Chicago Cubs

Chicago Cubs Baseball Game – Wrigley Field – August 29 2018

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Today was the second time I had entered Wrigley Field since October 14, 2003, when some guy named Bartman made Felipe Alou go crazy in a playoff game by reaching for a foul ball. I was there for that game (and still have my ticket stub). Today’s game didn’t have quite the same drama. It essentially was over in the top of the first, when former White Sox player Todd Frazier hit a grand slam homer for the Mets.

So we spent the rest of the game observing things like the number of mound visits registered on the scoreboard and the number of players participating in them. On several occasions, the Cubs seemed to be channeling the movie Bull Durham, bringing half a dozen players to the mound to discuss wedding gifts, jammed eyelids, and cutting the head off a live rooster.

The Wrigley Field bathrooms definitely have been upgraded, or at least the one I inspected. The food still looks unappealing (I opted to bring a power bar from home instead) and the left field Jumbotron looks sort of surreal, but it helped light the field on a dismal day when the highlight of the action for the Cubs was a flock of birds taking up residence in short left field in the late innings.

Kyle Schwarber interacted more effectively with the birds, chasing them away, than he did with the Mets pitchers, striking out three times, and certainly more effectively than Tippi Hedren did in that Bodega Bay phone booth in 1963, a scene that couldn’t be shot today, because there are no phone booths, which also reminded me of the scene in the 1978 Superman: The Movie, when Clark Kent couldn’t find a suitable phone booth in which to change into his alter ego. Today, neither could Schwarber nor any of the other Cubs.

Baseball 2017 – Phoenix, Chicago, St. Louis

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On August 12, 1994 major league baseball players went on strike. When the players went on strike, so did I. Over the years I softened my stance somewhat, but still hadn’t crossed my own picket line more than a few times prior to 2017 (amazingly the Bartman game was one of those times, though I swear I was in no way responsible for the result).

So 2017 was a breakout year for me. For the first time in over 25 years I went to a spring training game, actually three games. A week in Arizona in March seemed like a good idea (though it had been warm enough in Chicago in February to play golf four days in a row).

All the games we went to were day games. They don’t seem to play night games in spring training in Arizona, which I don’t understand, given that one could play golf during the day, while there is absolutely nothing to do in Arizona in the evening. The one day that our seats were in the sun, we spent most of the game in the shade by the first baseline bar watching the game on TV. Not sure that was worth a three and a half hour flight.

Closer to home, 2017 marked my first time at Wrigley Rooftops. Unfortunately, I’m not too fond of heights. Fortunately, it was early in the season, and very cold, so I spent about five seconds outside watching the game and the rest of the time safely inside, warm, watching on tv, and scrounging for food and drink, until I left in the sixth inning.

The final lap of my 2017 baseball rebirth was a Cardinal game in St. Louis when I was there for a conference. I don’t expect to go to many games in the future, though the nerd in me would consider an opportunity to add another park to my resume (having attended games in 13 major league parks to date despite my prolonged absence from the fray), and an invitation to watch a game from a luxury suite with a dessert bar is always tempting.