can’t link to the precise post. It’s the fifth one.)

Jim: What was then a $6.50 toll (from the Ohio state line to Breezewood) is now $9.50.

I guess I can’t compare the I-79/I-68 routing to Three Rivers Stadium anymore, since I-79 and I-68 are still in existence. Perhaps someday they will be replaced by or supplemented with high-speed railroad corridors, which I will then be able to compare to PNC Park.

Speaking of your 2001 trip, have I ever mentioned that I bought a Nikon 990 digital camera based on the loveliness of the pictures from that trip (which, alas, seem to have disappeared from your site)? Sometimes I wish I’d bought something a little smaller, but I have to admit it takes lovely pictures. Of course, it’s way out of date now, much like my third-generation iPod that will also be making the trip. These kids today, with their 8-megapixel digital cameras and their click-wheel iPods…

Levi: If all goes well, I’ll next weekend (at my brother’s wedding) be getting my sister’s extra iPod (She got one, then her husband won one), passing mine along to Stacey, who has less need for thousands of songs at her fingertips daily.

I don’t know how big this one is, but it’s bigger than my 5-gig one, that’s for sure.

Jim: Won one by buying the 97,600,000th song (or whatever) from the iTunes Music Store? If so, awesome! If not, slightly less awesome, but still awesome! I can’t even remember now how many total songs I won from Pepsi bottlecaps. If it’s a third-generation iPod, it’ll work with the car charger I’m bringing, so there will be no need to worry about having to charge up the battery in order to listen to Jack Benny.

I hope the game justifies the positive feedback

I have been checking eBay occasionally to see if anyone is selling tickets for the games on the trip. Finally, that paid off, because I found someone selling his 18-rows-behind-the-plate season seats for the August 23rd Tigers-White Sox game. I gambled on not using “Buy It Now,” and that paid off as well; I ended up being the only bidder, so I got them for his starting price, a significant discount from the face value. The tickets came in the mail today.

I didn’t post anything about this before now because I didn’t want any of the miscreants who read this blog to bid on the tickets and bump the price up. These will probably be the best seats we have for any game on the trip, except perhaps Davenport, or Montreal.

Alternate universe version of the trip number two, almost finished

Indians 5, Royals 1. Brand-new Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley started his career in Cleveland, which I didn’t realize until I looked him up just now.

Tomorrow: Speaking of brand-new Hall of Famers, it’s Milwaukee, home to Paul Molitor for most of his career. This was pretty well-planned, eh?

Back here in the real world, on the lookout for airplane reading material for the trip, I came across “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy” on the bargain shelves at Barnes & Noble for $3.98.

Alternate universe version of the trip number two, continued

Blue Jays 4, Devil Rays 2. The Rays’ winning streak of June is now but a distant memory.

Tomorrow: Cleveland! Actually, it’s late enough that it’s later today, really. My excuse is that, since this is only a pretend version of the trip, I can go to a friend’s birthday karaoke party in real life.

Alternate universe version of the trip number two, continued

Expos 2, Marlins 1. I don’t know, Les Poissons didn’t look like World Series champs to me. But maybe that’s because I’m still bitter.

Tomorrow: Toronto, and at last, I won’t look so out of place with the Devil Rays cap I’ve been wearing this whole time!

Original comments…

Jason: You should probably have washed your Rays hat by now. Just because you’re in a French-speaking region, that’s no excuse to drop your sanitary habits.

Alternate universe version of the trip number two, continued

Yankees 10, Blue Jays 3. No Jeter! No Giambi! Yankees still win. Levi grumbling about not being able to watch the Cardinals’ current awesomeness.

Wait a minute. What am I doing up so late? We’ve got to get up early to make it to a day game in Boston tomorrow!

Alternate universe version of the trip, number two

The answer to the question posed at the end of this entry is, no, I won’t remember when July 17th rolls around. So here’s the first half of Itinerary Number Two…

Saturday, July 17: Cubs 5, Brewers 0. A complete-game shutout for Greg Maddux!

Sunday, July 18: Tigers 4, Yankees 2. The Tigers get their 44th win, one more win than they had all last season!

Monday, July 19: Expos 6, Pirates 2. A rare Expos win!

Tuesday, July 20: Marlins 9, Mets 7. A seesaw battle in the Big Apple!

Tomorrow: The Bronx! Also: More exclamation points?!