Results tagged ‘ first base ’
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….
5/25/09 vs. the Yankees
I wanted to go to this game for a couple different reasons. First, it was a Monday afternoon game, and I was off work (Memorial Day). Second, the Stankees were coming in for three games, and this one was going to be the easiest to make (I was taking my daughter Sarah, and the other two were going to be on school nights). With all that said, on Fri. 5/22, I bought the two cheapest tickets I could find online ($11.00 for mine and $3.00 for Sarah’s). The seats were in the upper deck straight down the 1st base line, but I really didn’t care ’cause I didn’t plan on staying there for the whole game anyway.
I had heard that the ballpark was going to open at 10:00, with the parking lots opening at 9:00. This kind of surprised me, since the gates normally open 2 hrs. prior to game time, which today would’ve been at 11:00. Were they expecting a big crowd for Memorial Day? Were they expecting a big crowd because of the Stankees? Both? Who knows, all I cared about was the fact that I could be inside the ballpark that much longer!
I figured (or at least I “hoped”) that the Rangers would be taking batting practice today, which is a good thing, because I’ve been to a few games this year where they haven’t. We pulled into the parking lot at around 9:30 or so, and got to the gate as soon as we could. After getting through the bag check, we scanned our tickets and were handed a “Baseball in the Military” magazine (more on this later). We raced to the left field seats and were greeted by this….
That’s what I’m talkin’ about! Beautiful sight!
We were in that spot for the entire BP session for the Rangers, and the closest we came to getting a ball, were the homeruns on the fly that missed us by 20-30 feet. There were more hit to the right field side, but I just hate fighting the crowd over there. Although, today that crowd was everywhere. The closet Stankee fans were out in force. This was my competition during BP….
And this is a look at all the Stankee fans waiting behind the dugout….
Now, as you can probably tell, I’m not real fond of that team from the Bronx, but even I cannot deny the greatness of this guy….
Mariano Rivera.
It’s not his fault that he’s on a team I can’t stand, that guy is a stud!
Here’s one of Sarah eating her favorite snack….Combos!
See the guy to right of #58 in the following pic? He’s another great player….
C.C. Sabathia.
Those are the only photos I took of NY players. I respect Jeter, even though he is a Stankee-lifer, he can play & everyone knows it. A-roid & Mark Deushera? Don’t even get me started on those two wastes of MLB uniforms (as well as MLB money).
There was a lot of pre-game pageantry today (as was the case everywhere I’m sure), including a fly-over by three Apache helicopters, and I’m still kicking myself for not taking a photo. I love fly-overs!
Every game I attend, I take stadium photos, and every time I upload them to my computer I notice duplicate angles. So, I almost talked myself out of taking pics this time, but we were going to be sitting in an area I haven’t really been to before, so I took some anyway. Here’s some from the upper deck 1st base side….
I kind of like the look of the stadium from up there, but it’s not the best place for actually watching the game.
We stayed in our seats until the end of the 2nd inning, when we decided to walk around. Not only were our seats way up there, we were also stuck in the middle of a row of about 20 seats. Not cool.
We wandered all the around the park, until we came to the sports park in centerfield. That’s when we got tricked into filling out a casino survey (never set foot in one in my life), just to get Sarah a set of bang sticks. Here she is….
At least she’s happy, that’s all that matters!
We took shelter from the sun in Captain’s Corral, an enclosed concession stand basically, and bought some cheap nachos and a bottle of water.
After wandering, wasting time in the sports park, and hiding from the sun, it was now around the 7th inning, so we found some empty seats behind home plate to go for foul balls and also to look for tickets and stuff after the game.
No foul balls. Didn’t even come close to any really, just the “one section over” usual. The Rangers lost this game 11-1 and only had 4 hits in the game.
Here’s a shot of the tickets we found after the game….
Time of game – 2 hrs. 35 mins.
Attendance – 48,914
Stankee fans – GO HOME!!
Next game 6/11 vs. Toronto….
BY THE WAY – Remember the magazine I mentioned at the top of the entry, “Baseball in the Military”? I hope that Major League Baseball gave this out at every stadium, and that more people took it home at other places than people did here, because it is AWESOME! It’s about 20-25 pages long and has some great stories in it of guys enlisting in the military while playing baseball. If you got one, and haven’t read it, I highly encourage you to do so. You won’t regret it.
5/12/09 vs. Seattle Mariners
I was looking forward to this game for two reasons: 1st-The Rangers were just getting back from a 7 game road trip, and 2nd-Josh Hamilton was going to make his first start after coming off the 15-day DL.
My friend Dirk & I got to the ballpark right at 5:00, and made it into the left field seats at about 5:10, so there were already people in the stands since the gates open at 5:05. Oh well, it wasn’t that crowded, so I still felt pretty good about our chances.
The Rangers were already hitting when we walked in, so we ran down to the front row, but out of about 12 hitters, 2 of them were righties (and we were in LF). We thought about moving to RF, but it was too crowded, so we decided to stick it out in left.
During the Rangers portion of BP, I think only one or two homers were hit in our direction, and the closest I could get was about 5 feet away. Blah. I got C.J. Wilson’s attention once when a ball rolled to the wall & he came over to get it. I called his name and held up my glove, and he looked right at me, and then threw the ball back in. Nice.
During the Mariners portion of BP, I still thought we had a good chance, because I had printed out their roster, coach list, & even made a cheat sheet of about 7-8 players with their photo, last name, & jersey #.
It came in handy only from the standpoint that I was the only one around shouting out first names, while everyone else was forced to shout #s since their warmup jerseys didn’t have their names on them. A few guys turned to look when I called their name, but I think it was because they were surprised that anyone actually knew them.
The Mariners’ BP was different for me, because the first 15-20 minutes or so was all of the lefties. Some would try to go opposite field, but they never reached the seats.
Then finally, the righties came up. Yay! It was short lived. Not only do their right handed hitters not have big time power, but I don’t think 1 of their balls hit the seats. As opposed to the lefties, which includes Ichiro, AND Griffey. (I was starting to think that we probably should have fought the crowd in RF).
Watching Griffey hit was pretty cool. I can’t remember, but in all the years that I have gone to baseball games, I think this may have been my first time to watch him take BP. And boy did he put on a show! He still has it, that’s for sure.
Batting practice came and went, and I was left empty-handed. I guess I had gotten a little spoiled, since the last two games I went to that had BP, I was able to come away with a ball each time. Oh well, there’s always next game!
Just in case you haven’t noticed, I didn’t take any pictures at this game. My wife needed the camera this same night, so I had to do without. Maybe that’s why I was shutout, I felt awkward even being there without a camera. Is that weird?
Our seats were in left field, and we stayed there until the 4th inning, when we decided to move to the 2nd level behind home plate to go for foul balls. Didn’t get any, but I still like going up there.
In the bottom of the 8th, we moved down to the 1st level behind home plate on the 1st base side. Nothing there either, but you can’t beat that view!
The game itself was good. Scott Feldman pitched 6-1/3 innings, giving up 1 run on 4 hits, with 2 walks and 2 strikeouts, and getting a no-decision. Derek Holland picked up his 1st win in his young major league career, and Eddie Guardado got the save.
Rangers win 7-1, Hamilton hit a 2-run homer in the seventh to break a 1-1 tie, and opened up a six-run rally.
Time of game – 2 hrs. 50 mins.
Attendance – 16,564.
Next game – 5/23 in Houston.
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