Opening Day. What’s more fun than opening day? It’s a day that every baseball fan loves, a day for optimism, and all those other stereotypes you hear around now. But we had a beautiful day of weather, I was there at the game with my wife and baby, and it was wonderful. So was Curt Schilling. That’s the baseball story of this game. Curt Schilling. He dominated the Rangers, going 7 innings, giving up just two runs on 5 hits. The two runs were a line shot home run by Blalock into the wedge in the right hand corner.
A couple of highlights for me were watching Ian Kinsler make his major league debut, and getting a single off of Schilling. Schilling had a classy thing to say about it later when asked about giving up a knock to a rookie. Schiling said (something like) “He’s a major leaguer, he deserves to be there”. Nice statement by him. Kevin Milwood looked great in the first three innings. Then he seemed to run out of gas a bit too early, which is a surprise there. But again, Schilling locked us down pretty good.
It is definitely a bit more work when you have a one year old baby with you at the game. Credit to my wife who had to deal with most of it, as Samantha wanted mommy to hold her most of the time. Samantha normally would have napped for about two hours during the time we were there, so it made for a fidgety baby. But it all went well.
Parking was major ass, because I had to park all the way in the back of the parking lot out by Rt 30 and behind the Seimens building. I left about 2 hours and 45 minutes early, and I still couldn’t get to my usual parking spots. It was insane, I hate parking out that far. Next year we leave even earlier for opening day. Sigh.
There were some new ballpark things which I didn’t get a whole lot of time to check out. There is a new concert type area set up on the third base side on the hill next to Mark Holtz lake. I didn’t get much time to check it out, but it could be interesting. There was a new picnic area outside the old gates on the first base side. Both were constructed to have the same general astehtic (sp?) feel as the rest of the park around it, so it doesn’t stick out like a bright orange something going “I’m new!”. Neither I got much time to check out as we were running rather late due to the parking situation. But they definitely could be useful. Inside the park is where they should focus their attentions – new scoreboards, fix broken seats, missing cupholders, etc. The place is definitely NOT a dump, but there are certain things (fix the sound system) which would help overall in the experience.
Oh, and beer is $6 now. Sigh.
Baseball is back. Life is good.