A Stupid Loss for a Great Team

For the third straight year, I was in Los Angeles in early July to see the Dodgers with Sean, Pete, and Lorenzo.  Two years ago was a low point in their season.  Last year, I went to the game the night before Clayton Kershaw’s 3,000th strikeout.  This year I was there to see some interesting Dodger history.

We all knew Shohei Ohtani was one home run away from 300.  What I did not know until after the fact was that this was the Dodgers’ 11,110th game as the Los Angeles Dodgers (between the regular season and the postseason).  That is noteworthy because the Brooklyn Dodgers played 11,109 games between the regular season and the postseason.  The seasons are longer now and there are more postseason games so they still haven’t spent as much time in Los Angeles as they did in Brooklyn, but they have now played more games as the Los Angeles Dodgers than they did as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Before the game, Sean and I stopped at Philippe’s for French dip sandwiches.  Philippe’s is pretty close to the stadium so it is always a good option before a Dodger game.  They should have Philippe’s inside the stadium.  There are a decent number of food options, but they could use something local like this in the stadium.  But I’m not too concerned about the food inside the stadium because if I’m only going to get there for one game a year, I’m getting Dodger Dogs and not worrying about the other options.

As for the game, it was Justin Wrobleski for the Dodgers against Michael Lorenzen for the Rockies.  I had just seen the Rockies get pounded a week earlier.  I hoped to see that again, but it was not to be.  Justin Wrobleski probably doesn’t get enough credit for his performance in the World Series last year.  He pitched five scoreless innings in four games (including four scoreless innings in the Dodgers’ last three wins).  He did that after not pitching at all in the playoffs before that.  This year, he’s been excellent as a starter.  He’s 7th in the NL in ERA, tied for 4th in wins, and tied for 3rd in WHIP.  He was not originally selected as an all star (he would have been if not for the fact that every team gets an all star and the Dodgers already had five).  I figured he would get added as a replacement and that’s what happened.  As for this game, he was really good.  He allowed one run on six hits and two walks with nine strikeouts in seven innings.  He left in position to win.  Unfortunately he didn’t get the win.

Shohei Ohtani got rid of any possible suspense by hitting his 300th career home run leading off the bottom of the first.  He’s going to break Mookie Betts’s record for most career leadoff home runs (Betts has 32, but Ohtani is now at 27).  Only two Dodgers have ever hit 300 home runs with the Dodgers (Duke Snider and Gil Hodges), but Ohtani was the eighth player to hit his 300th career home run with the Dodgers (Snider, Hodges, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gonzalez, Freddie Freeman, JD Martinez, Mookie Betts, and Ohtani).

Shohei Ohtani is about to hit his 300th home run.

The Dodgers made it 2-0 on a bases loaded walk by Andy Pages in the fifth, but they missed an opportunity to add more that inning.  The Rockies scored on a groundout in the sixth, but the Dodgers answered with an RBI single by Alex Freeland in the bottom of the sixth to make it 3-1.  The Dodgers brought in World Series hero Will Klein in the eighth inning.  He was the most random World Series hero for the Dodgers last year after pitching 15 ⅓ regular season innings and just one inning in the postseason (a very low leverage inning when the Dodgers lost Game 1 by a score of 11-4) before pitching four scoreless innings in Game 3 (he was the only Dodger other than Yamamoto to get a win in the series).  He’s been very good for the Dodgers in a bigger role this year, but he was not good on this night.  He only got one out and three runs on one hit and one walk (all of the runs were unearned because of an error, but Klein wasn’t good).  The first run scored on Miguel Rojas’s error fielding a possible double play ball that could have ended the inning.  The worst case scenario should have been runners on the corners with two outs.  Instead it was runners on the corners with one out and a run scoring.  Although Klein wasn’t good, he could have gotten out of it without any runs scoring if the Dodgers had gotten the double play there.  But they didn’t and the Dodgers brought in Jack Dreyer.  Jake McCarthy put down a bunt to Max Muncy and Muncy threw to Alex Freeland covering first base on the bunt for the second out.  The tying run scored on the bunt and with Muncy fielding the bunt, nobody was covering third so the runner from first just kept going.  Alex Freeland made a poor decision to throw it and try to hit Miguel Rojas on the run covering third.  Even if Rojas caught it, they probably weren’t getting the out.  But Rojas didn’t catch it, the ball went into the dugout and the run scored.  So the tying run scored from third and the go ahead run scored from first on a bunt.  Miguel Rojas had the biggest hit of the World Series with his game-tying home run in the top of the ninth inning in Game 7.  But this wasn’t a good inning for him.  It was a really stupid inning.  But Will Klein and Miguel Rojas are definitely allowed to have a bad game after what they did for the Dodgers in the World Series last year.

The Dodgers were only down by a run against a bad team so I was hoping they would come back.  They didn’t do anything in the eighth.  In the ninth inning, they had 8, 9, and 1 coming up.  I figured we would get pinch hitters since Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez weren’t playing.  Dave Roberts let Alex Freeland hit and that worked as he got a single.  Then Roberts went to Teoscar Hernandez to pinch hit for Miguel Rojas and Hernandez walked.  So it was looking pretty good for the Dodgers with the tying run on second and the go ahead run on first with nobody out and the top of the order coming up.  But Shohei Ohtani popped up on the infield and Andy Pages hit a fly ball to right.  That brought up Freddie Freeman.  The first pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  The second pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  Freeman ended up striking out on the sixth pitch of the at bat to end the game.  The game didn’t end on a challenge, but it made me think of how lame it would be if a playoff game ended on a challenge or if you thought a playoff game ended and then it didn’t because of a challenge.  I have my issues with the ABS strike zone and I would just get rid of it, but that’s not going to happen so I would be fine if they just used it instead of having challenges.  Or if they just used it for the ninth inning and extra innings and got rid of challenges after eight innings, that would be better also.

This was my 17th game at Dodger Stadium.  The first games I went to there were before the blog in 2011.  The Dodgers are 9-8 in the games I’ve been to at Dodger Stadium.  So that’s a .529 winning percentage.  Apparently their overall winning percentage at Dodger Stadium since the start of 2011 is .635.  So they’ve been bad by their standards with me in attendance.  But it’s a small sample size and also it’s correlation not causation so I’m definitely not going to conclude that I shouldn’t go to games at Dodger Stadium.  The only stadiums where I’ve seen more baseball games are Shea Stadium (my estimate is that I attended around 50 games at Shea Stadium) and Citi Field (I’ve been to 34 games at Citi Field), and maybe the old Yankee Stadium (I’ve been to eight baseball games and four football games at the new stadium and my estimate is that I went to like 13-20 games at the old stadium).  I wish I could get to more games at Dodger Stadium.  I used to try to get to two games when I would visit, but ticket prices are so crazy now.  I had a couple of Dodger Dogs that were very good, but the lack of real mustard was disappointing.  To drink I had a 310 Blonde from Santa Monica Brew Works (which Pete and I visited many years ago).  Dodger has a couple of areas with a decent craft beer selection.  A lot of it is from California, but more like San Diego or northern California.  I wanted a more local beer (I can’t be drinking beer from Padres or Giants territory at Dodger Stadium) and the 310 Blonde was very good.

It was a disappointing result, but the Dodgers have won the last two World Series, so whatever.  I always like being at Dodger Stadium and it was good seeing Pete and Lorenzo there again.  It was 76°, attendance was 47,806 (probably the biggest crowd for a baseball game that I’ll get to this year), and the game took two hours and 30 minutes.  Major League Baseball just released their 2027 schedule.  Hopefully I’ll get back to Dodger Stadium to see a win next year, but that schedule is very much tentative at this point with a lockout possibly coming.  Hopefully Major League Baseball won’t be stupid enough to have a work stoppage, but Rob Manfred is the commissioner so I’m definitely worried.  If he has his way, Major League Baseball might come up with a collective bargaining agreement as stupid as the NBA’s.  I wonder what the position of the Dodgers’ ownership group is.  If I was them, I’d pretty much be on the players’ side.  So we’ll see what happens.  I hope we get a full 162 game season next year.  There’s a chance that this was my last baseball game of the year as I don’t have any solid plans to go to anymore games.  But there’s still a lot of summer left so I hope I’ll get to at least a couple more games before school starts.

A World Series Hero in the Wrong Uniform

Just a few days after getting home from Colorado and Wyoming, I headed out west again.  This time I was going to California for three baseball games.  I wanted to combine my nearly annual trip to Los Angeles with something else.  We were going to the Dodger game on Tuesday and a minor league game on Wednesday.  So that meant doing something on Monday or Thursday.  I looked at the minor league schedule for Thursday and the only games out west that would be easy to get to were places I had already been to (Reno and Las Vegas) and Sacramento (which I’m hoping to get to next year for an A’s game).  So that meant going to a game on Monday, but there are usually no minor league games on Mondays so I went to a Padres game.  It was my third Padres game.  I saw Dodgers-Padres in 2012 and Pirates-Padres in 2017.

This was Diamondbacks-Padres.  I had mixed feelings about the game.  Both teams are division rivals.  Both teams were tied for second at 14 games behind the Dodgers.  So there was no obvious rooting interest for the benefit of the Dodgers.  The Padres have been probably the Dodgers’ biggest rival this decade (the Dodgers beat them in the playoffs in 2020 and 2024 and lost to them in the playoffs in 2022).  But the Padres’ starter was Dodgers World Series hero Walker Buehler.  I hate that Buehler is on the Padres, but I can still root for him as long as he isn’t playing the Dodgers.  On the other hand, the Padres’ first three hitters were my three least favorite active players other than the cheating 2017 Astros who are still around:  Fernando Tatis (cheater), Jake Cronenworth (Michigan), and Manny Machado (Manny Machado).  So I guess I was rooting for the Padres to win this game 1-0 with anybody other than those guys scoring or driving in the run.  Unfortunately, Walker Buehler was not good.  It’s a shame he didn’t come around when pitchers weren’t throwing too hard because maybe he could have stayed healthy and had a great career.  Since having his second Tommy John surgery, he is 16-18 in the regular season with a 5.18 ERA and a 1.50 WHIP.  Before his second Tommy John surgery, he was 46-16 in the regular season with a 3.02 ERA and a 1.04 WHIP.  He’s had a nice career with some great postseason moments, but if he had come around a couple of generations earlier, he might have had an Orel Hershiser-type career.

The bad news was that Buehler was bad, but the good news was that the Padres didn’t hit.  The Diamondbacks took a 2-0 lead in the first with runs scoring on a throwing error by Buehler and an RBI single by Max Kepler.  Buehler ended up giving up seven runs in five innings, with Max Kepler and Geraldo Perdomo hitting home runs off of him.  Nolan Arenado added another home run later to make it 8-0.  And that was the final score.

It's not as good as PNC Park, a great view at Petco Park.

Petco Park is really good.  It’s one of the best in the Majors (I have it ranked fifth among stadiums that still exist, but the second best to be built after Dodger Stadium in 1962).  It opened in 2004, but I noticed during this trip that it has a little bit of a Fenway Park thing going on with ramps in random places a slight changes in elevation walking around the lower level.  I visited the Padres Hall of Fame, which I think has been added since my last time there nine years ago.  Since it's the Padres, it wasn't very big.  The craft beer selection looked really good.  I didn’t have one because I was definitely going to have a beer the next night at the Dodger game.  I did get the short rib quesabirria tacos.  They were fantastic.  Being in San Diego, I was hoping for fish tacos, but I didn’t see any.  I’ll take a hot dog at a baseball game any day and be perfectly happy, but these might have been the best specialty food I’ve had at a baseball game.

They gave me a fork, but the structural integrity of these tacos was very good.

So to summarize, the good news was that the Padres lost and the stadium and the tacos were great and the bad news was that Walker Buehler wasn’t good.  Oh well, he’ll always be fondly remembered by Dodger fans (he's on the All-Jim Team).  It was 72°, attendance was 38,204, and the game was two hours and 25 minutes.

The next day I was off to Los Angeles.  I’ll get to the game later, but I took the train from San Diego.  I had done the opposite train ride in 2017.  Going from San Diego to Los Angeles, most of the first half of the ride is right along the coast so that was cool.  The stop at Anaheim is right by Angel Stadium.  So I saw three Major League Baseball stadiums on this trip, but only attended games in two.

I took this picture from the train.

Shohei Ohtani used to work here.

Mile High Baseball

I don’t remember when I came up with the goal of getting to a sporting event in all 50 states.  Whenever I did, I had probably already been to a sporting event in 30+ states.  But actually doing all 50 seemed like a long shot.  The state that seemed most unlikely was Wyoming.  Well, I crossed Wyoming off the list and I only have three left.  It was the second leg of my first trip of the summer.

I flew out to Denver and went to Marlins-Rockies.  Those two teams didn’t exist until I was nine years old.  It was my third time at Coors Field.  The first was in 2012 for Dodgers-Rockies.  The second time was when I flew out to Denver and met Tom to help him move across the country in 2017.  We didn’t get to a game, but we did the stadium tour.  So I was back for a second game.  It was really just because I wanted to combine Wyoming with something and Denver was pretty much the only logical choice.

I got to Denver and I didn’t have anything planned other than the game so I took a nap when I got to my hotel room before the game.  The forecast was good for the game, but when I left my hotel to walk to the stadium, the sky looked ominous.  There were some rain drops and I saw a few lightning strikes in the distance.  But the forecast still looked good for the game.  I got to Coors Field and took a lap around the stadium and then headed up to my seat.  Right before the game started, it started raining pretty good.  So I headed up to the purple row, which is 5,280 feet above sea level.  It was about five rows from the top, but it was high up enough to be under cover.  So I watched the beginning of the game from up there.  The rain didn’t last long and then I went down to the field level to get food and a beer.  I got the taco trio (three different tacos) and a 90 Shilling Amber Ale from the Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado.  The tacos were pretty good and the beer was underwhelming.  I got it because it was one of the few craft beers I saw at the stadium.  There was a lot of crafty beer (Coors Field is where Blue Moon was created, but that’s owned by Molson Coors), but not a lot of actual craft beer.  I watched a little bit of the game from the field level down the first base line and then I headed back up to my actual seat.

This was the view from 5,280 feet above sea level.

As for the game, I didn’t really care too much who won.  In theory, the Rockies are a division rival for the Dodgers, but they’re terrible so I didn’t care if they won.  They also had Eric Karros’s son playing third base so I guess I was rooting for them.  It was Tanner Gordon pitching for the Rockies against Eury Perez.  The game was not very competitive.  The Marlins took a 1-0 lead in the first, but the Rockies tied it in the bottom of the first on a Mickey Moniak home run.  But the Marlins retook the lead in the second and then went up 5-1 on a three-run home run by Javier Sanoja in the third.  The lead got to 10-1 on a Joe Mack two-run home run in the seventh.  The Rockies scored a run in the bottom of the seventh to make it 10-2.  With a non-competitive game that I didn’t really care about, I left after seven innings.  The Marlins ended up winning 14-3.  It was 83° and attendance was 20.526.  I assume that will be the smallest crowd for a Major League game that I get to this year.  The game lasted three hours.

The next day, I was off to Casper, Wyoming.  But before that, I picked up breakfast at Sam’s No. 3 in Denver.  It was on Man v. Food.  I had a breakfast burrito that was pretty good.  Then I flew to Casper.  As far as I could tell, Denver was the only city that had flights to Casper.  The post-security area at the Casper airport was like one big room.  There were vending machines and no other food (there was a restaurant on the other side of security).  Casper is the second biggest city in Wyoming with a population of about 59,000 in the 2020 census (Cheynne had about 65,000).  The elevation is about the same as Denver.  In 2012, I drove from Denver to Cheyenne for breakfast because I figured I would never be in Wyoming again.  As it turns out, this was my third time in Wyoming.  Tom and I drove through Wyoming going from Denver to Salt Lake City on the first day I was with him when I was helping him move.  But of course, I hadn’t been to a sporting event in Wyoming.  Casper had a minor league team from 2001 or 2002 (Wikipedia has conflicting information) to 2011.  It was a rookie league team (rookie league doesn’t exist anymore) and the team eventually moved to Grand Junction, Colorado.  They played at Mike Lansing Field (named after a former Major Leaguer who was identified in the Mitchell Report as a cheater).  Now Mike Lansing Field is home to the Casper Spuds (the minor league team was the Casper Ghosts, which was a better name).  The Spuds are a collegiate summer league team.  I’ve done collegiate summer league baseball to cross off Alaska, Oregon, and Vermont on the list of states to see a sporting event in and so I was doing that with Wyoming.

I went to two games because I didn’t want to take the chance of traveling all the way to Wyoming and having a game rained out.  It was the Casper Spuds against the Oahe Zap (from Pierre, South Dakota).  I’m pretty sure the Zap won both games.  I left after seven innings both times.  I tried to look it up, but the websites for the two teams and the league are not good.  There was no information about the players (I would have checked to see where they play college baseball).  The Zap’s website has their scores from last season, but not this season.  The Spuds’ website doesn’t have anything.  But the Zap were leading when I left in both games and when I went to the second game, I heard some people talking about how the Spuds made a comeback the night before but came up short.  The food and beer selection was fine for a collegiate summer league team.  I had a bratwurst at the first game and nothing to drink.  For the second game, they had a food truck making quesadillas, but they were kind of expensive and also it was July 2 (our actual Independence Day) so I wanted to have a hot dog.  That worked out well because Thursdays are energy night.  I had no idea what that meant, but apparently it was $2 off hot dogs and beer.  So I got a hot dog for $3 and a Spuds Suds from the Black Tooth Brewing Company (a craft brewery in Wyoming).  Unfortunately they only had yellow and not real mustard, but the hot dog was good.  The beer was nothing special, but it was very cold.  The temperature was in the 80s for the games (on days when the highs back home were right around 100°).  I have no idea what the attendance was.  Wikipedia says that the stadium has a capacity of 2,500.  I’m pretty sure there were less than 1,000 people at the games I went to.  The stadium reminded me of the stadium in Boise, Idaho (another spot that no longer has a minor league team).  There were three sections of seats (one behind home plate, and one on each side of the field).  I sat behind home plate up near the press box for both games mainly to stay out of the sun before it set.  I think all the tickets were $10.  The scoreboard looked super old.  It must be the scoreboard from when the stadium originally opened.  If this was still a minor league stadium, it would be pretty terrible, but it's fine for collegiate summer league baseball.  So I got to cross Wyoming off the list of states to see a sporting event in and I celebrated the 250 years of American independence with baseball, a hot dog, and craft beer.  That was pretty good.

I think Wyoming was the most unlikely state for me to watch a baseball game, but I did it on my third trip to Wyoming (which is at least two more times than I ever thought I would be in Wyoming).

The only states I still have to see a sporting event in are West Virginia, Mississippi. and Hawaii.  I don’t know which one will be next or when that will be.

Mendoza!

I am not going to be able to see the Dodgers when they come to Citi Field this summer.  But I wanted to make sure I got to a game at Citi Field and a baseball game seemed like a good way to start summer vacation.  The plan was to go to Cubs-Mets on June 22.  That was the first day I was going to be off because of summer vacation.  My last day of school was June 18, but I would have been off the next three days even if it wasn’t summer vacation because it would have been Juneteenth, Saturday, and Sunday.  So my dad and I were planning to go on Monday, June 22, but that game got rained out (I never bought tickets because the forecast looked pretty bad for a while).  The next two nights were the NBA Draft (which should be one night, not two) so we went on Thursday, June 25.  It ended up being Carlos Mendoza’s last game as the manager of the Mets.

This was our view for the game.

This was my 34th game at Citi Field in the 18 years that it has existed.  The only stadium I’ve been to more was Shea Stadium.  I don’t know the exact number of games I went to at Shea Stadium, but I went to games there over the course of 20 years and I would guess it was an average of about 2.5 games per year so I would guess I went to around 50 games there.  Of the 34 games I’ve been to at Citi Field, 22 have been against the Dodgers.  This time I was a neutral fan.  I would have been inclined to root for the Cubs because the Mets were wearing their stupid black uniforms, but there were other factors to consider.  The Cubs are managed by former Notre Dame baseball player Craig Counsell.  But Craig Counsell also complained about the Dodgers being able to count Shohei Ohtani as a position player.  He brought this up for no reason one time (it wasn’t when the Cubs were playing the Dodgers), but also his complaint is stupid.  If your roster is limited to 13 pitchers and you have a player that both pitches and hits, you should be able to count him as whatever you want to count him as on your roster.  The Cubs do have some former Dodgers.  They have Michael Conforto (perhaps the Dodger who contributed the least to last season’s championship), Justin Dean, and Michael Busch.  As much as I wanted to root for Justin Dean (he played in 13 playoff games in the playoffs last year with zero plate appearances, but the Dodgers went 12-1 in those games, including Games 2, 6, and 7 of the World Series), I couldn’t root for the Cubs.  Why?  Because although they have some guys I want to root for, they also have cheater Alex Bregman on their team.

Baseball is harder when you’re not cheating.

This was the final game of a four-game series against the Cubs.  The Mets had lost the first three.  It was Freddy Peralta for the Mets against Matthew Boyd for the Cubs.  Boyd pitched four and two-thirds scoreless and was taken out after 76 pitches because the way pitchers are used in 2026 is stupid.  Peralta pitched five scoreless and then came out with two outs in the sixth after giving up three unearned runs.  Michael Conforto drove in the first run on a single, cheater Alex Bregman drove in a run on a double, and then Ian Happ had an RBI single.  The Mets responded well, tying the game on home runs by Eric Wagaman and Jared Young in the sixth and seventh.  And then a perfectly good game was ruined by Rob Manfred extra innings.  Pete Crow-Armstrong drove in a runner who was on second base for no reason with an RBI double in the top of the tenth.  The Mets went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the tenth and lost 4-3.  So the Mets allowed four runs and none of them were earned.  The first three were unearned because of a throwing error by shortstop Ronny Mauricio.  The last one was unearned because Rob Manfred put a runner on second base for no reason.  The night before, the Mets made six errors and gave up five unearned runs (and also five earned runs) and lost 10-5.  After the series against the Cubs Carlos Mendoza was fired.

Besides being subjected to Rob Manfred extra innings, it was good to be at a Major League Baseball game for the first time since I was in Minnesota ten months earlier.  Attendance was 36,035.  The game lasted three hours and 13 minutes and it was 76°.

I’ll finish with my thoughts on the World Cup.  I don’t have many thoughts because soccer is stupid.  I thought the thing I would enjoy most about the World Cup would be not watching it.  And indeed, I have enjoyed not watching it.  But the best thing about the World Cup has been seeing all these foreigners visiting the United States for the World Cup and realizing that the United States is pretty awesome.  I have many issues with soccer, but I’ll just mention two right now.  Why do soccer broadcasters use improper grammar?  They’ll say stuff like “Belgium have played well in the World Cup.”  Belgium is a singular noun.  If you said, “The Belgians have played well in the World Cup,” that would be grammatically correct because the subject of that sentence is a plural noun.  And why is the United States always referred to as USMNT?  I know it stands for United States Men’s National Team.  Why can’t we just call them USA Soccer?  Whenever I see USMNT, I just think United States Mutant Ninja Turtles.  So those are all my soccer thoughts for now.  I hope the United States wins to embarrass countries that care about soccer, but I’m not going to be watching because as a patriotic American, I definitely don’t care about soccer.

Single-A Opening Day in Virginia

I was trying to figure out what to do for my annual Easter vacation trip.  I usually travel the week after Easter, but my brothers were coming to town that week so that left me with the window of Holy Thursday-Holy Saturday to travel.  Before I knew that my brothers would be in town, I was thinking of going down to Biloxi, Mississippi, for minor league baseball and to cross Mississippi off the list of states to see a sporting event in.  I was thinking of combining that with a trip to Richmond because they were opening a new minor league stadium there.  But those teams weren’t home before Easter so I had to adjust my plans.  I thought about going to Mississippi State for college baseball.  They have the biggest college baseball stadium in the country outside of Omaha and it would be interesting to see some SEC baseball.  Not surprisingly, it’s really hard to get to Starkville, Mississippi.  I think my options involved a tight connection in Atlanta on the way home (I didn’t feel good about that) or getting home really late on Saturday night before Easter.  So Mississippi was out.  I was looking at the minor league schedule for a game in a place that I’d want to go to and I decided on Single-A Opening Day in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  This was my second Opening Day at any level of professional baseball.  No matter what happened, it was not going to come anywhere close to Opening Day for the Dodgers in 2013.

Fredericksburg was appealing for a couple of reasons.  I had wanted to go to Richmond for their new stadium.  Fredericksburg does have a pretty new minor league stadium.  The Richmond stadium is opening this year, the Fredericksburg stadium opened in 2021.  It was supposed to open in 2020, but the minor league season was canceled.  Although it didn’t host any minor league games in 2020, it did serve as the Nationals’ alternate training site that season.  So it’s a pretty new stadium.  The other reason I wanted to go to Richmond was because I think I’ve only seen one sporting event in Virginia.  Sean and I went to a Potomac Cannons game in the spring of 2003 (they were a Reds’ affiliate back then).  I think that was my first minor league baseball game ever.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Virginia since Sean used to live there, but I think that’s the only sporting event I’ve been to in Virginia.  I’ve seen plenty of sporting events in Washington DC and Maryland, but Virginia doesn’t have a major professional team.  I thought about going to the Notre Dame-Virginia football game in 2015 (when Malik Zaire got hurt and DeShone Kizer threw the winning touchdown pass to Will Fuller late in the game), but that didn’t happen.  So it was almost like Virginia was a state I hadn’t attended a sporting event in even though I’ve spent a lot of time there.  I was thinking about the states I’ve spent the most nights in.  Of course, New York is number 1 and Indiana is number 2.  My guess is that Florida is number 3 and California is number 4.  Virginia is probably number 5, Pennsylvania is probably number 6, and Massachusetts is probably number 7.  I’ve seen hundreds of sporting events in New York, dozens in Indiana, 22 in California (16 Dodger games, two Giants games, two Padres games, an Angel game, and an A’s game), I think 13 in Pennsylvania (four Phillies games, three Pirates games, four NCAA tournament games, a Lancaster Barnstormers game, and a Notre Dame-Pittsburgh football game),  I think 9 in Massachusetts (six Red Sox games, a Celtics game, a Notre Dame football game, and a Notre Dame hockey game), and I think 4 in Florida (Rays games in St. Petersburg and Tampa, a Marlins game, and the Notre Dame-Alabama National Championship Game).  

The game was on Good Friday.  If they had played on Holy Thursday, I would have gone to that game instead, but Good Friday was their Opening Day.  Going on Holy Thursday would have allowed me to eat whatever I wanted at the game and it did seem like there were some good food options.  But I was fasting for Good Friday and I couldn’t eat meat.  It seemed like the non-meat options were soft pretzels, mac and cheese, and a black bean burger.  I would have gone with mac and cheese, but soft pretzels are a traditional Good Friday food.  So that’s what I went with.  Fortunately they had real mustard (they had yellow also, but they had packets of Gulden’s).  If the pretzel had been warmer, it would have been very good.  To drink I had a Rappahannock Red from the 6 Bears and a Goat Brewery in Fredericksburg.  It was pretty good.  The bad thing about the concessions was that the lines moved very slowly.  There was one little beer stand that had cans that was pretty quick, but I was hoping to get it on tap.  There was a stand that had the Rappahannock Red on tap so I was waiting in line.  There was one bartender when they definitely should have had two.  The line moved slowly but I got to the point where there was a group of two people in front of me and then I was up.  But it never got to the two people in front of me.  The computer the bartender was using died and since the stadium is cashless, he couldn’t sell any more drinks.  So after waiting for a while for a beer on tap, I had to settle for getting a can.

As for the game, it was the Nationals against the Augusta GreenJackets (a Braves’ affiliate that plays in North Augusta, South Carolina).  The Augusta starting pitcher was Ethan Bagwell.  He left with a 3-0 lead (Augusta scored on a home run, an RBI single, and a throwing error) after throwing 78 pitches in six innings with six strikeouts and only a walk allowed.  I’ve seen a combined no-hitter in the minor leagues and I was nine outs away from seeing another one.  The bullpen was not able to get it done.  Fredericksburg had plenty of baserunners in the bottom of the seventh thanks to a hit by pitch, two walks, two doubles, and a triple.  They also had two stolen bases and a sacrifice fly in that inning and they took a 5-3 lead.  And that was all the scoring for the game so Fredericksburg ended up winning on Opening Day.

It was good to be at a baseball game for the first time since August in Minnesota.

Concessions were an issue, but there were good aspects of the stadium.  I rank stadiums based on my experience attending games and the weather helped.  It was 82°, which was nice because my last couple of Easter vacation trips have involved cold weather baseball (Des Moines and Portland, Maine).  It was a very nice looking stadium and the crowd was good (being there on Opening Day definitely helped with that).  Attendance was 4,230, which was mostly full (with a capacity of 5,000).  The game lasted two hours and 20 minutes.  So it was a decent enough experience for my first baseball game of the season.  I’ll probably get to more minor league games this season so I’ll hold off on rerunning my full non-Major League Baseball stadium rankings, but I think this one was in the middle of the pack as far as the ones I’ve been to.  I’ll probably slot it in around 20 on the list.

March Musings

March is a good month on the sports calendar, but it’s not a fun month as a teacher.  My only day off was my annual personal day for the first Friday of the NCAA tournament.  But the excellent month of sports started before that.  I went to the Thursday night of the Big East Tournament with Vin.  I think this was my twelfth Big East Tournament and my ninth with Vin.  I was hoping we’d get to see St. John’s.  In all my years going to the Big East Tournament, I don’t remember ever seeing St. John’s when they’re good.  That’s mainly because they haven’t been very good this century.  Since I started college in the fall of 2002, they’ve only made it to the NCAA Tournament in 2011, 2015, 2019, and now 2025, and 2026 (after making it 20 out of 27 years from 1976-2002).  It looked for a while like we would get to see St. John’s.  We were getting the 2 seed in the first game and the 3 seed in the second game and St. John’s had a good chance of being the 2 seed.  But they ended up sneaking their way up to the 1 seed late in the season.  So UConn was the 2 seed and they played Xavier in the first game.  Villanova was locked into the 3 seed for a while and they played Georgetown in the second game.

I have a clear hierarchy for how I root for teams in the Big East.  It goes like this:

Tier 1- Villanova.  I will always appreciate them for winning National Championship Games against North Carolina and Michigan.

Tier 2- Providence, Seton Hall, Georgetown.  This tier is the Catholic Schools from the Old Big East besides Villanova and one other.  We’ll get to them.

Tier 3- Xavier, DePaul, Marquette, Creighton.  This tier is the New Big East Catholic schools.

Tier 4- St. John’s and Butler.  St. John’s would be in tier 2, but their head coach is Rick Pitino, one of my least favorite people in basketball for multiple reasons (going back to his time with the Celtics).  I want them to be good because it’s good for the Big East and Madison Square Garden is more fun if they’re good, but I want somebody other than Rick Pitino to be their coach so that I can root for them.  As for Butler, I have nothing against them.  I rooted for them when Brad Stevens was their coach.  If the school converted to Catholicism, they would be straddling the line between the second and third tier even though they’re not an Old Big East team.

Tier 5- UConn.  There’s a big drop off from tier 4 to tier 5.  There’s nothing to like about UConn.  Danny Hurley makes them even more unlikeable.

That’s how I root for the Big East teams in general.  But I am willing to break those rules under certain circumstances.  For example, I was rooting for anybody other than St. John’s, UConn, or Villanova to win the tournament this year because those three were locks for the NCAA Tournament.  And they were the only teams the Big East was getting in the tournament unless somebody else won the Big East.  So I was rooting for anybody else.  Unfortunately Xavier didn’t get the job done.  It wasn’t competitive in the first game as UConn won 93-68.  Vin had to leave early in the second game.  I stayed until there were about eight minutes left in the first half.  It looked like Villanova was on their way to victory.  They led 27-18.  ESPN says that they had an 89.2% chance to win at that point.  But I guess they didn’t play well at all after I left.  Georgetown won 78-64.  While I was rooting for somebody other than St. John’s, UConn, or Villanova to win the tournament, I wasn’t too excited about that result because I didn’t think Georgetown had a chance to go any further in the tournament (I was thinking Seton Hall might be the only other team that had any real chance to win the tournament).  And not surprisingly UConn beat Georgetown 67-51 the next night.  St. John’s beat Seton Hall in the other semifinal and then they beat UConn easily in the final.

We were in the first row of the 300s level which was a pretty good view.

It was good to see Vin for another Big East Tournament.  Hopefully next year will be our tenth together.  I might try to get tickets for the semifinals or the final next year.  I’ve been to the semifinals and the final a few times, but tickets for those nights have been pretty expensive the last few years.  I always say that the Big East Tournament marks the end of winter and to celebrate, I had my first Sam Adams Cold Snap (their spring seasonal) of the year.  And now that we’re at the end of March, Sam Adams Summer Ale should be available any day now.

My dream continues to be Notre Dame rejoining the Big East for all of our sports except for football and hockey.  We should always be independent in football and we should be in any conference other than the Big 10 or independent in hockey (since the Big East doesn’t have hockey).  Of course, right now we’re in the ACC for our non-football/hockey sports and we have our football scheduling deal with the ACC (for an average of five games per year, which seems to have become six with Stanford joining the ACC and us keeping Stanford on the schedule annually for some reason).  My ideal scenario would be a scheduling deal with the Big 10 and SEC for a total of seven games per year against those two conferences (USC plus six other games).  The rest of the games would be three games per year against ACC/Big 12 opponents, the Navy game, and one buy game against a Group of 6 team.  Of course, football is the most important thing, but I dream of being part of Big East basketball once again.

Notre Dame basketball has been depressing.  The men’s basketball team has been terrible in the post-Brey era.  Mike Brey had done all he could and I had no problem moving on, but it has not gone well.  It seemed like Micah Shrewsberry was a good choice to take over, but it has not worked at all and there is no reason for optimism right now.  As for the women’s team, they haven’t been as good as they were at the end of the Muffet McGraw Era, but they had a surprisingly good run in the NCAA Tournament this year.  The hockey team hasn’t been good lately.  The baseball team had a great coach in Link Jarrett, but then he left.  Since then, we haven’t been back to the tournament.  We might have a chance to get in this year.  But if you offered me a National Championship in football at the expense of being bad in every other sport, I would make that deal.  Of course, we’re allowed to win a National Championship in football and still be good in other sports.

With Notre Dame being terrible in men’s basketball, my interest in college basketball has waned greatly.  Still I love the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament.  The Big East Tournament was good (despite St. John’s and UConn being the two teams in the championship game).  But the NCAA Tournament has been pretty boring.  For the second straight year, no 13-16 seeds won in the first round.  I don’t want a ton of upsets, but I want some.  The Sweet 16 was all Power 5 teams (and only one Catholic school).  People are speculating that this is the future of the tournament because it’s hard to build a team that can win multiple tournament games these days if you’re not in a power conference because your good players are just going to transfer to a power conference team.  College basketball was already in bad shape and it’s somehow gotten worse.  Duke finding a way to lose was nice, but the bad news was they lost to UConn.  And we have Michigan in the Final Four.  There have been some fun games, but this year’s tournament has been generally boring.  Hopefully Arizona will save us from the nightmare scenario of Michigan winning.

In the NBA, it’s been a good season for the Celtics.  I was optimistic at the beginning of the season when a lot of people weren’t.  I just thought Jaylen Brown and Derrick White were too good for the Celtics to be bad.  How many teams in the East have two players as good as the two of them?  Not many.  I did question my instincts about the Celtics when they started the season 0-3 and looking bad.  But since then, they’re 50-22.  Joe Mazzulla now has any many 50 win seasons as Erik Spoelstra.  I love Joe Mazzulla.  Things seemed bad for the Celtics when they had to replace Ime Udoka with Joe Mazzulla.  That has worked out amazingly well.  Joe Mazzulla is a better coach and he has a much more likeable personality than Ime Udoka.  Joe Mazzulla is Catholic (he has rosary beads made out of the Celtics’ old parquet floor) and he doesn’t care about the British royal family.  I love that guy.  So anyway, I was optimistic about the Celtics, but they’ve exceeded my expectations.  The Celtics are now the favorites to win the East.  I definitely didn’t see that coming.  If they win the East (they’re far from being locks, but it is very realistic), they will be underdogs in the Finals (as long as they’re playing the Thunder or Spurs), but the Pacers almost won the championship last year and I think the Celtics are better than the Pacers were.  Regardless of what happens in the playoffs this year, it’s been a very fun season and there’s a lot of reason for optimism for the Celtics’ future.

And I’ll finish up with some baseball thoughts now that the regular season has started.  The Dodgers are going for their third straight World Series championship and that is awesome.  The big change in baseball is the ABS challenge system.  Most people seem to like it.  I do not like it.  There are two reasons why I don’t like it.  First of all, we’re not sure how accurate it is.  Major League Baseball has said that they’re 95% sure that a pitch is within 0.39 inches of where the system says it is.  So that sounds pretty accurate.  But it’s not accurate enough.  You could have a pitch called a strike and that batter challenges it and the system says it’s 0.1 of an inch off the plate and the call gets changed to a ball.  But the margin of error is saying that the pitch very easily could have been over the plate.  So why should that call be overturned?  The other problem that I have with it is that it’s not using the actual strike zone.  There are two problems with the strike zone that they’re using.  The first is that they’re not using a three-dimensional strike zone over the plate.  They’re using a two-dimensional strike zone over the middle of the plate.  And why aren’t they using a three-dimensional strike zone?  When there’s a challenge, they show you the flight path of the ball so it seems like it would be pretty easy to use a three-dimensional strike zone.  And the second problem is that the strike zone is based entirely on a player's height.  Two players who are the same height but have totally different stances do not have the same strike zone.  If they were using the actual strike zone and they took into account the margin of error and didn’t overturn super close calls that might have been correct in the first place, I would be fine with using this system.  But that’s not what they’re doing.

So I don’t like the ABS system, but I am happy to have baseball back.  I should be attending my first game of the season later this week.  Hopefully I’ll get to a bunch of games in various stadiums this year.

Joe Mazzulla’s State

I’m very overdue for this blog post, but I went to Providence the day before the Super Bowl to see Providence play DePaul in basketball.  Why did I do this?  No, it’s not because it’s Joe Mazzulla’s home state.  It was because Rhode Island was one of five states where I had never attended a sporting event.  It’s a state where I’ve spent very little time.  I was in Rhode Island probably in 1995 when my brothers visited Providence on our way to see schools in Massachusetts.  Other than that, I’ve been through Rhode Island on my way to and from Boston.  I remember driving home from John’s wedding and checking the clock in my car and I think it took me 40 minutes to drive through Rhode Island.  In 2025, I crossed off three New England states on the list of states to see a sporting event in (Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire).  I probably would have done Rhode Island a while ago, but they haven’t had minor league baseball since 2019.  So a Providence basketball game was the best option.  The problem was it pretty much had to be a Saturday game and it had to be a game that didn’t interfere with watching football.  I think one year they might have played Georgetown on a Saturday after football season, but it was Ed Cooley’s return to Providence and ticket prices were really expensive.  But this year, they played DePaul on the day before the Super Bowl so that was pretty much ideal.  Also, the game was at 4:00, which meant I could leave home at a reasonable hour, get to Providence in time for the game (or so I thought), and get back home without having to stay overnight in Providence.

There was some snow in the forecast, but it didn’t seem like that big of a deal.  But my train was delayed.  When I got on the train, it was still sunny.  But the weather got worse as it went through Connecticut.  By the time I got to Providence, snow had accumulated on the train where the doors would open.  Providence had gotten a few inches and after walking about a half mile from the train station to Amica Mutual Pavilion (on some sidewalks that didn’t have the snow cleared), I made it to the game with about 9:00 minutes left in the first half.  I would have liked to have been there for the whole game, but it was better than only getting to see the last three innings of a baseball game in South Dakota.

It wasn’t a particularly exciting game.  It was two bad teams.  DePaul ended up finishing sixth in the Big East at 8-12 and 16-15 overall (which is actually a great season for DePaul during their time in the Big East).  Providence finished tied for seventh at 7-13 and 15-17 overall.  But this game was all Providence.  I don’t remember what the score was when I got there, but they led 43-26 at halftime and they won 90-72.  Jason Edwards had 25 points, Jaylin Sellers had 21, and Oswin Erhunmwunse had 10 points and 13 rebounds.  Providence was 9/21 for three and DePaul was 5/23.

There were lots of empty seats.

The box score doesn’t list attendance.  The Providence website said it was sold out when I was trying to buy a ticket (I got one pretty cheap on the secondary market), but there were plenty of empty seats.  That could have been because of a lot of no shows between the weather and the bad teams.  Capacity for Amica Mutual Pavilion is 12,410.  I would guess there were around 8,000 fans there (that might be generous).

Joe Mullaney was born in Flushing, went to Holy Cross, and coached at Providence.  He had 30 points and 52 assists in 37 games for the 1949-1950 Boston Celtics.  He also coached the Lakers for two years.  Fortunately he didn’t win the championship with them.  He lost in the NBA Finals against the Knicks in 1970 and then lost to the Bucks in 1971 (who ended up winning the championship).

The Amica Mutual Pavilion food and beverage program wasn’t very impressive.  I had a hot dog (sadly they didn’t have real mustard, only yellow) and a Friar American Golden Ale from Newport Craft Brewing.  Apparently some of the money from it goes to Providence athletes.  It was nothing special.

I’ll usually go with a local craft beer when I’m at a sporting event out of state.  I’ve had Rhode Island beer before, but this was definitely the first time I drank a Rhode Island beer in Rhode Island.

Providence won today in the Big East Tournament.  They play St. John’s tomorrow afternoon.  I will be at the Big East Tournament tomorrow night.  I’m rooting for anybody other than UConn, St. John’s or Villanova to win.  I will always root against UConn and Danny Hurley.  I would like to root for St. John’s, but I will not root for Rick Pitino when there are other Catholic schools I could root for.  Normally I would root for Villanova (I will definitely be rooting for them in the NCAA Tournament), but they’re making the tournament either way.  If anybody other than those three teams wins, the Big East will get a fourth team in.  If it’s one of those three, it will only be those three.  It would be a pretty big upset if somebody other than those teams won, but go Seton Hall (or whoever else).

So that was my sporting event in Rhode Island.  I still have West Virginia, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Hawaii to go.  Maybe I’ll get to one of them this year.