Mr. Baseball

While I was in Cleveland I had a chance to go to my first Major League Baseball game.  The first time was supposed to be a Yankees-Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium but thanks to the general dickiness of Mother Nature, that didn't happen.  At any rate, I went to the stadium and got an excellent seat:

This wasn't just any seat mind you.  This was a seat that came with a license to eat as much as 10 Somalis.  They had almost everything you could imagine: pizza, pasta, soda, water, peanuts, popcorn, cotton candy, ice cream, bratwurst, nachos, hamburgers, hot dogs, salad, and carved meats.  Add on to that all the condiments you can carry, and you've got yourself a recipe for a bunch of fat guys.  I was relatively moderate with my:

bratwurst/fries/onion rings platter

nachos

 pretzel

 

 ice cream

and of course all the beverages I could drink.

One thing that wasn't all you could freely have was booze, and I think that's the wise move.  Part of that is because I have a general idea what free liquor would do to a crowd and to the pedestrians after the game.  Part of that is because of one of the best parts of the game: 2 guys from Philly sitting right behind me.  They started out pretty funny.  The wife got a call, and she wanted the guys to be quiet.  Well, that didn't sit well with them because they were a) loud and b) fueled with liquid courage.  They decided that if they had to be quiet, so did 35,000 other people.  So one of them gets up and he shouts "hey everybody, be quiet - she's got a phone call!"  That was pretty funny I have to say.  What wasn't funny was the ensuing 2 innings.  That joke got pounded into the ground in ways that were typically reserved only for the really bad David Letterman jokes.  Eventually after their 20th and 21st beers, they started getting really loud and swearing like sailors.  If you want to swear, that's fine...but the children, somebody please think about the children!  The wife did and that drug out the phone bit for another inning as they tried to justify their fowl mouths by saying that at least they didn't talk on the phone during a baseball game, as though those things were moral equivalents.
Finally they left for some reason or another in the 5th inning and I never heard from them again.
The rest of the game was quite entertaining.  I expected an Angels blowout, but it wasn't to be.  The game was close enough that a group of people even decided to try and start the wave, which was promptly thrown down by everybody else in the stadium.  They kept trying, but not long enough for me to get a great picture.

At the end of the day, the game ended after an Indians rally in the 7th that ended up burying the Angels.

The players gathered on the field afterwards in some sort of line fiesta that showed they didn't do much winning.  They also shook hands with the other team.

Thus ended my first MLB game, and I'm ready to hit another when I get a shot