$214 Round Trip Flight to Denver

When I saw that price, I had to go.  It was one last baseball trip for the summer.  Football season was a week away and that meant I couldn't go anywhere on weekends anymore (actually Notre Dame doesn't play on September 29, so I guess I could theoretically do something that weekend).  School was about to start so that meant I couldn't do anymore midweek trips.  So this was a chance to get to one last stadium this year and one more state (it turned out to be two).

I had an early flight to Denver that got me in around 11:00 in the morning mountain time.  This was my first real trip to the mountain time zone since Arizona was on Pacific time when I went.  Anyway, I couldn't check into my hotel for several hours, so I had to figure out what to do.  As always, anywhere Adam Richman went on Man vs. Food is a possibility.  The one I considered was the Cherry Cricket in Denver, which is known for having great burgers.  Initially that's what I thought I would do, but then I realized there was another possibility that I couldn't possibly say no to:  Casa Bonita.  Fortunately, my brother Sean had already been there and told me about it.  If not for that, I probably wouldn't have thought of it even though I'm a huge South Park fan.  If you've never seen the South Park episode, watch it now and come back and read the rest of this when you're done.

And you're back.  According to the user ratings on IMDB, Casa Bonita is the 9th best South Park episode ever.  I would put it in the top 5.  So yeah, Casa Bonita is a real place and it's pretty accurately depicted in the episode.  It's really in the middle of nowhere.  It's a little bit outside of Denver in this strip mall with several vacant shops nearby.  But it's awesome.  If I was Eric Cartman, I'd probably kidnap Butters so that I could go to Kyle's birthday party also.  I went for lunch on a Monday.  There was hardly anybody in there, but the cliff diver was still performing several dives into the pool which is 14 feet deep.  The food was kind of typical Mexican food.  Nothing special, but if you like South Park and you're in Denver, you absolutely have to go to Casa Bonita.

This has to be the greatest place ever for a kid to have a birthday party.

At night, it was Dodgers-Rockies at Coors Field.  It was my tenth and probably final baseball game of the 2012 season.  Josh Beckett was making his first start with the Dodgers.  He gave up a home run on his second pitch as a Dodger.  Beckett was actually decent after that and left the game trailing 3-0.  The Dodgers couldn't hit at all and ended up losing 10-0 after giving up seven runs in the eighth inning.

As for the stadium, it was pretty good.  I liked the outfield setup a lot.  There was a little pond/fountain thing behind the wall in center that was pretty cool.  Before the game, I was able to stand right over the Dodger bullpen as Beckett warmed up.  In the upper deck, there was a row of purple seats to show where you would be exactly a mile above sea level.  That was a pretty cool touch.  But that brings me to the very obvious problem with Coors Field.  Professional baseball is not meant to be played at that altitude.  Even though it might be the biggest outfield in all of Major League Baseball, it's one of the easiest stadiums to hit home runs in.  And it's a double whammy for pitchers because the outfielders have to cover so much ground.  If they play deep, that means more singles.  If they play at a normal depth, it's easier for hitters to find a gap for a triple that would be a double in a normal-sized outfield.  If you put Coors at sea level and just shrunk it a little bit, it would be one of my favorite stadiums, but baseball really shouldn't be played at an altitude that high.

Maybe I'll be able to get seats like this at Citi Field next season.

The next morning I drove to Wyoming for breakfast.  It was about 105 miles from my hotel to Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Why did I go?  Because I probably would never have any reason to be in Wyoming ever again.  With a population of nearly 60,000, Cheyenne is the largest city in Wyoming.  For comparison, the Town of Huntington where I reside has a population of over 203,000 (in fairness, Cheyenne is smaller in terms of area, so it does actually win on population density).  Anyway, I had a very nice breakfast at a diner in Cheyenne.  But I was totally the guy who didn't belong.  There were legitimate cowboys in there.

I was very much a fish out of water at this diner, but I can cross Wyoming off my list.

So I guess that wraps up Part I of the Year of Jim (baseball, 2012).  This season I got to games in eight different stadiums (six that I hadn't been to before).  If you go back to the beginning of the 2011 summer, I got to games in ten different stadiums and visited seven states for the first time.  I've now been to 16 stadiums (14 that still exist) and 24 states.  I'm almost halfway there on both.