For stop number 2 on my Easter Vacation trip, I went to Omaha, Nebraska. In 2015, I visited Dennis in Minnesota and knocked out four other states on the trip: Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. I spent the least amount of time in Nebraska (probably about 45 minutes). I wanted to check out TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha. That’s where the College World Series is played. It’s also Creighton’s home field. So I was going to the Creighton game against Kansas State at night. But first, I was hoping to knock out a few states that I still had left on the beer list. Nebraska was obvious. Iowa is right across the river from Omaha (there was actually a tiny section of Iowa that I passed through going between the airport and my hotel) so I was pretty confident on that one. I was hoping to get at least one other state. I did some googling and found the Crescent Moon Ale House, which is the best beer bar in Omaha. So after getting to my hotel, I took a walk over there.
Before I got to the bar, I stopped on the way on Creighton’s campus. I haven’t actually spent much time on campus at other Catholic universities with a couple of obvious exceptions. My first stop at Creighton was St. John’s Church. A statue outside confirmed that it was named for St. John the Apostle, who was the saint I picked for my confirmation name. I stopped inside. It was a nice church. Not as nice as the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, but nicer than the church at Georgetown. After that, I found the St. Ignatius Loyola statue outside the library. The campus wasn’t all that exciting. I’ll give Georgetown the overall edge even if Creighton has the nicer church. Other Catholic universities I’ve been to: Providence, Boston College, Villanova (all of those were in the mid-90s, I don’t remember them), and St. Thomas in St. Paul (Dennis and Courtney got married in the church there). I think that’s it.
Then I got to the bar. I was able to get five states. I wasn’t looking to get hammered, so it was a good thing that they do flights of four beers (five ounces each). I had a flight with beers from South Dakota (Crow Peak IPA), Oklahoma (COOP Alpha Hive), Kansas (Defiance Fuzzy Knuckles), and Iowa (West O Blackberry Coco Stout). The South Dakota one was an IPA that didn’t taste like an IPA. That was my least favorite. The others were good. The Iowa beer had a fruity and chocolatey flavor. I liked it more as I drank more of it. Then I had a pint of Prairie Pride Trouble in Dublin (Nebraska) with a burger. The beer was an Irish red, which I generally like, and the burger had bleu cheese and bacon. The beer was solid. The burger was underwhelming. Not bad, but definitely nothing special. So with that, I have four states left to get a beer from: Indiana, Arkansas, West Virginia, and Alaska. Indiana and Arkansas are happening later this year. Alaska will happen whenever I get to Alaska (maybe next year). West Virginia is a tricky one. I might have to take a trip to Charleston, West Virginia. They have a minor league team. I could check that out and get some beer. If anybody else knows of an easier way that I could get some West Virginia beer, let me know.
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| South Dakota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa |
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| It's in a Dogfish Head glass, but it's a Nebraska beer. |
I went back to my hotel to rest before the game. I watched the end of another bad Dodger game (rough start for them, but they should be fine). And then I took a nap. I had 36 ounces of beer. I wasn’t drunk, but it was not a negligible amount of beer. Between the alcohol and the lack of sleep the previous two nights with flights to get up for, I overslept. I set an alarm for 6:00 and the game was at 6:35. The mistake I made was not putting my phone away from the bed so that I would have to get up to turn off the alarm. I turned off the alarm and went right back to sleep. I woke up later and found that it was 8:30. So I panicked a little bit. I checked the game and it was in the sixth inning. Fortunately it was a short walk from my hotel. So I got there with Creighton up 8-0 in the sixth. Bad job by me, but I was really more interested in checking out the stadium than I was in the game. I was rooting for Creighton, but if they lost, it’s not like I was going to be upset about it. Anyway, it was a really tiny crowd. I expected that. I would say that at most, there were 200 people there. When I bought my ticket, it looked like a lot of the seats near home plate were taken. My guess is that there are a decent number of season ticket holders who didn’t feel like showing up with it being a Wednesday night in April against Kansas State with temperatures in the high 30s. It was definitely a cool stadium. It’s a lot bigger than any minor league stadium that I’ve been to. It’s the biggest college stadium by about 9,000 seats. Mississippi State has the second biggest. It’s bigger than the biggest minor league stadium (Buffalo) by about 5,000 seats.
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| The statue outside the stadium |
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| My view for most of my time at the game |
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| First row behind the dugout |
I’m sure TD Ameritrade Park is much different with a big College World Series crowd. It would be cool to see that. I had thought about taking a trip to Omaha in the past for the College World Series, but it’s not really convenient with my school schedule. Anyway, with the tiny crowd there was only one concession stand open and it didn’t have anything exciting. I didn’t get anything to eat or drink. It looks like there would have been some interesting options if all the concession stands were open. Around the concourse, you can see the past champions of the College World Series and some pictures of players. The two I found interesting were Dave Winfield and Terry Francona. I took a lap around the stadium. I watched a half inning from the front row behind the Creighton dugout and the rest from where I was supposed to be sitting behind home plate. Creighton ended up winning 8-3.
It would be awesome if Notre Dame made it to Omaha. We’ve only been in the College World Series twice (1957 and 2002). When I was a student, we finished off our last two appearances of eight straight in the NCAA tournament (I don’t have any memory of that). Since then, not good. We made the tournament in 2015, but that’s it. Notre Dame had some success in the Big East, but we’ve struggled in the ACC. I would love to see Notre Dame get good at baseball again, but I don’t really expect that to happen any time soon. Notre Dame has one obvious problem. I can’t imagine why any baseball player without any particular loyalty to a school growing up would want to play college baseball in the North. It was cold at that Creighton game. And with the college season starting when it does, it can be a lot colder than that. I suspect the reason why a lot of players end up at Notre Dame or Creighton or any other Northern school would be that they didn’t have any scholarship offers from Southern schools. At least Creighton has the advantage of playing in TD Ameritrade Park. It’s got to be cooler to play there than in the tiny baseball stadiums that a lot of colleges have.
So I liked TD Ameritrade even if it was a tiny crowd and it was cold. If I had been there at the start of the game, I don’t think I would have lasted all nine innings with the weather. Even though it was cold, I picked the right day to be there. Creighton was supposed to play the day before against Kansas, but it was rained out. After the Kansas State game, they had a day off and then they were supposed to start a three-game series at home against Butler. On the off day, they announced that the whole series was cancelled due to the forecast of rain, snow, and cold for all three days of the series. It turns out that they did play two of the games, but they were moved to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. So I was fortunate to get to TD Ameritrade Park, even if it was only for a few innings. The only thing I’m upset about with oversleeping was that I didn’t get to see it before the sun went down. Oh well.
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