109 Degrees of Awesomeness

According to weather.com, the high in Phoenix yesterday was 109.  That's definitely the highest temperature I've ever experienced.  The UV index was 11.  I didn't know it went that high.  I first felt the heat when I got out of the airport on Friday night.  The pilot said it was 100 degrees when we landed around 8:45.  It was weird being outside at night and it being really hot.  And then there was the day yesterday.  I have to say, though, that it was different than a hot day in New York.  When the wind was blowing, it was a hot wind.  But it was kind of a pleasant heat.  I did a little walking outside in Phoenix, and I was only sweating a little bit.  I'd take 109 in Phoenix over 99 in New York (although it's very rare for it to get that hot where I live).


The game was a night game.  I had all day in Phoenix and I had to figure out what to do.  I considered a few possibilities.  First was driving to Four Corners, where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado come together.  I want to get to all 50 states and I could knock out four new ones instead of just one.  And really, when am I ever going to get to New Mexico?  I do think that  I'll probably get to Colorado and Utah in the next few years.  I have to get to Denver for Coors Field and I would love to see Notre Dame play at BYU and we have a couple of games coming up there in the next decade.  My other thought was to go to the Grand Canyon.  "If you go to the Grand Canyon and you don't think about God, there's something wrong with you."  (Sorry, I know there are only like three people who might be reading this that got that one.)  Four Corners was six and a half hours away.  The Grand Canyon was more realistic, but that was still four hours away.  And I feel like you can't be in a rush if you go to the Grand Canyon.


So I had to figure out what to do until the game started at 7:10 MST (for some reason Arizona claims to be in the Mountain time zone right now when it's really on PDT right now).  When in doubt, go to Adam Richman.  I looked up the Phoenix episode of Man v. Food on youtube and decided to go to Alice Cooperstown, which was right by Chase Field.  But first I did a tour of Chase Field.  With the roof open, we started by walking around the concourse.  We got a look at the pool.  It's $3500 per game for 35 people.  That seems like a pretty good deal, but the desire to be in the water is reduced with the roof closed during the game.  After that, we saw a luxury box and the press box.  Then we went down underneath the lower level in the clubhouse area.  We couldn't go in with the Diamondbacks having a home game that day, but we did see Dodgers backup catcher Matt Treanor.  The tour ended with a stop in the Diamondbacks dugout.

When the stadium opened, I was amazed by the idea of a baseball stadium having a pool in it.

After the stadium tour, I went to Alice Cooperstown.  Unlike Primanti Brothers in Pittsburgh, I did not have what Adam Richman had.  He had the Big Unit Dog, a 22-inch hot dog.  That wasn't happening for me.  When I first sat down, there was this loud bell that sounded like a fire alarm.  Nobody seemed concerned about this.  Apparently, they ring it every time they bring out a Big Unit Dog and then everybody who works there yells "Big Unit!"  It happened three or four times while I was there.  Anyway, I had a burger and a Sam Adams.  I hung around and watched most of Cubs-Mets.  Sadly, Jeff Samardzija was the losing pitcher.

There's the regular Big Unit and there's also the Adam Richman Big Unit that's loaded with all sorts of stuff.

I left around four and headed to St. Mary's Basilica for their 5:00 mass (definitely better than having to go at 7:00 tonight after traveling).  I had finished eating long before four, so I was definitely good to receive Communion around 5:50 or so.  St. Mary's is the oldest Catholic Church in Phoenix (dating back to 1881) and was designated as a basilica by Pope John Paul II in 1985.

The oldest Catholic church in Phoenix

After mass, I went back to the stadium for the game.  I took a quick lap around the lower concourse again before going up to my seat.  I was high up, but if I moved one seat to my left, I would have been directly behind home plate.  To me, that's the best seat that you can find at a reasonable price, high up, but right behind home plate.  It was a great view of the field.  The Dodgers started out nicely with a two-run home run by Jerry Hairston in the first, but their triple-A lineup (no Kemp or Ethier) could only score one more run and Chad Billingsly fell apart in the fifth and sixth and the Diamondbacks ended up winning 5-3.

Great view of the field

Overall, I was impressed by Chase Field.  I liked it a lot better than Marlins Park, the only other retractable roof stadium I've been to.  I don't like indoor baseball, but I'm not going to argue with it when it's 107 degrees at the start of the game.  Also, I felt more like I was outdoors than at Marlins Park.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought the roof at Chase Field was higher up.  Also, the stadium just seemed bigger and more like an airplane hangar than a traditional dome.  And it felt like the right temperature for baseball, unlike Marlins Park where the air conditioning made it too cold.  All of those things created more of an illusion of being outdoors.  I do have couple of minor complaints.  After every play, they gave the "scoring decision" on the scoreboard.  I first noticed it when Hairston hit the home run and the scoring decision was "2-run HR."  The scoring decision really isn't necessary on most plays.  Also, they had a strikeout board for the Diamondbacks pitchers.  It was sponsored by some company that has a K as a logo, so that's what they would put up for every strikeout.  But some of the K's should have been backwards (like when Juan Uribe broke his usual habit of striking out swinging and struck out looking instead).  They had all the K's facing the same way.  That's incorrect.  Of the five stadiums I've been to this year, I'd rank Chase Field third.  The big thing that puts Petco and PNC Parks ahead of it is that both of those have great views of the city, but Chase Field really doesn't.  So while the result of the game was disappointing, I did enjoy Chase Field.  This trip brings my total number of current stadiums visited to 13 and states visited to 22.  I'm almost halfway there on both.

Happy Fourth of July!

Some people prefer the official name of the holiday, Independence Day.  I prefer the Fourth of July.  Independence Day should July 2.  In the words of John Adams:


"The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."


Most Americans have no idea what John Adams was talking about.  And they probably don't know what happened on July 4, 1776 either.  So here's the history.  In June 1776, Richard Henry Lee (a great patriot who doesn't get the credit he deserves) introduced a resolution with three parts.  On July 2, the colonies voted in favor of the first part of the Lee Resolution (the other two parts were approved later), which said:


"Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved."


So by a vote of 12-0-1, the colonies voted in favor of independence from Britain.  We should be celebrating Independence Day on the day we voted for independence.  Many people think that we celebrate Independence Day on July 4 because the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4.  With the exception of John Hancock, that's probably wrong.  Most historians believe that the Declaration was signed by most of the signers on August 2 (some of them weren't even there on July 4).


So why do we celebrate July 4?  For one thing, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin had bad memories.  They all later claimed that they signed the Declaration on July 4.  But there is a good reason to celebrate July 4.  It was the day that the Declaration of Independence was approved (but not signed) by Congress.  In my opinion, July 2, 1776 is more significant historically than July 4, 1776.  But we should celebrate July 4.  The Declaration of Independence might be the most important document ever written in the English language.  And this might be the greatest sentence ever written in the English language:


"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."


If you know your Declaration of Independence, you might think I made a mistake there.  If you look up the text of the Declaration of Independence, you'll see the word "unalienable" instead of "inalienable."  The two words mean the same thing.  The copies of the Declaration in Jefferson's handwriting use inalienable.  Copies in Adams's handwriting use unalienable.  Jefferson wrote the Declaration, so I prefer to use his word.


So we have a problem.  We're celebrating a day that deserves to be celebrated for the wrong reason.  And we're celebrating something that deserves to be celebrated on the wrong day.  I solved baseball's Opening Day problem, and I'm here to solve this problem:  Three day holiday, July 2-July 4.  I'm a teacher, so it doesn't really matter for me.  But if you don't have your summers off, you know you want more summer holidays.  The greatest American holiday deserves should be more than just one day.  We can celebrate everything that should be celebrated on the right days.  If we end up with a situation where July 2 is a Saturday and July 4 is a Monday, Tuesday also becomes part of the holiday.  Or if July 2 is a Friday and July 4 is a Sunday, we can add either Thursday or Monday to the holiday.  That way everybody gets at least two weekdays off to celebrate our independence.

Whatever day we celebrate, we should always be thankful to live in the greatest country in the history of the world.  God Bless America!

I returned to the city of my first college football game

I know I've been slacking on the posting lately.  I was down after the Celtics missed their chance to get to the Finals.  Maybe I'll have more to say about that later.  But it was quite a run by Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen the last five years.  I'll always be thankful for 2008.


Anyway, for my latest trip, I returned to Pittsburgh, the city where I attended my first college football game seven years ago.  The other thing I always think about when I think about Pittsburgh is the confluence of the three rivers.  I remember John Madden saying, "Whenever you come to Pittsburgh, you have to talk about the confluence because that's the only time you'll ever get to use the word confluence."


I took the bus because I got a round trip for $45.  It was a long bus ride, but that was fine because I brought season 1 of Man v. Food on DVD.  Between two eight hour bus rides, I was able to watch all 18 episodes.  It was awesome.


When I got to Pittsburgh, I met my friend Jon and his girlfriend Maggie and we went to Primanti Brothers, one of Adam Richman's favorite places in Pittsburgh.  I had the same sandwich that Adam had on Man v. Food and Best Sandwich in America, capicola and egg.  It was different from any sandwich I've ever had with the fries on the sandwich.  That was a nice touch.  The egg didn't add much though.  I didn't really taste it on the sandwich with so much meat.

Capicola, egg, cheese, fries, and cole slaw all on the sandwich

On Saturday morning, Jon and I got breakfast before heading downtown.  I had blueberry pancakes, which were excellent.  We went downtown and enjoyed some Summer Ales before the game.  It was the first afternoon game I've been to this season, so that was good.  As we walked across the bridge to the stadium, a guy on the bridge with a saxophone noticed the Notre Dame hats that Jon and I were wearing so he played the Victory March.  That was pretty awesome.  We got to the game early so that we could walk around the stadium.  We got Bud Lights as our Walking Around the Stadium Beers.  They were filled up from the bottom.  It was pretty cool.  When I was almost done with it, I spilled what was left because I was playing with the cup and trying to figure out how it was filled up from the bottom.


We had another Summer Ale in the bar on the club level before the game.  For the game, we were supposed to be out beyond third base, but we sat behind home on the club level.  The view of the city was awesome.  Brad Lincoln started for the Pirates against Max Scherzer (most famous for having eyes that are two different colors) for the Tigers.  Lincoln had a no hitter until Ramon Santiago led off the sixth with a single.  When do you start getting excited about the possibility of a no hitter?  I think we were right there.  Once a pitcher gets through five with a no hitter, he's more than halfway there.  I think it's appropriate to start getting excited at that point and you keep getting more and more excited as the game goes on.  So yeah, I had started to get excited, but that didn't last long.  Andrew McCutchen hit a three-run homer in the fourth and that was all the Pirates needed.  They ended up winning 4-1.

Great view of the city

After the game, Jon and I had dinner at Finnigan's Wake, a bar and restaurant where I went with Jorge, Mike, and Dane to celebrate Notre Dame's 42-21 win over Pittsburgh to start the 2005 season.  That was one of the best nights of my life.  This trip was a good reminder of that weekend.  And PNC Park ranks very high on the list of stadiums I've been to so far, which now stands at 14.  I've been meaning to do a few posts that rank the stadiums, and hopefully I'll get to that soon, but PNC Park was great.  Next up is Phoenix.

Hopefully the next time I see Jon, we'll celebrate a victory over Michigan.

When I have kids

We're a long long way away from that, but I thoroughly enjoyed The Consequences of Caring from Bill Simmons today.  If you don't know the stories of the teams that I like, here they are:


Dodgers:  My dad.
Celtics:  My dad.
Jets:  My favorite color was green when I was little (a fact that I've lamented as I've watched the Giants win two of the last five Super Bowls).
Rangers:  My friends got into hockey in 1994, a good year to like the Rangers.
Notre Dame:  I went to college there.


I've always wondered what happened with my brothers, especially with basketball.  They're both Knicks fans.  From the 1983-1984 season to the 1986-1987 season (when my brothers were 5-9 years old, the Knicks won a total of 124 games (with 53 of those wins coming in the 1983-1984 season, including the playoffs).  During those same seasons, the Celtics made the Finals every year and won the championship twice.  So this has never made sense to me, but Bill Simmons addresses this:  "You can't necessarily make [your kids] follow your team, but you can steer them away from your least favorite teams."  Well, I guess my brothers didn't end up rooting for the Lakers, so that's pretty good.


I've thought about what's going to happen when I have kids.  I believe there's at least a 99.5% chance that God is giving me all girls because God has a sense of humor.  Having girls would be great (you know, until they turn 12 or so), but I want at least one boy to make into mini-Jim.  I would love to train Jim Jr. to root for all the same teams that I root for.  I don't know if that will happen, but I'll do everything I can to prevent him from rooting for the Lakers, baseball Giants, Patriots, USC, and Michigan.  I can live with him not rooting for all the same teams that I root for.  If I marry a sports fan, it's impossible that I'll marry another Dodgers-Celtics-Notre Dame fan since my dad, my cousin, my uncle, and I are the only four in the world.  So I could live with my son rooting for the Knicks and the Mets.  If my son liked the football Giants, I might just say to him, "Yeah, you made the right call on that one."  But I was once asked this question:  What if I met the girl of my dreams and she liked the Lakers or went to USC?  The question made no sense to me because obviously, any girl who likes the Lakers or went to USC is not the girl of my dreams.  Either of those is three strikes right away.  The one team that I would do everything I could to get my son to like is Notre Dame's football team.  If things don't turn around, that might be an uphill battle, but I'll do everything I can.  Baby clothes, training him to sing the fight song at age 2, football jerseys, taking him out to Notre Dame for a football game as soon as he's old enough to have any idea what's going on.  And college sports aren't that big around here, so I'm fairly confident I'll be successful with that one.


Simmons made me think of some of my early sports memories.  There were some tears shed. I guess that's part of becoming a huge sports fan.  When I have kids, of course I wouldn't want them to cry about sports, but if they like sports as much as I did at a young age, it's going to happen.  Hopefully they'll have a team like the 2008 Celtics to make it all worth it.


Let's go Celtics!  Beat the Heat!

Change of Plans, Everything Went According to Plan

I got good news and bad news.  And they're both the same:  I got a job.  (Don't get mad at me for saying getting a job is bad news, I'm making a TV reference, I'm sure some of you got it.)  Many of you knew that already, but it wasn't official until earlier this week.  Maybe it seemed like I didn't want to get a job, but that was the plan all along.  I was just making other plans in case that didn't happen.  My boldest plan involved going back to Notre Dame for something (not exactly sure what) if I didn't have a job by this time next year.  The other very long shot idea I had was sending my resume to Bill Simmons and trying to get a job with Grantland (like I said, a very long shot).  That idea came when I found this Simmons column from 10 years ago.  In it he discussed being a sports fan after September 11 and said, "ESPN pays me to write three columns a week from the vantage point of the average sports fan."  I think we can safely say that Simmons is no longer the average sports fan.  He's one of the most influential people at ESPN and he's friends with NBA executives.  It's time for a new Sports Guy to write from the perspective of an average fan, which is why he should have hired me.


Anyway, I sent an email to my friends Jon and Kyle about my new job last week.  Both responded with a question.  Jon's question can't get reprinted here.  But Kyle's question was, "What implications does the new job carry for the Year of Jim?"  Good question, Kyle, I'm glad you asked.  The short answer is that the Year of Jim continues.  The idea of the Year of Jim came from the idea of going back to Notre Dame a year from now and having all this time on my hands.  Well, that's out.  But I'm still going to travel whenever I can.  I'm sure I won't be able to knock out as many states as I would have liked within the next year, so I'm probably going to keep this going for a lot longer than a year.


I've got Pittsburgh and Phoenix coming up within the next month or so.  I'm hoping to get to Boston this summer (but that's nothing new for me, I've been to Fenway three times already).  Ireland is at the end of the summer.  I said that I was hoping to get at least one more trip in this summer and I might have found it.  I had a good conversation with my friend Dennis this past weekend.  He lives in Atlanta and I was telling him about all this, so he invited me down for a Braves game.  That might happen in August.  I'd still be up for another trip besides that, but I would be satisfied with baseball games in at least three non-New York cities (on top of the three that I've already gotten to this year) and Notre Dame football in Ireland before starting my new job in September.  (By the way, if anybody knows of a way for me to get tickets for the Ireland game, let me know.  I applied in the alumni lottery, but we'll see if that works out or not.)


Once football season starts, things will have to slow down anyway.  I'm not traveling for baseball during Notre Dame football weekends.  But since I have a job, I could potentially afford to go to more Notre Dame football games.  Jon, how many weekends can I stay with you this fall?


Once football ends, stuff gets boring.  I would really like to take a trip to Oklahoma City to see Durant and the Zombies and cross off Oklahoma if I don't get to the Notre Dame-Oklahoma game.  Perhaps the worst thing about having a job is not being able to go to the entire Big East basketball tournament next year and/or one of the sites for the first weekend of games for the real tournament.  But hopefully I'll get to at least two Big East tournament nights at the Garden.


Then baseball season starts up again and I can do some more traveling.  Good news for me:  Easter in 2013 is on March 31.  That means that Major League Baseball's Opening Day(s) (see my plan to fix Opening Day) will probably be during my Easter vacation.  I really want to get to an Opening Day game next year.


So yeah, that's what's going on.  The last time I was looking for a job, I didn't get hired until July. It's nice to be able to go into the summer not having to worry about that.


Go Celtics!

How I Missed a No-Hitter

May 5, 2007:  It was a Saturday morning and I was in class (oh, how I hated Saturday morning class).  When I got out of class, I got a message from my friend John saying that he had an extra ticket to the Yankee game.  When I didn't answer my phone he stopped by my house, but nobody was home.  He had to leave for the game, but he still had the ticket if I wanted to get myself to the Bronx.  So I drove myself to the Bronx (incidentally, I'm pretty sure that was the first time I ever got in a car on Long Island and drove it off of Long Island).  Anyway, I met John and his then girlfriend (now wife) Liz in the Bronx.  Our seats were in the right field bleachers (I sat in the left field bleachers several times, but I'm pretty sure that was the only time I sat in the right field bleachers).  As the game went on, Chien-Ming Wang was not allowing any hits or walking anybody.  At some point, the crowd started getting very excited with every out.  I remember Liz noticing that the crowd reactions were different, but not realizing what was going on.  When she asked us, we did the whole superstitious can't talk about the no-hitter thing and just told her not to worry about it.  Hideki Matsui made a nice running catch on a ball hit by Ichiro to start the seventh inning.  At that point, I thought Wang was going to do it.  With one out in the eighth, Ben Broussard hit a homerun and the perfect game was over.

Seeing a no-hitter in person would be the coolest thing I could experience during the regular season.  Unless you had season tickets for a team with Sandy Koufax or Nolan Ryan on it, you need to get really, really lucky to see a no-hitter.  I was five outs away from a perfect game, but I'll gladly settle for a no-hitter.

That brings me to Friday.  A group from my school was going to the Mets game.  There was a large group of parents and students and some teachers.  So I easily could have gone, but at no point did I ever consider going to the game.  I can live with it.  I stayed home, caught the last six outs for Santana, and watched the Celtics beat the Heat.  Then I went over to my friend Vin's house to enjoy some Sam Adams Summer Ale.  So it was still a good night.

P.S.  I retract the second thing I conceded in my last post.  Go Celtics!

Good News for the Celtics

David Stern does not want this series to be 3-0 so the fix will be in for the Celtics tonight.


But seriously, the officiating has been terrible in the first two games.  Before you get upset, I will concede two things:


1.  The Celtics were not winning Game 1 even with good officiating.
2.  With the injuries the Celtics have, they were probably not winning the series even if they won Game 2.


However, the officiating in both games was terrible.  In Game 1, there were four technical fouls called on the Celtics (excluding defensive three seconds) and none were called on the Heat.  I hate it when players get technical fouls for stupid reasons.  You're giving away a point 80+% of the time.  Especially in the playoffs, you just can't give away points.  And the referees can't be giving one team points by making terrible technical foul calls.  I thought three of the four technical fouls were ridiculous.  Ray Allen and Doc Rivers got called for technicals without doing anything outrageous.  Kevin Garnett got called for a team technical for delay of game for touching the ball after the Celtics scored.  He didn't hit it or throw it away, he touched it.  I was fine with calling a technical on Rondo for getting a little physical with one of the Heat players after a basket, but Mike Breen thought that was a bad call too (and he always defends the refs).


In Game 2, you can look at the free throw disparity and Paul Pierce's fouls compared to LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.  But one huge play in overtime completely changed the game.  With the game tied, Rajon Rondo drove to the basket and as he was attempting a difficult shot, he got smacked in the face by Dwyane Wade.  Rondo missed the shot and went down.  With Rondo down, the Heat went down the floor five on four and scored to take the lead.  It was a four-point swing created by the missed foul in overtime.  That's unacceptable.

Yep, no foul there.

Rant about Rondo's free throw shooting:  Rajon Rondo is a terrible foul shooter (59.7% this year).  I am a much better free throw shooter than Rondo is.  He is at least a million times better than me at everything that you do in basketball except for shooting foul shots (he's also a bad three point shooter, but he's a much better three point shooter because my range is about 21 or 22 feet).  Whenever I shoot around by myself, I shoot 100 free throws and keep track of how many I make.  When I shoot on a good rim (as in not the rims at camp), I make about 85 of them (I've made as many as 90, I was really excited when I did that).


But if you think Rondo was missing either of those two free throws if they called the foul, you're wrong.  Rondo was amazing in that game.  Every time he took a jump shot, I had complete confidence that it was going in (something that's never ever happened before with Rondo).  He was not missing those foul shots.  The Celtics should have been up by two which would have made it a different game.  For much of that game, Rondo was playing by himself (especially when Pierce fouled out).  And he almost managed to beat the Heat.  He just couldn't beat both the Heat and the referees by himself.


Go Celtics!