August 2009
8/20/09 vs. Minnesota
This was the fourth game of the series between the Rangers and Twins, and the second of the series that I attended. I went to game one and they won 8-5. Games two and three they lost after blowing the lead in both games. With the division on the line as well as the wild card, I was really hoping that the Rangers could pull it together tonight and start making up some ground.
Needless to say I was very excited about the game tonight.
I went to this game with my aunt Lori. We have gone to many games together over the years, and this was our second this year. We also went to the 6/12 game against the Dodgers.
We got to the park, and inside the stadium at around 6:15. I couldn’t leave work early for BP this time, because my manager was off and I had to stay until I got off at 5:30. Oh well, turns out that the Rangers didn’t hit at all, and the Twins didn’t hit for very long anyway. So, I wasn’t too upset over missing BP after finding that out.
The first thing we did after watching the grounds crew remove the cage was get food. Cheese fries and Dr. Pepper. Mmmmmmmm.
We found some empty seats in right-center field, and sat and ate our food. The temperature was around 96 degrees and it was humid. Eating scalding hot fries and sweating everywhere is not cool at all. We couldn’t finish our food fast enough.
When we finally did finish, we headed over to the centerfield gift shop to take advantage of the A/C. While we were in there, my aunt said that she would buy me a jersey since my birthday is next week.
Sweet!
I’ve often thought which jersey I would get if given the chance, and after much deliberation, I knew I wanted a red one (the Rangers brought red back into the fold this year, in case you didn’t know), but I decided that I wanted a blank one.
I love Josh Hamilton (not in that way though). I have both of his All-Star shirts, but I just find it hard to make that kind of monetary commitment to any current player. My fear is, I’ll get a certain player’s jersey and then they’ll get traded or suffer some sort of career-ending injury or something along those lines.
Is that weird of me to think that way?
Anyways, I got a blank red one off of the rack, and my aunt wanted to put my name on the back, so I grabbed the number 2 (my favorite number) and the letters P-O-W-E-L-L (my last name) and we went and paid for them. Then I had to wait in line to have the letters and number put on.
Without getting into too much detail and dragging this out more than I already have, I’ll just say that I wasn’t able to get those letters and number put on. The guy working the heat press said that it was an MLB thing. The letters are in the font they used last year, and the red jersey is brand new this year, so for whatever reason they couldn’t mix the two. Whatever, I’ll just go back and buy the letters another day and then go home and put them on myself.
Oh yeah, there was a baseball game.
We got to our seats out in left field just after the first pitch, and this was our view….
The sun was going down, but it was still miserably hot.
A friend that I work with was also at this game. Her husband’s company has season tickets on the first base side on the second row. She told me ahead of time to call her to see if there were any available seats around her, so we could all sit together. I called in the first inning and there were some empty seats, but I wanted to wait an inning or two to make sure no one was going to come in later.
They did.
I decided to kill some time, and went and got us both some ice cream. I went to the same stand I had gone to Monday night, and they still had various team helmets. I picked Seattle and Toronto and headed back to our seats and enjoyed all of the ice creamy goodness!
In around the 5th inning, she called me and said there were two open seats in her row, so we made our way over there and our view of the game changed to this….
Much better! I told my co-worker she was my new best friend!
Of course, those would be our seats for the remainder of the game. Here’s a couple shots I took of some of the players….
Here’s one of my aunt and I, along with her prized kettle corn….
Unfortunately, we didn’t even come close to any foul balls over there. A guy a few seats to our left caught one right before we walked down the stairs to sit there. Figures.
The Rangers had better control over this game, hitting four homeruns, including Julio Borbon’s first of his career, and two by Marlon Byrd. They would go on to win by the score of 11-1. That’s more like it!
11 runs on 17 hits helped give Derek Holland his 7th win of the year. The Twins had 10 hits, but could only manage 1 run.
Time of game: 2 hrs. 48 mins.
Attendance: 21,870
Next game: Tues. 9/1 vs. Toronto (Doubleheader!)
Here’s the helmets that I came away with from this game….
Internet Article
Those of you that swing by this blog fairly regularly should know by now that I have a daughter, named Sarah. If you didn’t know that, you haven’t been reading enough!
Just kidding.
As you may also know, Sarah loves baseball almost as much as I do, and goes with me to the Rangers games as often as we can manage it. In doing so, she and I have become a “ballhawk team” so to speak. Meaning, that we go for balls together, count them together, and enjoy them together.
Well, a few months back, a website was started called mygameballs.com. The purpose of the site is for ballhawks (experienced or rookie) to be able to log their snagged balls and keep track of everything right down to how they snagged it. It’s a very cool site, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend it.
You can become a member, or simply browse everyone else’s collection as well as be linked to other blogs.
Alan Schuster, the man that designed and created mygameballs.com, has become acquainted with various ballhawks, as well as their stories and/or blogs. I was one of the first few to join this site, and began the process of logging my baseballs (I don’t have many, so it didn’t take long).
After the site was up, and more people started to join, Alan started to put headlines on the site’s homepage to highlight a specific accomplishment or huge snagging day for someone. Well, he emailed me, along with a couple other ballhawks, to tell us that he wanted to do an article on “family ballhawking”.
Apparently, Alan had been scouring the blogs of the members and noticed that a few of us have kids, and that we include them in our baseball adventures. So, he started sending us emails stating his idea, what he wanted to cover, asking questions about specific events or results.
Long story short (too late?), he posted the article last Friday (8/14). I’ve emailed the link to all of my family members and everyone else that I know of so I could brag a little bit! Plus, Sarah loves it because, as you may or may not know, every little girl wants to be famous!
So here it is, click here and feel free to let me know what you think.
8/17/09 vs. Minnesota
The Rangers had just finished up a long 10 game road trip with a 3-game series at home against Boston, and now the Twins were in town for a 4-game series. This was a Monday night game, Boston’s gone, so my friend Dirk and I figured this would be the perfect game to get us back in the groove.
We got to the park at around 4:40 or so, then waited for the gates to open at 5:00. When they finally did, we hurried through the bag check and raced to the LF seats to see that the Rangers were hitting.
They need to make up their minds. Sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don’t. With all of the rumors and so-called “reports” that I hear about the team needing to save money, not wanting to spend it on baseballs, and then coming to the park and seeing them hit really causes confusion. At least for me anyway.
Do they feel that they are saving money by only taking BP on the field every other game, or every few games?
Who knows.
They were hitting today, and that was really cool to see.
When we got to the LF seats, we checked the gaps and the visitors’ bullpen like we usually do, but they were empty. The stands in left were surprisingly bare also. Sweet! We were borderline giddy with anticipation because of all the possibilities!
The Rangers only hit for about 10-15 more minutes when we got there, and we didn’t get anything. The few homeruns that were hit to left field were nowhere near us, and all of the balls that went to the track or into the outfield in general, were all thrown in to the bucket. I didn’t see a single ball get thrown into the stands by the Rangers.
That I can understand. If a ball gets hit into the stands that’s one thing, but don’t throw any into the stands because that’s unnecessary spending. If that’s their thinking, I can’t argue with that.
The sun was brutal again today, thankfully we stopped and got some water bottles on the way to the park, because I don’t think I could have made it without them. If I had been getting some chances at some balls, I may not have noticed the heat as much, but standing in the same spot for any length of time sure made it hard to think about anything else but the heat.
We had about a 10 minute break before the Twins started hitting, and we used it to sit and cool off. Once they began to hit, we had a pretty good portion of the stands to ourselves. It didn’t really matter though, since we hardly had any action the whole time. Halfway through the Twins’ BP, a ball went into the visitors’ bullpen and Dirk set off after it. I didn’t watch him try for it, I was too concerned with trying to get a homerun ball. After a few minutes, he came over with the ball, and that would turn out to be the only one either of us would get.
Dirk had a close call with a homerun ball that was coming his way, but he gave way to allow a younger kid to catch it. Can’t say that I blame him, there’s not too many guys at the Ballpark in Arlington that do that unfortunately.
Once batting practice had concluded, we got our designated driver coupons, and got some pizza, cajun fries (big mistake), and a couple sodas.
Our seats were in left field for this game, and we only stayed there for maybe two batters. I love sitting there most of the time, just not when the sun is beating down on us.
We moved over to the third base side, which has recently become our favorite foul ball spot. There was one section in particular that was surprisingly empty, so we found a couple seats towards the back of that section, and those would be our seats for almost the whole game.
There was more action around us than normal. Most games we come within one section of a foul ball once during a game. This game, we had at least two or three balls that came within four or five rows of us! As well as a few more that were a section or two over.
The first half of the game, we had about 10-12 rows to ourselves. No balls were hit our way then. Gradually, people started to creep in around us and constricted our range. In around the 7th inning, we moved over almost a full section to our right, where we would have more room, but it didn’t matter. Nothing.
Backing up a little bit….
Around the top of the 6th inning, we decided to get some ice cream. The last game we attended we found out that the Ballpark in Arlington was using ice cream helmets once again (much to my delight!), so we were going for one of those for sure.
As we made our way to the ice cream stand, we noticed this….
Notice the helmets? That’s just a part of the selection they had that you could choose from. When they asked you what kind of ice cream you wanted, the next question was “What team?”. The particular stand that we were at did not have any Rangers helmets. WHAT?! Oh well, it was pretty cool to get a helmet of another team. It’s almost like I went to different stadium. Almost. Not really.
I went for the A’s, and Dirk got the Giants, then it was back to “our seats”.
When I finished with my ice cream, I realized that the above photo was the only one I had taken so far. So, I decided to take a few photos from where we were sitting….
I love that hill!
The above photo is one of my favorite views of the ballpark.
Don’t ask me why I took that last photo. Just wanted to, I guess.
The Rangers ended up winning this game 8-5, but it got a little sketchy at times.
Joe Mauer hit a solo shot to left center in the top of the 1st. That guy’s a stud! I know, I’m a Rangers’ fan, but have you noticed what kind of offensive numbers this guy is putting up? As of this morning (8/19), ESPN radio reported that he is batting .380 with 25 homeruns!
Don’t think that’s too impressive?
If he finishes the season with those same numbers, he’ll become only the fifth player in MLB history to do that. You may have heard of the other four:
Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams.
Unbelievable. You go Joe!
The Rangers ended up using five pitchers out of the bullpen, but got the win anyways.
Time of game: 3 hrs. 20 mins.
Attendance: 17,940
Next game: Thurs. 8/20 also vs. the Twins
Here’s a photo of the two helmets I came away with….
The A’s I bought, and the SF Dirk gave to me because he had two. We were looking for some in the stands after the game, but I didn’t find any and Dirk found four.
Here’s the extra tickets I found also….
Rare Foul Ball Story
Yesterday (8/16) during the Rangers/Red Sox game, something very unusual happened. A young fan caught two foul balls, but that’s not the unusual part. Here’s the write up on the Texas Rangers’ website along with a video clip. Check it out here. I know you’ll find it interesting like I did!
8/05/09 at LaGrave Field…..(Parking Lot)
My friend, Dirk, and I didn’t have anything going on this evening, our wives were both out of the house, so we had an idea. We were toying with the idea of going to the Fort Worth Cats game, and just staying in the parking lot and going for foul balls.
We already had tickets for the next night’s game, but we just wanted to try something different. And it’s a good thing we did, because we didn’t end up going the next night. I ended up getting an upper respiratory infection the next day, so needless to say, I was in no condition to go to a game.
We got to the ballpark, paid to park, and ended up buying two $4 left field berm tickets anyway. We walked around to the LF Berm and watched the first inning and a half or so, then got a couple dollar hotdogs, and made our way to the parking lot to find a foul ball spot.
Remember, this whole time we were still thinking we would be there the next night, so there’s no pictures. I was going to take some reference photos the next day, but that never happened.
We were in the parking lot close to a big tree for about 20-30 minutes or so, when we had our first shot. A ball came out of the stadium, and bounced in the parking lot about 30 yards in front of Dirk. He got up and ran to the ball and snagged it on the 2nd bounce. Turns out he didn’t even need to stand up, since it would’ve come all the way to where he was sitting.
Pretty cool!
That was our first experience with getting a foul ball that way. To be honest, it’s kind of weird to stare at a stadium and wait for a ball to come flying out to you. Weird, in a good way.
Dirk had already found a ball before the game started that was lying near some dumpsters behind the RF bleachers, so this was his 2nd of the night so far, and I was really wanting one of my own.
Since we went out there so early in the game, there weren’t any kids in the parking lot yet. I stress “yet” because it only takes a couple of fouls to get a group of kids out there, so we knew if we were going to get some, it would have to be early.
A couple different times we heard something that sounded like a ball hitting the pavement, but we weren’t really sure, only to see a kid that we had not yet noticed chase the ball down. It’s okay, it makes us look like we were sharing, even if it was unintentional!
Well it didn’t take long for a little “crowd” to develop about 100 feet to our left. If we were going to have a shot at anymore, they would almost have to come straight to us.
We got that chance. A ball came over the roof of the seats and took one bounce off the pavement and 3 kids ran after it……only to lose sight of it.
The ball had hit the pavement and landed on the roof of an SUV with a luggage rack on top. The luggage rack had kept the ball in place long enough for me to walk over and grab it, and then see the kids keep looking for a couple more minutes until I let them off the hook.
No, I didn’t give the ball to them, because I was taking all the balls I got home to my daughter Sarah. Call me what you want, but my daughter thought it was cool.
After getting my 1st ball of the evening, we decided to go back in and get another $1 hotdog and watch an inning or two of the game. By this time it was the 6th inning or so, and we weren’t planning on staying for the whole game because we were going the next day. So, we started to make our way to the truck and we saw a batter foul a ball off to the opposite side of the stadium from where we were before.
Neither of us thought anything of it, until we walked out and didn’t see anybody running around, so we were just going to walk to the general area and see if it was still there.
It was.
The ball had come to rest in a grassy area in the parking lot. So I walked about 100 feet or so and grabbed it.
A few minutes later, we got into Dirk’s truck and went home, listening to the game on the radio the whole way.
8/2/09 vs. Seattle
This game wasn’t decided upon until Saturday afternoon (8/1), when my friend Dirk and I were talking, and we realized that this was the last home game for the Rangers for a while, so we got our two daughters and we were off.
The recent weather for the area was on and off rain with cool temperatures. Not today. The rain was nowhere to be found, and the sun was out in full force.
Figures. Thursday, when we went by ourselves, it was cool and the sun was in and out of the clouds. Today, we take our daughters and we’re roasting, just like we were on this day.
When we got inside the stadium and went to the LF stands, the Rangers were hitting.
Woohoo! I haven’t seen them hit in a while, but it was short lived.
I barely made it to the first row in LF and I saw a ball land in the gap, but by the time I was able to get my stuff out, someone was already down there tossing it up to someone else. Blah.
Then, a couple Rangers righties (Marlon Byrd and Andruw Jones I think) started jacking the ball to the back of the LF seats. There’s a wide cross-aisle and a wall with a scoreboard at the back of that aisle, and they were hitting the wall! I was too low and too far to the left to even think about going for those.
After about 10 minutes, they were finished. Time to check the gaps and get ready for the Mariners.
Nothing in the gaps. And by 5:45, when the M’s should be about 10 minutes into batting practice, this was the scene on the field….
What?! No way, they HAD to come out and hit, right?
Well, we killed about 5 more minutes and went to RF to check the Rangers’ bullpen and the gap over there, and this was the scene then….
(Insert prolonged exhale here)
What you can’t tell from the previous photo, is that there’s two Mariners players in RF playing catch. Yippee.
So, the next plan of action was to find food, drinks, and A/C in whatever order we could get it, and we started with cooling off in the centerfield gift shop. We then made our way behind home plate for our usual “designated driver” free drink coupons and headed toward the concession stands for nachos, cheese fries, and two Dr. Peppers.
Aahhhh!
We bought cheap, upper deck tickets for this game, so we went up there to eat and watch the first few innings of the game. This was the view when we sat down….
I love the shade!
You can see that the cage from batting practice is still on the field. Soon thereafter it was removed and the grounds crew started chalking the batter’s boxes….
And finally, the finished product….
I must have seen that done a hundred times, and it still intrigues me to this day.
A little while later, the Mariners bullpen guys made their way to the visitors’ bullpen (notice the pink backpacks!)….
The game went pretty smooth through the first few innings, so it wasn’t long before we made our way to centerfield for the kids’ sportspark. The girls did the slingshot game….
….and, they hit some balls off of a tee….
We sought some much needed refuge under the misting fans also….
Sarah’s proud of her $1 Drumstick!
Once the game playing concluded, we were on a new mission: Foul ball spot.
Mission accomplished….
Section 14, lower level toward the back of the section. About row 21-23, I can’t remember for sure. Here’s another view….
You know the cool part about the photo above of Michael Young at the plate? It culminated in this….
HOMERUN!!!
It was a solo shot in the bottom of the 6th that tied the game at 2-2. The very next inning, in the bottom of the 7th, Jarrod Saltalamacchia hit a 2-run homer that put the Rangers in front to stay at 4-2.
No foul balls…..again.
At least the Rangers won, that’s more important.
On the way out of the stadium, the girls were able to get their picture taken with Josh Hamilton! Check it out….
He just stood there and smiled, what a great guy!
By the way, did you notice the stack of cups in Sarah’s hand (on the left)? She actually had twice that many, but I gave some to Dirk. She got a little carried away.
Here’s a photo of the extra tickets I found after the game….
Time of game: 2 hrs. 14 mins.
Attendance: 28,670
Next game: Mon. 8/17 vs. the Twins (long road trip for the Rangers)
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