Baseball, Day 1

Now that I’m actually doing it, I’m realizing what a unique experience this trip is/is going to be. Like my brother said, “When else do I have nothing to do but watch baseball and drive on the interstate?”

I arrived on my own in Indianapolis about 11:15 last night. The flight attendant had us look out the window as we were on the approach for landing, to watch the fourth of July fireworks. But I have to say that the lightning off in the distance put on a much better show. My brother and dad picked me up today about 1:15 pm, and we headed for Great American Park in Cincinnati.

I’ve never been to any of the cities we’re visiting, so everything is a new experience. Downtown Cincinnati exceeded my expectations. The football and baseball stadiums are right next to each other on the Ohio River, a beautiful spot overlooking Kentucky on the other side of the river. The first thing we saw that caught my eye was the National Underground Railroad museum…Talli did a project on the Underground Railroad for school this spring, so I got this picture for her:

We got there early, and this was amazing: Doug snuck on to the field during batting practice, and robbed Barry Bonds of a homerun!

Ok, so REALLY what happened is that our game day tickets got us free admission to the Cincinnati Reds’ museum at the stadium. It was very well done, and a fun experience, especially since rain delayed the start of the game by about half an hour.

We’ve been Giants fans since before we could say the word “Giants.” Tonight, we saw them lose to the Reds 6-3, and tomorrow night we’ll see them against the Cardinals. Both the Reds and the Giants are in the basement of their division, so it wasn’t great baseball…but we did see the Reds’ pitcher Bronson Arroyo hit a homerun.

The big attraction, of course, is Barry Bonds and his chase of Hank Aaron’s all time record of 755 home runs. I hate Bonds…but it is sort of history making. I had the camera phone out every at bat, just in case he hit number 752. He hit one far enough on his last at bat, but it was foul. This is his first at bat, when he lined out to second; you can see that our view was pretty amazing:

Doug made all of the arrangements for the trip, and for this game, he got very nice club level seats. Behind where we were sitting was “Club 4192”, honoring another hallowed baseball number: Pete Rose’s number of hits that broke Ty Cobb’s career record. The view out the back of the club level was the Ohio River, so I grabbed this shot:

It was a great evening, a really good start to our trip. And with this last shot, I say good night.

(If you care, I’ve been posting pictures from my camera phone on my Flickr page as I take them. So, if you don’t want to wait until I get back to the hotel each night to write this scintillating prose for a blog entry, you can check Flickr and see pics PRACTICALLY IN REAL TIME!)