Tag: padres

All I can eat

I went to Dodger Stadium tonight with a big group from my office. Our seats were in the right field pavilion, which happens to be the all-you-can-eat section. What that means is that some of the food is free — hot dogs, nachos, peanuts, popcorn, and Coke, as served by concession stands that have no lines unless someone is attempting to pay for the free food — and then there are some other concession stands selling beer, ice cream, and candy.

(You may notice that the ticket stub above shows the group name; unfortunately, it was too late to get it changed from “Yahoo! Content Solutions” to “Smellosaurus Rex.” Actually, if there was a point at which they showed the names of all the groups in attendance on the scoreboard, I missed it.)

The view from right field is pretty good…

It’s a fine place to get some studying done…

Not particularly baseball related, but I notice that although Spanish for “high definition” is “alta definition,” they’re still abbreviating it “HD”…

In conclusion, it turns out that three Dodger Dogs, two Cokes, and an order of nachos is all I can eat.

Oh, yeah, Dodgers 6, Padres 3. The starting pitchers were Greg Maddux for

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the Padres and David Wells for the Dodgers, so I believe the total age of the starters was something like 119.

Sorry, Devil Rays

This site, called Cool Standings, shows the major league baseball

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standings — including expected wins, expected losses, and their calculation of each team’s chances to win the division, win the wild card, and make it to the playoffs, period. The Red Sox currently have a 96.5% chance of making the playoffs; the Padres are tops in the NL, with a 90.9% chance.

If you click on each team’s name, you get more stats, including

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a graph showing how their playoff chances have risen and fallen during the season. The one for the Yankees is particularly recommended.

Notes on a gray Saturday

1) On the broadcast of today’s Cubs/Padres game:

Pat Hughes: Be careful with this guy, Ron: he spells his name Cla–no “y,” but it’s pronounced “Clay.” I thought it was a mistake. It disturbed me. I couldn’t sleep last night. These things are important.

Ron Santo: You’re bothered a lot of the time, aren’t you?

Pat Hughes: Can’t you tell?

2) Cardnilly heard two people in the stands at Busch Stadium talking about Juan Encarnacion:

Inmate-looking guy [re-emerging from the concourse]: Say, who hit that last home run?
Mildly frightened bystander: Oh, one of the new guys. I forget his name…
ILG: Was it Incarceration?
MFB: Yep. That was the guy.

3) Operation Shutdown may be over, unless Derek Bell can talk the judicial system into letting him continue his workless protest.

4) Pedro has a green thumb. Now if only he’d grow out his hair again, I could wholeheartedly root for him.

5) Congratulations to Jim, who made the 600th post to this blog earlier in the week.

If baseball games were decided by "number of cool things in the stadium"…

The banner at Petco Park that turned “Western Metal Supply Co.”

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into “Western Division Champions” was very clever. Perhaps in New Busch Stadium, the Cardinals can have a legend under the scoreboard clock reading “Central Time” that can be appropriately altered in applicable Octobers.

Salt of the Game

Today I offer a toast to a player whom you’re unlikely ever to have given a second thought to: longtime bench player Mark Sweeney.

Sweeney, a lefty, was born in 1969 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and he attended the University of Maine before being drafted by the California Angels in the 9th round of the 1991 draft. He was traded to the Cardinals in 1995 and made his debut on August 4th of that year against the Cubs, going 1-4 with an RBI groundout in a loss. He remained a Cardinal until midway through 1997, playing outfield and first base, at which point he was traded to the Padres (for, among others, Fernando Valenzuela). Since then, he’s been with the Padres, Mets, and Rockies, with 2005 finding him back in San Diego.

His career batting line is .256/.349/.392, and he’s never even 200 at-bats in a season. For his 11-year career, he’s hit 27 home runs, or five more than Sosa hit in June of 1998. But all in all, a solid major league career, something to be proud of.

And he’s always been a favorite for some reason, a player I keep an eye on every season. Why? I’m not really sure. Part of it’s his batting eye, definitely. Ever since the first time I read Bill James back in 1990 (when he confirmed my suspicion that all those walks Jack Clark used to take were extremely helpful), I’ve liked players with a good eye. I’ve also always had a soft spot for bench players who do one or two things well and seem, by all appearances, to accept their role. And I enjoy rooting for the Lesser Sweeney, forever playing in the shadow of Mike Sweeney, who, though drafted a round after Mark and making his debut a month later, has been a much better hitter (.305/.377/.498) and a four-time All-Star and has made nearly 20 times what Mark Sweeney has made.

But that’s about all the reasons I have. Not a lot, really, but even so, every spring when the Cardinals are stocking their bench, I keep hoping they’ll pick up Mark Sweeney. And each year I hope his team will make the postseason, and he’ll get a chance at a Tito Landrum–Timo Perez-type postseason moment, forever lodging himself in the memories of some team’s fans.

So the next time I raise a glass, it’ll be to Mark Sweeney.

The first tangible sign of spring

Hey, the Phillies tickets showed up in the mail already! We’ll actually be meeting up with my aunt and uncle at the game and our mutual friend Maura, so I’m going to mail those people’s tickets to them ASAP.

On another note, I bought Padres tickets over the weekend for a May game against the Cubs. This isn’t directly relevant to the road trip, except that both the Padres and the Phillies are going to be playing in new stadiums in 2004, so it’ll be fun to do a comparison and contrast. The Padres’ stadium, Petco Park, already gets points for being named after something warm and fuzzy (well, as warm and fuzzy as a chain store can be, i.e., much warmer and fuzzier than Wal-Mart), whereas the Phillies’ stadium, Citizens Bank Park, loses points for being yet another stadium named after a cold, impersonal bank. Actually, at least it’s a bank that still has “bank” in its corporate name, unlike its baseball stadium naming rights counterpart across Pennsylvania, PNC.

What? More baseball?

While we’re waiting for Levi to regale us with tales of cute, furry kittens insinuating his dreams, here are some pictures from the two baseball games I went to over the past few days. Jason had some Dodgers vouchers to use up before the end of the season, so he, Cathryn, and I went to the Dodgers-Padres game last Thursday…

The colored seats at Dodger Stadium, a picture taken because who knows when they’re going to decide to put in new chairs?…

This is the right-field pavilion, which I guess we could have bought all the seats in, but didn’t think of it before the beginning of the season the way some people did…

Jason had a big bowl of nachos and a big drink…

The final line (the Dodgers didn’t do much)…

Slightly less blurry, the final score…

An artistic shot of the Los Angeles skyline on the way out…

Sunset Boulevard: not just a movie starring Gloria Swanson, it’s also a Dodger Stadium parking lot exit…

Three days later, Jason and I went to Angel Stadium of Anaheim, or whatever it’s really called now, to see the Angels play the Rangers.

Jason wanted to say hi to the mummified body of Gene Autry…

Then he had another big bowl of nachos (I assume that’s sour cream on top and not icing)…

And a soda in a magical color-changing plastic cup (red, or at least pink, when full; clear when empty)…

During the game, a train stopped at the Anaheim station, across the parking lot. Unfortunately, the Amtrak schedule is not well-suited for taking train trips to Angels games…

Not only can you see trains from the stadium, you can also see the Matterhorn at Disneyland, which I’ve pointed out with the red arrow in this picture…

Yes, the Angels have some retired numbers…

They also have some fake rocks and real water…

The end of the rows of seats have an Angels logo on a raised baseball-diamond shape. They’re covering what’s actually molded into the seats: an Edison International logo on a baseball diamond…

Now that they’re not owned by Disney anymore, the Angels are free to get some other family entertainment spots as their sponsors…

And other family-oriented sponsors…

They still make some of the ushers go out on the field for the seventh-inning stretch, but now they have to take off their straw hats for “God Bless America”…

And put their hats back on for “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (which, at this game, was sung by the same woman who had just done “God Bless America,” I guess because they figured as long as she was on the field with a microphone, she might as well)…

Meanwhile, during most of this, Rangers rookie pitcher Chris Young was on the mound being tall…

Which means it was time to break out, yes, the Rally Monkey!…

Didn’t work, and what is probably my last game of the season ends just as my first game of the season did, with a win by the visiting Texas Rangers…

Original comments…

Jon Solomon: Chris Young is a friend of mine from when he played basketball (and baseball) at Princeton. I got to go to Fenway as a member of “the media” a few weeks ago to cover his first MLB win. They let me go on the field, in the locker room and everything. What were the Red Sox thinking? I’ve got an interview with Chris from after the game up on princetonbasketball.com. If you want a password to listen, just let me know.

Jason: I suggested stopping by the Hooters of Anaheim after the game. However, Jim declined, since he was TiVo-ing the Bucs-Seahawks game and didn’t want to know the score.

But when I got home, I did drink a quart of Jack Daniels.

Jim: Hmm, what a coincidence. But in my case, I needed it to help me forget the Bucs-Seahawks game.

A waffle at the beach is a sandy Eggo

First of all, yes, there was the obligatory letter to the sports editor in Saturday’s L.A. Times complaining about people at Dodger Stadium doing the wave during Alex Cora’s marathon at-bat.

Today I went to one of 2004’s new ballparks, Petco Park, with Cathryn and Jennifer (and Jason, who took this picture)…

It is a very nice place, albeit colder than Qualcomm Stadium, thanks to the breezes coming off San Diego Bay, and the fact that we were under the overhang. In fact, we were in the very top row of the upper deck section to the left of the “first base tower” in the picture below…

In the top row, there’s some bizarreness involving the steel supports holding up the overhang, so although we had seats 7 through 10, there was about a 6-inch gap between seat 7 and seat 8, although it wasn’t like there was a giant metal post in the way or anything like that. (There was also a gap of about 18 inches between seat 6 and seat 3. Seats 4 and 5 were missing.) Anyway, this is the view of the diamond from way up there…

And this is the view of downtown San Diego. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get a picture of a plane landing (they come in just beyond the skyscrapers, eventually disappearing behind them)…

The lawn looked like a nice place to hang out…

So did the seats in front of the Western Metal Supply building…

And if you’ve got to pick one Padres player to hang out with, it’s got to be David Wells…

The final line…

In conclusion, Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, where we’ll be on August 27th, has a lot to live up to. I already think it’s going to lose points for not being right downtown. But it may gain points for being warmer than Petco Park…next time, I’m going to wear long pants and at least bring a sweatshirt. Or try to get seats at least a few rows farther down, which will be in the sun.

Original comments…

maura: how about that ben sheets!!

Levi: On paper, the building they left in left field struck me as really dopey, almost as bad as the flagpole and hill at Bush/Cheney Field in Houston–though not nearly as bad as the stupid train at the same park.

But now that I’ve seen the new San Diego park on TV, I’ve changed my mind. The building’s kinda cool.

Jim: What? Trains are not stupid. The fact that Houston has better train service at their baseball stadium than they do at their actual train station (a 3-day-a-week Amtrak train to L.A. and Orlando) is kind of stupid, but me ranting about inequities in government transportation funding is off-topic for this blog.

Levi: Actually, the train in Houston is remarkably similar to Amtrak rides I’ve taken. You sit on it for a long time and it doesn’t go anywhere. Then it goes, but only a short way, at which point it stops and changes direction. Then you sit again for a long time.

But at least the train doesn’t turn into a bus.

sandor: Trains going forwards and backwards and forwards again? Sounds like my trip on the L yesterday. Halfway between Irving Park and the Addison, the brown line train I was on stopped, then started going in reverse. In 10 years of riding L trains, I’ve never experienced such a thing happening. I didn’t even realize they had a reverse gear. It was quite shocking.

Sorry, off-topic. But I thought worth sharing.

thatbob: “Thank you for not requesting autographs”?!? WTF?!?

thatbob: Now obviously those seats at Western Metal Supply Co. are supposed to be reminiscent of Wrigleyville rooftops, or that book depository (or whatever) in Baltimore. What I can’t figure out is if the seats are actually part of the park, ie. ticketed revenue, or just an authorized use by a lucky neighbor. What’s going on there?

Levi: Silly Bob. There’s no way that a modern park would ever let any chance at a dollar slip by. Those aren’t only seats: they’re expensive luxury box thingies, and they bring in buckets of the ready for the Padres.

Jim: “Thank you for not requesting autographs”: It was Photo Day, and you’re just supposed to take pictures of the players, not ask them for autographs.

The ground floor of the Western Metal Supply building is the main Padres store, and then there’s standing room in front of it; each other individual level is, I believe, a single “party suite,” available on a per-game basis for your corporate get-together or other function. There’s no actual suite on the roof, just some tables with umbrellas to go along with the ballpark seating, but it, too, seems to be a special group seating area.

Jason: What Jim forgot to mention – and I am shocked that he did – was the fact that he took a trolley train to the game. Must have been the sugar high from too many Hostess Baseballs to affect his memory.

Jim: I thought me taking a trolley was a “that goes without saying” kind of thing. Yes, parking near Petco Park is expensive, so the trolley was the best option.

thatbob: I’m a *big* fan of selling the crappiest seats in the house to the stupidest people with the most money! I heartily approve! God Bless You, Petco Park!

Petco from the get-go

While you slept, Levi, you missed the game I watched on TV tonight, in which David Wells had to run from first to third (but, alas, didn’t end up making it to home).

Oh, yeah, Jay Payton climbed the wall in the 5th to prevent Barry Bonds from going down in history as the first person to hit a home run in Petco Park, and the Padres came back to tie in the 9th and then came back to win in the 10th, both times on Sean Burroughs singles.

Also, in the top of the 1st, the Giants announcers were making fun of the scoreboard that was listing the count as 5 strikes and 3 balls. Then they realized it was the pitch count scoreboard. I would obviously have rather watched the game with the Padres announcers, and DirecTV usually goes with the home team version of the games in their Extra Innings package…but only when the home team is on a regional sports network that DirecTV carries. The Padres are on a cable-only network.