Walla Walla. Keokuk. Cucamonga. Seattle.

I made it to the funniest sounding city in America.  With this trip, I've now made it to 27 states.  I think I've linked this map before.  The Mariners are the most isolated team in the Majors.  The closest team is the A's and Oakland is 678 miles away.  So unlike many other stadiums in the Majors, you can't easily combine it with other stadiums into one trip.  I did anyway.  I had wanted to visit my friend Dennis in Atlanta and go to a Braves game.  The Braves are the most isolated team in the densely baseball-populated eastern half of the US (the Reds are the closest team, Cincinnati is 370 miles away).  So I made a big triangle across the US.  I went from New York to Seattle to Atlanta and then back to New York.  I'll get to my Atlanta trip in another post, but let's talk about Seattle and Safeco Field.

I started my day in Seattle by walking to the Space Needle.  At 605 feet tall, the Space Needle was the tallest building west of the Mississippi in the US when it was completed.  (Interesting facts that I just learned doing some research right now:  The nine tallest buildings in the US are all in New York and Chicago.  The tenth tallest building in the building in the US is in Atlanta.)  Now Seattle has buildings that are taller than the Space Needle, but they're in a different part part of the city so you still get really good views from the observation deck of the Space Needle.  You can see the water and downtown and then some mountains off in the distance.  It's worth doing if you're in Seattle.

The Space Needle is cooler than I thought it would be.

I think that's Puget Sound

Downtown Seattle is on the right.  It might hard to see, but there's a mountain off in the distance on the left.

After the Space Needle, I walked the two and a half miles to Safeco Field.  I walked through downtown.  Safeco Field and CenturyLink Field (home of the Seahawks and their dirtbag head coach) are just a little bit past downtown.  They're actually in a not so nice part of Seattle.  That's about the only bad thing I have to say about Safeco Field.  It's by far my favorite stadium that has a retractable roof.  Somewhere on the interweb I saw their roof described as an umbrella.  It just covers the stadium rather than completely enclosing the stadium and they only use it when it's raining.  I'm totally fine with that.  Once inside Safeco, I did a lap around the lower concourse.  They had a very wide food and beer selection.  I got a Fremont Summer Ale because I was worried that they wouldn't have such a good selection on the upper concourse (it turned out I had nothing to worry about, great selection upstairs as well).  The Fremont Summer Ale was nothing special, but I give them credit for their wide selection.  A pretty cool feature on the lower concourse was the Mariners Hall of Fame.  Besides stuff on some of the great Mariners players, they had some other good things in there.  They had a thing set up where you could pick up a phone-type thing and hit a number and listen to calls from several legendary broadcasters.  Of course, I listened to Vin Scully's call of the final out of Sandy Koufax's perfect game.  They also had displays on the baseball and bats that players use.

Ken Griffey, Jr. is the greatest hitter I've ever seen, assuming I'm right and he didn't use steroids.

Of course, there was lots of Mariners-specific stuff, but I enjoyed stuff like this.

The game was kind of like the one I went to in Houston.  I sat up high just a little to the first base side of home plate.  The visiting team won easily and I moved down late in the game and sat on the first level between home plate and the first base dugout.  Of note was David Ortiz (not one of my favorites, he used steroids) setting the record for most hits by a DH.  The Red Sox took a 9-0 lead and ended up winning 11-4.  I was really cold by the end of the game.  I should have brought a sweatshirt.  The high during the day was in the low 70s so I was fine, but when the sun went down and it was in the high 50s, I wasn't so warm.  But that's my fault and not the Mariners'.  It wasn't raining so they were playing baseball outdoors.  That's the way it should be.

My view early in the game.

My view late in the game.