Fun in the sun from the last 2.5 days
Cool stuff outside the park. The park in general was quite nice, and I can confirm that the toilets flushed extremely properly.
Baseball is coming.
Arrieta and Bosio, warming up before the game.
Arrieta warming up with long toss.
The Cubs take the field. Solid ballpark music in both games, including Bad Reputation (potential theme song for the OV podcast if it ever gets going) during a canned Maddon intro video on the scoreboard.
First pitch from Arrieta, a strike.
Day 2. I had a seat on the 1b side in the sun and never actually sat in it, ending up wandering the park and watching from SRO spots, the berm, and later some seats w/ shade behind home that one of Brett’s readers tipped him off to. For anyone planning to go to ST, I strongly recommend getting a GA outfield ticket and just wandering the park. Also, sunscreen.
For some reason I didn’t think to take a pic of the excellent food carts. Great move by the Cubs, though I’m kind of shocked they were there. This brat with grilled onions was $5, both tastier and much cheaper than the various park offerings, and they had lots of other good looking stuff too (the taco truck on Sunday looked especially fantastic, but I had already eaten). Can also confirm via the pic that they had pretty good beer selection (big if true), though the better stuff was a little tougher to find on Monday.
MIKE OLT o/. I ran into Brett just before his HR later in the game and missed it.
Kris Bryant on the right. I was disappointed he didn’t start in either game, but he did come in for the second half of this one. He also seemed a lot taller in person.
Speaking of guys who looked much bigger in person, I thought I had taken pics of CJ Edwards pitching, but apparently not. He was the star of the day for the Cubs, and hung clown shoes on all three guys he faced. He didn’t look big per se, but the impression you get from reading about him is that he’s like 5’4″ and 98 pounds, but he just looked like a normal dude.
Bryant bloop single/double. Brett got video of this, in which you can hear me cursing in the background when it looked like he would TOOTBLAN. Luckily the 4 year olds in the next two seats had gotten up to get ice cream that inning.
Bryant with a hustle kinda-sorta double. Works for me. pic.twitter.com/TCOSWedVNa
— Brett Taylor (@BleacherNation) March 9, 2015
Managed to get over to the LF berm to say hi to CCD before the end of the game. Really hoping this rockets to the top of the list of GIS for ‘pasty baseball nerds’
Little Miss BBQ in Tempe – fatty brisket and sausage (attn: @BBQsnob). Best Q I’ve ever had west of Texas pic.twitter.com/iozNKPvWRD
— keithlaw (@keithlaw) October 8, 2014
This is on the agenda for today, and it might be a good thing that this place is closed on Sundays and Mondays because I probably would be so stuffed with smoked meat that I would have to roll to my car. Soler, Baez, Bryant, and Russell are all in the lineup today but sadly I’m not really young enough anymore to drive all day, roll in at 3 am and go to work the next day.