Oakland

On the (Real) Longest Day

Oakland Coliseum, 2009

Saturday, September 5, 2009
Seattle Mariners vs. Oakland Athletics
Oakland Coliseum
Major League Baseball, American League West
Oakland, CA
6:10 PM 


Outside the Game:
I awoke at 1 AM Pacific Time.

There is early, and then there is so early, it is the night before. I was only able to get reasonably priced direct tickets to San Francisco by taking the first flight of the day. This was at 6:30 AM. Getting up after a brief nap the night before, I had a quick ride to Newark Liberty Patriotism Bald Eagle God Bless America Airport.

Of course, I was leaving from one of the small terminals, so of the few concession stalls that were there, only one was open at 5 AM. However, the good thing about early flights is that you are pretty much guaranteed two of the three of the holy triumvirate to get off the ground (plane and crew). Circumstances actually held out for the third (takeoff position), and we departed on time, in what may be a first for these trips. The early flight was also not fully filled, so there was actually an empty seat between my row-mate and myself, which we claimed for democracy and our right and left legs, respectively. Outside of some mild amusement at a non-English speaking passenger a few rows ahead of me who kept on getting out of his seat whenever he felt like it (to the great consternation of the crew, who eventually referred him to the ominously euphemistic "Customer Relations" before his connecting flight), there were no great events of note, and we landed on time with all fingers and toes accounted for, and naps of a varying lengths for all and sundry.

After loping uneasily into the discontinuity of early afternoon, I waited for my shuttle to the DoubleTree Hotel by the bay. This came and deposited my body, completely assured that it was late afternoon, at the hotel, where I blearily tested the cheerful smile of the woman at the check-in counter. She was, however, nice enough to allow me to check in early, at the point she realized that I was the kind of person who didn't give a good goddamn about how high my overlook of the bay was, and only cared about dropping my bags and person in a paid-for box that had a bed, toilet, and access to the outside world.

I took a quick shower, got dressed into more San Fransisco-appropriate attire, and went out to catch the shuttle back to the airport. I was dropped a short walk from the BART station, upon which I was basing my reguar travel for the trip. After decyphering its arcane symbols and curious messageways, I bought a ticket, worked out what line and stop at which I needed to exit, and got on a train. The progress of the stops on the trip out were interesting in their novelty, and immediately lost any further interest for their repeated iterations for the remainder of the trip.

As it was still only early afternoon, and the game did not open until 4, I got off at the Embarcadero station to wander up to North Beach for lunch. I had taken a rather extensive trip to San Francisco about six or seven years ago, and had revisited the city briefly last year to check the Giants off my list, so after hitting the pavement for a little while, I started to get my bearings again. I made my way to Columbus, and headed northwest until I reached the City Lights bookstore, promised myself I wouldn't go nuts, and walked out with three books. A brief walk further up deposited me at the Stinking Rose for a lunch of garlic pesto ravioli. (Yes, I know the place is touristy, and the locals hate it, and it's overpriced--but damn if it isn't the only restaurant in the world that I've found to be sufficiently garlicly.)

Your judgement means nothing.

After the late lunch, I traveled back down to Market and the Embarcadero station, deciphered the appropriate hieroglyphics, and got on an Oakland-bound train. With a holiday weekend and a team scraping the bottom of the division, I hadn't expected a large turn-out for the game, and my estimation for the baseball crowd dwindled as I saw a large number of drunk twenty-somethings on the wrong train to go watch the opening of college football season, for whatever non-professional team for which the poor waifs could be compelled to root.

There is a special BART stop just for the Oakland stadium, with a connecting umbilical walkway from the station to the park proper. As I hadn't seen fit to buy a ticket ahead of time, I walked around until I found the main ticket window to secure said item. I was apparently disoriented and blathering upon reaching the window, because the patient lady behind the counter was having difficulty discerning if I wanted to sit in or out of the sun. After some gentle prodding and re-questioning, she gave me a ticket out of the sun in the middle deck behind home plate. The transactions and translations for the ticket had managed to elapse the time left before the gates opened, and I was able to enter as soon as ticket was in hand.

After the game ended at a rather reasonable 9-ish (due to the early start time), I made my way back to the station for a train back to the airport. There is no direct line between Oakland and the airport, so I had to work out where I needed to transfer on the ride back. I switched trains for the airport, then they decided to see if I was paying attention by dropping me at a stop at the airport that I did not recognize at all to see what I'd do. After a bit of fumbling around, I found my way out to the hotel shuttle stand in time to see my hotel's van pulling away.

I got back to the hotel proper at a little before midnight, and when I did the math to discover that outside of some sundry naps on my flight up I had been up for nearly 24 hours straight,I decided to get some sleep.


The Stadium & Fans: 

Home plate to center field, Oakland Coliseum

The Oakland Coliseum is another multi-purpose stadium that is a throwback to an earlier age. It was particularly funny seeing banners for the A's promoting "100% Baseball," right in front of an Oakland Raiders banner. Maybe math works slightly different out there.

As multi-purpose conversions to baseball goes, it wasn't that bad. The seating in the round provided good views to the field, and the upper decks were covered with A's-specific tarps with retired numbers and other messages. The extra football seating wasn't retracted up like a high school gym, but physically removed and stored out in the parking lot during a ball game. The football gridiron patterns, however, were still clearly visible lying just under the baseball diamond, and Raiders logos were in great abundance throughout the coliseum.

Stomper stomps

There was a special Labor Day Breast Cancer survivor event that day, where 500 breast cancer survivors marched out on the field to form a human pink awareness ribbon, and then they released 500 balloons and a flight of doves. The ceremony was actually very nice, if marred by the doves, who decided to fly around the stadium for a good five minutes instead of majestically flying off immediately as they clearly were intended to do.

Given the holiday weekend and the opening of college football season, the crowd was sparse, with a smattering of primarily Japanese Seattle fans in attendance. The crowd that was there was enthusiastic and into the game, which was a nice surprise for a team out of the playoff race.


At the Game with Oogie:

Bay scoring

It was bound to happen eventually. As I was wondering around the stadium trying to find the main facade, I ran into a guy at the main facade asking me to take a picture of him there. It turns out he was doing the same thing I was doing in trying to go to all the MLB stadiums. While I was at the end of my trip, he had just started the process this year. We talked for a while,  and somehow I feel a little relieved from the quest by passing it onto another and providing them proof that the it can be completed.


I bought a ticket in the middle deck right behind home plate, in what turned out to be a season ticket holder area. As is often the case, the area was filled with hard-core fans that all knew each other. I was sitting right next to an older gentleman fully attired in an A's jacket, jersey and hat. We had a nice ongoing conversation throughout the game, and his seeming unshakable faith in the Athletics was pleasantly borne out.

The Game:

First pitch, Mariners vs. Athletics

Two teams with nothing to play for in September is probably not going to be a great baseball experience, and it looked like the A's were out of it early, as the Mariners scored a quick 3 in the top of the second. But the A's roared back with four in the third and did not look back. Eventually, every single player on the A's, including replacement players, had gotten at least one hit and scored at least once, with the sole exception of the left fielder.

The Mariners' Bill Hall had a night that can only be called horrific. He managed to strike out five times, with the final strike out ending the game, killing a mini-rally Seattle had in the top of the ninth. I had to look up what five strikeouts were referred to. (Three is a "golden sombrero." Four is a "golden sombrero with tassels.) Wikipedia tells me that five strikeouts is called an "Olympic Rings" or a "Platinum Sombrero." The more you know...

Seattle's Ichiro Suzuki even looked as though he was going to have a bad night (at least for him), going one for three to start out, yet he ended the night three for five, which explains how this inhuman hitting machine keeps up his batting average and torrid hitting pace.


The Scorecard:

Mariners vs. Athletics, 09/05/09. Athletics win, 9-5.

The scorecard comes as part of a $5 program, and I have to say, it is perhaps my favorite scorecard at any stadium I've been to so far. It is a heavy weight paper, tabloid-sized folded card. It has the A's logo on the front, scoring instructions on the back, and on the inside, nothing but scorecard. It is not laden with ads as many other cards, and outside of not having the game day lineups in the card itself, it is large, spacious, easy to write and erase on, and has all the relevant stats.

I did have a first for scoring in this game. There was a pop fly to the first baseman in foul territory that was dropped, which counts as an error for prolonging the inning without allowing a baserunner to reach a base. I scored it at the bottom of scoring diamond for that at bat.


The Accommodations:

DoubleTree Hotel

I was at the airport DoubleTree. It was a nice room, with a great view of the Bay, if a little removed.

On a Day Off

Beautiful San Francisco

San Francisco, CA
Sunday, September 6, 2009


Outside the Game:
I had allowed myself three days on this excursion on the chance of a rainout on the first day. I didn't want to fly out and spend all this time and money on the chance of not seeing the requisite game. As it turned out, this precaution was unnecessary under the foggy skies of San Francisco, so I had a full day to kill in the city by the bay.

I partook of the breakfast buffet at the hotel, worked some of it off in the exercise room, and then showered up and went back out to the airport. A fog-obscured BART ride dumped me back at the Embarcadero stop. After spending some time at the weekly Embarcadero art fair, I took a trolley car up to Fisherman's Wharf.

Not having any particular plan of action, I wandered around Pier 39 to get some cheesy memorabilia and see (and smell) the harbor seals before heading further down to the docks.

They really stink

The perfect example of the unintended destination presented itself on my way out the dock with the historic military ships. There was an exhibit tucked into a parking lot by the pier, called the Musee Mecanique. I wandered in to find a palace of my dreams that I had managed to completely miss in my last visit to San Francisco. The Musee was a collection of old coin operated games and amusements from the 19th century to present. In addition to some very old classic video games (coin op Pong anyone?), not to mention some more recent classics (Moon Patrol and Star Wars, for the win), the main exhibit was cabinet-sized coin op games, music boxes, fortune tellers, movie players, and automated dioramas. In this wave of Make Geek ascendancy,this place should be a shrine. All of the boxes worked, and most also had a brief history with them and a photograph of the machine's workings underneath the visible play area. Not only was playing some of the old mechanical games that I remembered filling out the early video arcades of my youth and discovering a host of baseball-themed games entertaining, but watching the intricate clockwork mechanations of the automatons was also utterly, utterly fascinating. My personal favorite was a fortune telling machine that, based on your birthsign and whatnot, had a typewriter bang out your fortune while you watched, fed the paper with the fortune up and out, sheered off the paper, and deposited it in a slot for retrieval. The unnecessary complexity and the act of making something cool work for the sake of making it work nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Musee Mecanique

After prying myself away, I eventually went to my initial destination of the military ships. I started with the WWII submarine USS Pampanito. I sprang for the optional audio tour (which, these days, are being done on iPod Shuffles, for the interested) which turned out to the be the best $3 I sprang for the entire trip. It had contributions from the surviving original crew, and really helped fill in a lot of the blanks of life inside a tiny metal tube.

USS Pampanito

But the best part of the trip was an ancient Asian ex-crew member who was sitting in the galley, getting people to sign the guest book. Although hard of hearing and sometimes seemingly doll-like, I spent a good half hour talking with him. I was immediately endeared by his exasperation with my obvious ignorance about signing the guest book he had perched in front of him, but he was good enough to set me straight with a bunch of fascinating stories.

The economy of space worked into the submarines was of great interest, but while I was in the boat, some rough water came in and shook the boat around slightly and disconcerted me enough to realize that life as a submariner would not be in my best interest. If some rough tide was enough to make me scramble for the exit, I'm fairly certain that a depth charge attack would not be endured by my seemingly delicate nautical constitution.

I then went further down the pier to visit the Liberty Ship, SS Jeremiah O'Brien. This was the older brother of the Victory Ship that I had visited in Tampa Bay. The mass-produced Liberty Ships were used early in the war to replace merchant tonnage lost to U-Boats. The cargo ships lack something of the sexy of submarines, but it had its own stories worth hearing.

I didn't know it was Irish.

As with the Pampanito, there were ex-crew on the O'Brien acting as guides. I talked to one on the main deck who talked about the D-Day anniversary. The ship had taken part in D-Day, and the veterans wanted to sail the ship back to take part in the anniversary, where many of the ships still in existence were participating. The Navy said that there was no way unless it passed various seaworthiness certifications in time to sail, which would be impossible. So a crew of average age of 65 repaired the ship in half the time, passed certification, sailed it to France, and parked it exactly where it was 50 years previous.

After finishing on the O'Brien, I walked up the rest of the way through the Warf up to Ghiardelli Square (and I swear to something or other, I just at that moment connected the dots as to why their flagship product was a square of chocolate) before deciding to walk back down Columbus to go to the new Beat Museum across from City Lights.

I was interested in visiting because I thought it faced the same conundrum of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in that it was a static, by its nature commercial, structure that was supposed to chronicle a movement that was by its very nature opposed to such ossification. I speculated that the execution of it could range from a room with a ratty old couch and a crooked shelf of Keruac books to a naked, animatronic Alan Ginsberg screaming, "The poet stands naked in front of the world!" The museum is housed between two topless bars in what appears to be an abandoned topless bar, so it had that going for it, as did the fact that it tended more towards the former execution than the later.

Beat Museum

After visiting, it was a quick walk back down to the Embaracadero station. An extended wait for a trolley car to take me back up to Fisherman's Wharf led to me walk all the way back up myself, and the wisdom of my decision was borne out by the fact that no trolley cars passed me for the entire walk back up.

Going back to the Wharf, I was looking for what apparently was a crazy idea: a nighttime cruise of the bay. But all of the cruise lines stopped running at 6 PMish, and outside of one over-priced sunset cruise, it did not seem that anyone had ever considered such a thing. About to give up and go to the wax museum or something, I heard the calls from a small tour boat that was taking out a half-hour cruise around Alcatraz for $10. I paid my money, and actually got my cruise out to the night bay. All the other patrons were provided blankets and hats for some reason. The night temperature was probably around a litte under 60 degrees or so, and the huddled masses all stared at this odd superman who could handle temperatures in the 50s without a jacket.

Night Bay

After the tour, I took another quick visit to the Musee Mecanique, and then grabbed a trolley back down the Embarcadero. I took a quick walk up to the Stinking Rose for some garlic meat loaf, and then took the BART back to the airport and the hotel, getting some sleep after less than 23 hours of activity.


The Accommodations:
I was at the airport DoubleTree again, and again just missed the damn shuttle on the way back to the hotel in the evening.

On Unwanted Returns

Joltin' Joe

Hoboken, NJ

Monday, September 7, 2009


Outside the Game:
The one direct flight back to Newark Liberty Apple Pie God-Fearing 'Merican Airport left in the early afternoon, not early enough to force any unnecessary early rises, but not late enough to sneak in another trip to the city proper. So I slept in a little, soaked in the tub for a bit, and then ate another large breakfast at the hotel. After packing up my bag and doing a room sweep, I killed the last of the time before needing to get to the airport shuttle walking around the south bay walk outside the hotel.

A quick shuttle later, I was at the airport and waiting in a line to wait in a line to go through security. A herd of bimbos behind me was loudly complaining about the injustice of waiting in all these lines, and stuff, and like how they never had to even wait in lines like this at clubs, I mean really. I was saddened to discovered that I still was unable to kill people with my mind, even if I tried really, really hard. I was later gratified by the fact every last one of them ignored every last sign that were posted and got pulled for extra screening by the good folks at the TSA. Go get 'em, boys.

Unlike United's peripheral location at Newark, they were in one the main concourses at SFO, which provided choices enough for a decent lunch before the flight. Not wanting to be compressed for the 5.5 hour flight, I inquired about the possibility of the upgrade to the extra leg room seats. The lady behind the counter said the flight was full up, but she was ecstatic I asked, because the number of children on the flight was making her final seat assignments a nightmare, and would I be interested in a free move to an exit row with extra leg room? Although it was a middle seat, it was ten rows further up on a full flight, so I'd  have a better shot on finding someplace to stow my carry-on, and not having my knees locked up on arrival another added perk.

The flight trended a little on the late side, and largely went without incident, although there were times I wondered seriously, seriously about how much jail time I would get for strangling any of the seemingly unnumbered screeching babies sharing the metal tube with me. Also disconcerting were the rather curt messages from the pilot, who did not proscribe to the standard folksy pilot patter of backing into things such as seat belt announcements ("Hey, folks, it looks like we may be heading into a little bit of choppy air coming up, so if you could all make your way back to your seats and buckle up, I'm about to turn on the seat belt sign."), but rather the nun teacher version of clipped, condescending orders ("SEATBELTS.") that made me wonder if he knew something that I didn't.

Nonetheless, the flight landed about five minutes late, and a quick car ride had me back at home, in plenty of time for work, damnit.


The Accommodations:
Home, sweet Hoboken.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2009 Stand-Alone Trip