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Some Ranting and Raving!
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I suppose Kevin had a rather uneventful trip from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh. He left sometime in the morning and got to the airport sometime too early in the afternoon. He reported later that he spent his time wisely by driving around downtown, scoping out the stadium, and playing some video baseball game in the airport. The video game must have been great fun, because scarcely had I arrived when he whisked me to the arcade to watch him play yet another game. Luckily Mark came in a short time later or I fear I would have been subjugated to watch Kevin play video baseball all afternoon.
Being a rather keen assessor of any given situation, my first question for Kevin after landing was "Where's Gerry?" Mark, not quite so keen, first told us about how Carmen had almost made him miss his plane, but he later came around with "Where's Gerry?". Kevin filled us in with the details--broken ankle for Sue, missed flight for Gerry, lousy airline wouldn't reschedule flight, etc. etc. We were bummed. We were major-league bummed.
On the way to finding a highway that would take us downtown for the game, we surprised ourselves by finding a hotel. On checking in, the girl behind the counter says, "Are you here for the game?" I was stunned. How did she know that the brothers in baseball would be checking into her hotel? Or was the game bigger than I thought? A little further questioning reveals that that's all one can do in Pittsburgh--go see the Pirates.
Pittsburgh's Three River Stadium is right downtown where the three rivers meet (obviously), and it had the character of other sterile, perfectly symmetrical, artificial turf parks built in the 1970s--which is NONE. Our seats were on the third base on the last row of the lower section. The overhang hung over a lot so we moved to the upper section for the last few innings and the fireworks. If I remember correctly, it was 0-0 going into the ninth between the Braves and the Pirates. The Braves broke it open in the ninth and won something like 5-2. Not believing that Gerry's wasn't going to join us, we called back, during the fireworks, to see if he had come up with a solution to his dilemma--he hadn't.
I pride myself on being a great map-reader and navigator, but I never go my bearings straight all weekend and we ended up taking a lot more wrong turns than we needed to. It took us an hour to get from the stadium to Hooter's, Mark's favorite artifact from the midwest. We pretty much drove all over Pittsburgh to discover we could have walked there quicker, it was so close to the stadium. There was a decided difference on what constitutes a good-looking babe, but the wings were tasty and the view was great.
Saturday morning we hit the road for Canton. Our auto conversations didn't have the zip and zing of our Cooperstown or Boston auto conversations (No Carmen and no current interns to rip on.) The most interesting thing to come out of our hours in the car was how bright and intelligent Kevin is. He got a 4.00 in college and ranked #1 in his graduating class at Dayton. Mark and I basked in his presence for the rest of the week-end, and we let know him know how appreciative we were for allowing us low-lifes to be with him to share all this...
We found a hamburger joint about a mile from the Hall of Fame called Woody's that brought the food on a tray and put it on our car window (I know this has a name but I can't remember what it is). We made the waitress pose with us for pictures ( I think her name was Kristen or something like that). After that stop, all Mark would talk about for the rest of the trip was woodys and hooters, and I don't mean the restaurants.
The Football Hall of Fame was good filler for a lazy summer afternoon, but it was a distant third to the Baseball HOF and the Basketball HOF. It has the usual history of football, sketches of the hall of fame players, displays of uniforms, shoes, helmets, etc. and movies. We spent a couple of hours seeing everything we could see.
We thought we had to time to see the rock-n-roll HOF in Cleveland, so we hustled up there and discovered that the rock-n-roll HOF was just a hole in the ground--we were several years early. Now we were in Cleveland with several hours to kill so we thought, "why don't we go get a hotel room, get a nice relaxing dinner and head to the ball park?" Well, to our great surprise, hotel rooms couldn't be found anywhere in the Cleveland area. We went the several and then started calling. We must have called a dozen and gotten nowhere--all price ranges, all parts of the city were sold out. Unbelievable. We finally decided to drive to Toledo after the game (about two hours), so we got rooms in the Red Roof Inn in Toledo.
We still had time for dinner so Kevin and I (mostly I) talked Mark into eating at Bob Evans--now Mark's second favorite artifact from the midwest. The waitress was hitting on Mark, or so Kevin thought, so we made a point to stop here on the way out of town after the game for a late night snack before heading to Toledo. The second farewell was really tearful...
Unlike the night before when we had plenty of time to get to the game, we were in somewhat of a hurry because of the hotel blunder and didn't get there much before the game started. Cleveland's and Detroit's stadium are remarkably similar except Detroit has taken care of their's and Cleveland's is a dump. They both have the large lower sections with a lot of seats underneath the upper sections. The upper sections are supported by lower section obstructing posts and you get to them by going over catwalks over the lower section. Our seats were in the front of the upper section close to home plate--probably our best seats of the three games. Seattle jumped on Cleveland early and when we left in the ninth I think it was 5-1 Seattle or something like that. Considering it was two teams I cared little about it was a decent game. The crowds at Cleveland and Detroit was decidedly different than those in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh seemed to have lots of families and couples enjoying an upscale social event. Cleveland and Detroit seemed to have a lots of fans that looked like their cities--sort of dumpy and non-descript.
The drive to Toledo wasn't as bad as we thought and we were in our rooms by 1 a.m. Sunday morning we were back at Bob Evans for a killer breakfast--Kevin ordered Egg Beaters to go with his biscuits and gravy, sausage and greasy hash browns, and this was after we discovered how bright he supposedly is.
We got to Detroit early and went straight to the stadium. After parking in the safest parking lot we could find (I'm not sure I'd go to a night game there) we strolled through some shops and their food courts before heading to our seats. We had plenty of time to kill so we hung out with the autograph hounds next to field for awhile.
If the game had started on time, Carmen would have showed up about the third inning as we had predicted. As it turns out, it started to rain when the game was to start so it was delayed about an hour. During the rain delay, we were debating if we could get credit for visiting the stadium if the game wasn't actually played. We decided yes so we didn't have to come back. I was a little concerned since umpires will delay a day game forever, Mike Moore was pitching for the Tigers (an incredibly slow pitcher), and my flight was at 7:00 p.m. As it turned out, the game was only delayed about an hour and it went quickly after that--I saw the whole thing. Mike Moore pitched a one-hitter for the Detroit Tigers and they beat the Royals 3-0 (I think). Carmen showed up with what could best be described as her boyfriend I suppose since her husband was working or out-of-town or something. I chatted with Carmen's boyfriend while Carmen kept Kevin and Mark occupied during the game. Like the rest of us, this kid is in their accelerated management program but since he was still new and naively optimistic, I didn't have the heart to tell him that his career was going nowhere and he was making a big mistake.
After the game Kevin and Mark drove me to the airport and my short weekend was already over. I don't know exactly what they did after that, but I think they both stayed at Carmen's that night and went home the next morning. It was a great trip, but we sure missed you, Gerry, and felt a little incomplete without you. I suppose you have figured out by now that you need to make these three cities up on your own since there's no way we're going back until Cleveland has a new stadium. (We did see where the new stadium was and it was almost finished). Jill has given me the OK to do this again in a couple of years, so be prepared.
Photos from BIB2000: On the field for BP at Qualcomm and in Tijuana
(In the third picture, Kevin and Scott are with Courtney, the granddaughter of the Voice of the Padres, Jerry Coleman. Courtney, a member of the Pad Squad, took us on our stadium tour.)
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