I went to Detroit on July 8 to see the Dodgers play the Tigers. It was my third and, most likely, final Dodger game of the year. I saw them in Los Angeles and New York. Looking at the Dodgers' schedule, I won't get to another regular season game. A playoff game is very unlikely since the only teams I could easily see the Dodgers play against are the Mets and Yankees. I could make a weekend trip to see them play the Phillies, Red Sox, or Nationals in the playoffs. The Nationals seem to be the only somewhat likely possibility, but even if that happened, I still probably wouldn't go since that would interfere with watching college football. Going into the game, they were 0-2 with me in attendance this year. The last season that I didn't see a Dodger win in person was 2008. Since Clayton Kershaw wasn't starting, it meant that I wouldn't see Kershaw in person this year.
When I got to Detroit, I went to American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island just like Adam Richman did in the Detroit episode of Man vs. Food. They are right next to each other and they are known for their Coney Island dogs which are hot dogs covered in chili, mustard, and onions. According to Adam Richman, the hot dogs were the same, but all the other ingredients were a little bit different. He didn't say which one he liked better, but from the way he described them, Lafayette Coney Island sounded better to me. First I went to American Coney Island and it was good.
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| Lafayette Coney Island on the left and American Coney Island on the right. American Coney Island is much bigger. |
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| American Coney Island dog |
Then I took a walk down to the Detroit River. You look south across the river and you see Canada. I could clearly make out a Canadian flag on the other side.
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| I was facing south in the US and looking at Canada. I guess you can do that somewhere in Alaska also (you could at least stand right by the border facing south and Canada would be on your left). |
Then I walked back to Lafayette Coney Island and tried their Coney Island dog. The only ingredient where I noticed a difference was the chili. Lafayette had a meatier chili which gave Lafayette the edge, but both were good.
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| Lafayette Coney Island dog. Lafayette wins the Year of Jim Award for best Coney Island dog in Detroit. |
Walking around the city was weird. John asked if it was like Gotham and I said it had a very Batman Begins Gotham feel to it. It was weird walking around and nobody was around. Imagine walking around a city like Philadelphia in the middle of the day and nobody is around. That's what it was like. And I feel like I was in some of the nicer parts of the city.
Anyway, I went to the game at night. I walked around the stadium before going to my seat. I have a couple of thoughts. There were rides for kids to go on (like a merry-go-round). You don't find stuff like that at Fenway Park. It's a baseball stadium, not an amusement park. The outfield area was unimpressive. They had some statues of famous Tigers, which was nice, but I didn't like anything else. Behind the batter's eye was just like a tunnel. You walk through and there's nothing there. On either side of the batter's eye, you can stand along the wall and watch, but the angles are weird. The walls in left center and right center are parallel to the front of home plate, which makes for a weird angle for watching the game. Also, as you're walking around the concourse, there's just a lot of stuff that blocks your view of the field from the concourse (especially near home plate).
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| Ty Cobb was a terrible person, but he was probably one of the five greatest hitters of all time. |
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| One of the rides at Comerica Park. |
I had a black bean burger since I wasn't in the mood for anything meaty after the Coney Island dogs. It was fine. To drink, I had a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy. One thing I liked about Comerica Park was that there was a bar on the upper level. Citi Field has a bar on the upper level, but you have to be seated in certain sections to get in. The one in Detroit was open to everybody. So I walked in, got a beer quickly, and walked out. My criticism is that they should have had a better selection. I don't mind a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy on a nice summer night, but they didn't have a wide variety of craft beers available.
The game got off to a great start. In the first inning, Adrian Gonzalez drove in two with a double, Matt Kemp singled in Gonzalez, and then Juan Uribe hit a home run to make it 5-0. But Hyun-Jin Ryu couldn't hold the lead. He gave it all back in the second inning and after four innings, the Tigers were up 11-5. Justin Verlander settled in after a terrible first inning. I think at one point, the Tigers had 16 hits between Dodger hits. What looked like it was going to be a good game for the Dodgers turned into a blowout for the Tigers. Late in the game, I was just checking stuff on my phone. One of the highlights of the game was Don Mattingly getting ejected. There was some good stuff on Twitter about that. Somebody mentioned that the umpire told Matting to get rid of his sideburns. One other thing that was cool (one of the few good things about Detroit) was that it got dark so late. Since it's so far west and north in the Eastern time zone, it wasn't totally dark until about 9:30 or 9:45. The final score was 14-5 (making the Dodgers 0-3 all time when Hyun-Jin Ryu pitches and I'm in attendance).
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| My view of the game. |
It was a good crowd of 36,912. One of the people in the crowd was an Englishman named Rich. He was three seats away from me and we talked for a little bit at the end of the game. He became a baseball fan when he was in the US in the late 1990s and now he's trying to get to every stadium. He's been to about as many as I have. He started this trip over to the US in Boston and he was finishing it up in the Midwest. Actually, we were supposed to go to the same game in Cincinnati on Friday so I gave him my email address to try to meet up there. But that never happened. I'll save that story for my next post.
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