my first baseball game

walking to the game

shaun and i attended a massive baseball game on friday night: the seattle mariners (i kept calling them the "marines") vs. the cincinnati reds (with ken griffey, jr.'s return to baseball). griffey is apparently the don bradman of baseball. plus, he's still alive.

so, it was intense. shaun asked me if i could remember the most people i'd been in a "room" with before. maybe three thousand? when the dalai lama came to wellington and everyone and their hero worship came to hear him talk through a translator.

Safeco Field has a capacity of 47,116. it was a full house on friday night. the level for our seats was about two-thirds of the way up, in the steep area. when we entered the stadium at this level, i know i reeled back. i gasped. i boggled. i stumped. i wheezed. it's not that the place was gigantic in itself, but the mass of humanity that was there (and i was contributing to) was simply astounding.

we ran up to our seats and waited for the festivities to begin. here are some of them (make sure to listen to it loud, for fullest effect):



p.s. i enjoyed the game. i absentmindedly cheered for whoever played well---shaun kept having to shush me, surrounded as we were by beer-guzzling and fight-picking mariners fans*---and picked up the basic rules of the game lickedy-split. in no time at all, i was calling the Balls, Strikes, and Outs. accurately, even, if you agreed with the umpire.

* when the seattle team's manager started arguing with the umpire, the crowd went wild, goading the manager on, screaming at him to give [the umpire] hell. even from my seat up in the heavens, i swear i could see spittle spray out in the inches between the two men's faces. another new experience clocked up: being surrounded by nearly fifty thousand people vocally blood-thirsty for antagonism and argument.

shaun seemed pretty disdainful of alla the proceedings.
or, he was eating a tootsie roll.

shaun and i didn't stay for the whole game---in a sport where a total score of 5 is normal, the Reds had scored 15 to the Mariners' 1 by the end of the 7th inning. so, um, we didn't need to stay to see that seattle's team wouldn't pull 14 home runs out of the last two innings. baseball, so like cricket in so many other ways, is different in this one: you don't have to wait to the end to tell the winner.

plus, it was dark by then already, and i couldn't take any more pictures of the sky: maybe the biggest part of my staying up there in a baseball cap.