Sunday, June 07, 2009

LAZY SUNDAY.

Mariners v Twins
Safeco Field, 6-7-09

Baseball is a big part of the lives of the friends we are staying with here in Seattle. Obviously you don’t plunk down $40,000 for a personal seat license, and maintain a series of season tickets for 10 years running unless you are not, but there are baseball people and then there are Baseball People. They are the latter.  They have their attendance down to a science, where we can walk out of their house with their 3 1/2 year old twins at 12:30 and be in our seats at Safeco for first pitch.

We didn’t sit in the front row today. (Those are The Charter Seats.) We sat four rows behind the visiting team dugout:

Of course, this is the game where I learned that even though I thought I had just recharged my camera battery, clearly I had not, because it died about 20 shots into the game. My spare battery (acquired after the Houston roadtrip debacle), dead. So I sat back and drank some beer and ate some pretzels and some Shishkaberries and watched the game from amazing, amazing seats.

My thought walking into the ballpark today was how wonderfully familiar, how second nature all of this is to me now. I could walk into any ballpark anywhere in the country all by myself and feel right at home. The whole feeling of walking into the park and emerging out from the dark and cool into the bright and green, the sounds of cheering and vendors hawking and what it sounds like when a player hits a ball really hard. It’s all the same, and that is a big part of what is so wonderful about all of it.

There were a ton of Twins fans today - at least a dozen “Circle Me Bert” signs that I could see.

I decided today that Seattle fans are entirely too quiet. No one heckles or yells things at their players - some people do, but it’s generally something supportive, never something negative.  There is no clapping at the last strike of the second out, no one stands up at key plays - even a home run didn’t get everyone on their feet. That was just slightly unnerving. It is one of my friend Sarah’s pet peeves about Mariners fans.

But otherwise, Safeco is an extremely fun, comfortable place to see a game. It’ll be fun to come back in two years when the Mets hopefully come back for interleague.