Pittsburgh

An Introduction:

It has always been an aspiration of mine to visit every ballpark in the country. While that is certainly still a goal in the hazy future at this point, I have made real a desire to take a vacation devoted entirely to going to a different baseball game in a different stadium every day. In the past, I had a rather ambitious two-week trip planned that involved some intricate travel arrangements, but that adventure was scheduled to start on September 13, 2001. For some reason, that trip never came to be.

Tempting fate last year, I took the long July 4th holiday as an opportunity to do a mini-trip of five days (starting on the Friday), visiting the NY Mets, the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Newark Bears, the New Jersey Jackals, and the NJ Cardinals (now defunct). These were all within an hour of my home, so each game was a day trip with me retiring back to my apartment in the evening. This year, I had some nebulous plans to visit a friend attending graduate school in West Virginia, so I used that as an arbitrary starting point for a week-long baseball excursion that was planned only in the slightest of ways, to avoid previous fates. It began with a drive down from New York to West Virginia on Friday the 30th, listening to the Mets-Yankees game on 660 AM all the way.

This is my story. 

GAME 1

PNC Park, 2006

Date: Saturday, July 1, 2006, 7:05 PM
Detroit Tigers vs. Pittsburgh Pirates
PNC Bank Park
Pittsburgh, PA
Major League Baseball, Inter-league
Promotion: Triple Bobble-head


The Stadium & Fans:
PNC Park is simply amazing. It is laid out perfectly, with some beautiful vantages. There isn't a bad seat in the place, and it is just an astoundingly good place to watch a game. Yankee Stadium still has it beat on history and presence, but this is easily one of the best baseball parks ever built, period. Watch the All-Star game this year, and you'll get an idea.

Even though it was a regional rivalry game with Detroit (who had quite a few fans in attendance), it is a tribute to the long-suffering Pirates fans that this game was a sell-out. It takes some kind of solid fan base to put up continuously with this hapless team, but in this park, I can see how coming out to see a game wouldn't be that much of a chore. In fact, the Pirates fans' management-opposition group, Irate Fans, has a slogan touting "the best park with the worst ownership." But Pirates fans are die-hards, and you can't help but have a great deal of respect for them.


Scorecard:

Tigers vs. Pirates, 07/01/06. Pirates win, 9-2.

The stand-alone scorecard was $1.00. It was on good card stock with good box size, but all the fields they included made me feel like I was doing my taxes. Still, it was a good challenge to prove out for my first game.


Miscellanea:
The promotion for this game (set up months ago at the beginning of the season) was a triple bobble-head. Of the three featured bobble-head players, some Pirates fans dryly noted, one has been demoted to the minors, one is on the Disabled List, and one is having the worst season of his career. Go Bucks.


Travel & Other Non-Game Activities:
It took a while to get used to people in Western PA/West Virginia. They are sincerely helpful, which can be disconcerting to someone from the big city. In a restaurant, I was thinking about what to order, when a counterperson pointed out some menu options. I immediately thought she was being sarcastic at my inability to decide on anything, but then realized she was actually just trying to help. It took a bit of grinding to mentally switch gears and say, "Oh, thanks," instead of, "F*ck you. Yes, I can read."

It was a quick drive up to Pittsburgh for the game. There's also plenty of cheap parking near the stadium, and a full house impressively emptied out with very little traffic or problems. I stayed at my friend's apartment that night on a pull-out couch.


The Game:
If I was sitting any closer to the players, there is a good chance I would have been arrested for trying to kill Kenny Rogers, now with Detroit. It is thus probably for the best that I was in the upper tier. Needless to say, I was with the bottom-dwelling Pirates all the way against the league-leading Tigers, and, I think to everyone's surprise, they gave the Tigers a 9-2 beatdown.

When you go to a lot of games in a row, you tend to run into a lot of baseballs "firsts." For example, in my mini-tour last year, I saw my first four strikeout inning. (The put-out on a strikeout is not recorded if the catcher does not cleanly catch the third strike. If the ball hits the ground, the catcher must tag out the batter or throw to first base for the put-out before the runner reaches the bag. This happens rarely in at the major league level because the catchers are usually good enough to keep the ball in front of them for an easy tag, but it does happen occasionally, and it is much more common [though still extremely rare] in the minors and independent leagues where the catchers aren't as experienced or talented. So, the pitcher can strike out the side, but the runner can reach base on a passed ball, allowing the opportunity for a four [or more] strikeout inning.) My "first" at this game was a pinch hitter for the pitcher getting two at-bats. In the National League where the pitcher has to bat for himself, the manager will send a pinch hitter in for a pitcher when he is going to put in a new pitcher the next inning. These pinch hitters tend to only have one at-bat, because they are replaced by the pitcher in the next half-inning. However, in this game, the Pirates batted around the order in the inning when the pinch hitter was put in for the pitcher, giving that pinch hitter two at-bats.

Click here to see all the photos from this trip.

2006 The East