Park #6

August 9, 2005: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Well, I got a few rabid emails from people wondering why it was taking so long for me to post my reviews. Sorry folks, I haven't had email or internet access for the last 6 days, but now I'm back in Cleveland for a solid 36 hours and I'm all updated.
Also, my photos are online, check them out at
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jefflazarus/album?.dir=5ff3&.src=ph&store=&prodid=&.done=http%3a//pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/jefflazarus/my_photos
i think it's crazy that I've taken 130 photos in 6 parks, but oh well.
Last night I went to Miller Park. Before I went to this park, a few people told me that it was not impressive and that the park sucked, well, those people are idiots. This park was really great. In case you didn't know, Miller Park is a retractable dome, and the whole park is freaking huge. I was so pumped about the dome that I was actually praying for rain just so they would use the dome. As you come off the freeway you see the park and it is just ginormous. What is really cool is that as you are walking around the exterior of the park, before you get inside, you can see into the park from jsut about everywhere. There is glass surrounding the park so that you can see into the stadium, which I really liked. It just had a very open feeling. Also, in front of the stadium, they have two statues, of Hank Aaron, and Robin Yount. These statues themselves are really great, but they are right next to each other, and they are the only two in the entire park. I really thought there would be more, but then I realized how much the Brewers sucked.
As you get into the park, the fun keeps on coming. There is so much going on in the park. Every two feet there is a different concession stand or something like that. It is just crazy crowded stuff in there. It was nice because you if you wanted a hot dog, you would pretty much trip over a hot dog stand instantly, but it kind of reminded me of the mall; just too much visual overload.
Okay, as I got to my seat, I was friggin shocked. I thought that a park that looked so huge from the outside would be just as big on the inside, but no, I was wrong. Just about every seat in the park is right on top of the field. There is very little buffer between the field itself and the seats. I got the $10 bleacher seats and ended up getting in the 2nd row in right center. This was crazy, I was literally four feet from the warning track, absolutely awesometastic!
The Brewers have this really neat slide up in left center field, and upon further inspection I found out that the Brewers mascot (this big yellow fuzzball) has a little shed way up in left field, and he pumps up the crowd from there and when the Brewers hit a homer, he goes down this big yellow slide. What kind of a snooty mascot is this? The dude never came out of his little slide area, and just chilled from his Ivory slide tower. The point of a mascot is to hang out with the commoners and hug little kids and bother people when they are eating their nachos. Who is this guy, who does he think he is? First of all, it sucks because I wanted to slide on the slide, I just know he was hoarding that thing for himself. Secondly, how can a guy dressed in all yellow fur and a Brewers uniform possibly think he's better than me? That's just crap.
The food sucked. Right near my seat was the "Gorman Thomas grill". Now, Gorman Thomas is a former Brewers player, who was a guy that by his girth, you could tell that he loved him some food. Well, the man doesn't know hot dogs, he must've gotten fat on nachos or something, cause his hot dog was nothing special. It was a below average dog, but it wasn't flesh colored, so I won't complain too much. However, park does have Leinenkugel Honey Weiss on tap there. A wonderful beer, and you should try it.
Now, its story time. Being in the bleachers (which was a great location), the downside was the fans around me. First of all, the Brewers were playing the Cardinals, which meant that there were as many Cards fans as Brewers fans, and the name calling and shouting was in full force. There was a group of four dudes behind me who i guess who just about 21 or 22 years old. These guys helped prove to me that yes, every city I go to has assholes. These four guys must have had 8 beers each in the first 5 innings. Now, you know these guys are idiots, because it cost these guys $50 each just to get drunk, I mean, how dumb are you. You get drunk in the parking before the game, not at the game, it costs four times as much. These guys were bad drunks too. It was their sole purpose during the game to pump up the crowd with idiotic chants. These guys were idiots, they had wonderfully creative chants like "Pujols blows", "We fucked Edmonds' mom", "Hey, Taguchi, you are an inferior baseball player". Wow, I mean, these guys were geniuses. These guys were so annoying for the first five innings. And then in the sixth the beer started to kick in, and over the course of one inning, these guys went from hooting and hollering every 3 seconds to out of commission. One of them passed out, one of them got the drunk sways (you know, where you are so drunk you just sway back and forth), one ended up leaving and going to the parking lot after he told his buddies "I gotta go barf on stuff", and the fourth spent the last three innings calling everyone he knew on his cell phone to tell them he was drunk. Yeah, these guys were class acts.
The game itself wasn't too exciting, the Cardinals didn't give the Brewers much to hit, and won 5-2. The Brewers starting pitcher Doug Davis (known by the fans as Double Ds), pitched 6 strong innings and only gave up 2 runs, but hte bullpen let it slide. The Brewers hitting was atrocious though, I think they had two hits in the first 7 innings, and after that couldn't get more than one baserunner at a time.
Overall, I thought the park was pretty impressive architectually, but I think that it could use a little improvement on the inside of the park., I'm gonna give the park a B+ overall.
6 down, 14 to go, next stop San Diego and the West Coast.
Laz

Park #5

August 8, 2005: Chicago, Illinois
Park #5: Did you know that “Wrigley” is German for “Pantheon of wonderment and magicalness”? Really, it is! Oh hell, fine, don’t believe me, but it should be. You know, television is usually pretty good to me, it plays a lot of funny stuff (with the exception of reality TV of course), and TV provides me good entertainment, especially Aqua Teen Hunger Force, but television has deceived me for many a years. Wrigley is much awesomer than TV has shown me (yes, yes, awesomer is a word). TV doesn’t do Wrigley justice at all. It is truly a gloriful place with many feats and wonders, Inignot and Ir would have loved it if they were still with us.
Let’s start with the outside of the park. First, there is a statue of Harry Caray, the king of all Cubs fans. It was great, and as you may know, Laz loves him some giant baseball statues. Second, I got to the game over an hour and a half early to check out batting practice, and the outside of the stadium was crawling with Cubs fans. They were chilling outside the park, they were waiting on Waverly Avenue to catch a home run from batting practice, they were everywhere. Very impressive. And for a two block radius all around the stadium, you see nothing but Cubs paraphernalia: on the people, on the streets, on the buildings, I even saw a pigeon wearing a Cubs hat and holding a pennant.
As you get into the stadium, a soothing calm rushed over me because I truly felt like I was in of the few baseball Meccas in the world. I walked into the stands and was just blown away by the glory and beauty of this field. The ivy and the brick come together like a steak hoagie and a 40 Ounce King Cobra, mmmmmmm. You look around the park and you can just smell the decades and decades of losing seasons, which kind of smells like home. Seriously though, you really feel like you are a part of baseball history.
Now, my seat was up in the 500s, the second row from the top, but was still a great seat. I could tell that there were not many bad seats in the place at all. There was a column that obstructed a little bit of my view of the field, but nothing major. However, I did have one complaint about my seat: the people around me. You would not believe the assholes in front of me. It was this family of four, and the daughter must have been about 10 or 11, and she was a little chubby, but I wouldn’t say she was fat. Her mom and dad were the worst parents in the universe, I wanted to stab them in the eye with a shrimp fork (and I hate shrimp). These parents were so evil; the daughter offered her dad some peanuts and the dad (who I’ve named Johnny von Bastardface) said “no I don’t, and you shouldn’t be eating them either”. The girl later got a hot dog and the dad goes “Jesus Christ, don’t you think you’ve had enough, I mean you can’t even look halfway decent”. Then the girl got a coke and the mom yells out “OH MY GOD, that better be diet coke.” I felt so bad for this girl, it was like that SNL episode where the family is eating dinner and they keep fighting. I was convinced that this dad was gonna say “I drive a Dodge Stratus”. This guy was so mean, I wanted to kill him. You could just tell that this guy beats his wife, which is still a domestic violence, no thanks to me (woohoo).
Anyway, back to the game, and its progeny. My friends in Chicago forewarned me about the deliciousness of a “Chicago style Hot Dog”, they went on and on how great they were. And they were right, I took one bite and it was like my tastebuds were possessed by Littlejohn, and they all went “YEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS”, it was great. And of course it came with peppers and onions for the extra-no-one-is-ever-gonna-want-to-kiss-me flavor. Plus, the bun had poppyseeds on it, now that was an added bonus that I did not expect, much appreciated. Well, I gotta admit, the hot dog I had right as the game started was so good, that I had to get a polish sausage at the seventh inning stretch, which was also great. As for the beer, they sell the typical Anheuser-Busch products, but they also sell something called “Old Style” which seemed to look like the Spam of beers. And it was: no flavor whatsoever.
One of the great amenities of Wrigley is the bathrooms. Now, I haven’t discussed bathrooms of any other park yet because I thought a bathroom was a bathroom, you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, right? WRONG, Wrigley in all its glory is one step above the rest. They still have the giant metal troughs that everyone pisses in. A crowd favorite. This was the first stadium I’ve been to on the tour that still had these, and with the possible exception of Fenway, I’m gonna say it’s the only one. These metal throughs are a thing of beauty, because unless it’s a crazy game, there is hardly ever gonna be a line to take a piss. And that’s all that really matters.
Okay, as for the Cubs themselves, they suck. They couldn’t hit their way out of a…….well, they can’t hit well. In the first 8 innings, they managed a total of three hits, with no runs. Going into the ninth, the score was 9-0, after Jeremi Williams gave up 3 home runs, and managed to prove to the world that the Reds are not bad hitters (I was shocked by this too). Now, the Cubs managed to score 4 runs in the ninth, which was not enough, and was not at all impressive considering they had only 3 hits in the previous eight innings. Too little too late. I did get to see Kerry Wood pitch, which I had not ever seen, so that was good. All in all, it was not an exciting game to watch.
So, in summary, the ballpark is fantastic, it is a shrine to what a baseball park should be. However, the unimpressiveness of the Cubs will cause Wrigley to lose a few points. Now, I know what you are thinking, that I’m rating the stadiums and just cause the team sucks shouldn’t hurt the stadium, well, you’re wrong. The rating describes the whole experience, and the exciting nature of the game can have a slight impact on the score, just as PNC park got points because the Pirates had a ninth inning win. It’s like when you were in grade school and you got points for good handwriting, or lost points for bad writing (which I am all too familiar with). So, therefore, I’m going to give Wrigley an A-, and say that it is an absolutely beautiful ballpark.
Five down, fifteen to go, next stop Milwaukee.
Laz

Park #4

August 7, 2005: Chicago, Illinois
Park #4: Today, I rolled into a Sunday afternoon game at US Cellular field which featured the Chicago White Sox against the Seattle Mariners. Now, being an Indians fan all my life, it was all but impossible to cheer on the White Sox. I mean, this team was 71-38 I believe yesterday, which was a phenomenon more confusing than how they get the cream filing into Twinkies (I mean, how do they do that?). These White Sox, on paper, have no hitters and a bullpen of nobodies. Yet somehow they are thirty games over .500. Well, in watching Jon Garland take the mound yesterday, it all came clear. They win ball games solely on starting pitching and defense, nothing more. Garland was great, pitching nearly 8 innings and only giving up one run and five hits. But more impressive was the Sox defense. There were four plays in the field that were just amazing. Aaron Rowand sacrificed his entire body to rob Richie Sexson of what would have been a bases clearing double. It was fantastic.
Now, the Sox hitting is nothing special, the only legitimate power threat is Paul Konerko, but besides him all their players are just average. However, their pitching and defense are strong enough that average hitting will win the day. I was very impressed by the team.
The stadium, on the other hand, not so impressed. First of all, the stadium on the exterior looked like a giant army barracks, with black steel girders all around, and no view of the interior of the stadium from the outside, you couldn’t even see parts of the stands. From the inside, you had no view whatsoever of the city. Its like the stadium and the city were two separate entities of which couldn’t look upon each other. The only place in the stadium that you could see any part of the city of Chicago was when you are leaving the park. As you are leaving, there are ramps which take you from your seats to the ground level, and from these ramps you can see the Chicago skyline. But the fact that you can see nothing anywhere inside the stadium is disappointing.
US Cellular, has a giant display in center field, with the pinwheels, and the humungous TV screen, but this TV screen is not a scoreboard, it just continuously flashes pictures of the players and little bits about them. The scoreboard is located in left-center and is quite unimpressive when compared to the center field TV screen. If you ask me, it should be the other way around. The scoreboard itself should be the focus, not play second fiddle to the TV screen informing you that Juan Uribe’s dog is named Bubbles. I did enjoy the fact that as you move around the stadium’s interior, there are constant murals of old White Sox players and team highlights, which was really cool.
Also, the day I was there was Carlton Fisk day in which they unveiled a life-size statue of him and honored him by bringing him onto the field in a 1959 cadillac (I think). It was really cool, and he gave a good speech.
The food was great! First of all, Chicago knows how to make a hot dog, they are grilled up nice with the peppers and onions, oh man, it was the kind of hot dog that even Kobyashi would stop and savor. Also, I give Chicago points for having the ever-elusive spicy curly fries. You know what I’m talking about: those Cajun style French fries that are also curly, they are great. They used to have them in Cleveland, but then they got rid of them, and that made me sad. Also, I had my first Churro, have you heard of these things? As I’m walking back to seats between innings, I walk past this concession stand where there are these foot long dough thingies I’ve never seen before, and they are called Churros. I asked the girl what was in them, and they are fried dough with either fruit, chocolate, or vanilla inside. I asked her if they were any good, and I was expecting to get the disgruntled and forced “Yeah, they are good” that food vendors are supposed to say, but no, this girl’s eyes opened really big, she smiled, and she says to me “you’ve never had one, they are fantastic!” Well, I had to get one after that recommendation. It was great, its like a jelly donut stretched out into a tube, WOW! I guess things can taste better just by changing the shape.
Much to my joy, there are no crazy driving stories from Chicago, but I’m still in Chicago, getting ready for a Cubs game Monday night. Even though I would give US Cellular’s food the highest grade I could, I was not impressed by the stadium, I just expected more (maybe the thought that this city also has Wrigley has skewed my perception and expectations), so I’m going to give US Cellular a C+.
4 down, 16 to go.
LAZ

Park #3

August 6, 2005: Detroit, Michigan
Park #3: Well, I wanted an adventure, I got an adventure. Now, for those who don’t speak French, Detroit means “narrow” in French, and that translation is completely irrevelent to my day. Well, much to my dismiss, the interesting part of this day was not the baseball park itself, but the times before and after the game. Let’s start by saying that I HATE MICHIGAN ROADS. The ridiculousness was off the scale with this one. First of all, I left Cleveland at 2pm so that I would be at least 90 minutes early for the game so I could catch batting practice; no dice. Everything was fine until I crossed the Ohio border into Michigan. For some reason, the state of Michigan decided to have 3 lanes converge to 1 right over the border to do construction. Now, if there had actually been construction, I wouldn’t have cared too much, but there was none AT ALL. Just orange barrels for 10 miles, and it took 2 hours to go these 10 miles on a Saturday afternoon. So, I got to the game right as the game started. Plan #1 was ruined. The game and stadium were great. The Tigers were playing the Tribe, and it was old school uniform game. They were wearing uniforms from I believe the 1920s. Now, this was my first time ever seeing the Tribe on the road, and it was great, well, because they won. Jake Westbrook pitches fantastic, giving up 2 runs in 7 innings, and he must have had at least 7 Ks. The game was pretty uneventful itself, the Tribe scored 2 runs in the first inning, and then one more in the second inning; further substantiating my theory that the Tribe gets 90% of their runs in the first 5 innings, and is all but incapable of scoring after the 5th.
The game itself was nearly sold out, which was impressive considering the teams. Comerica itself is a beautiful park. The exterior of the stadium is covered with Tigers, giant statutes and pictures, which was really great. It really defined the park, plain and simple. Once you enter the park, you are surrounded by Tigers memorabilia. As you go around the park, there are columns dedicated to each decade. This was pretty bad ass, the whole park is dedicated not only to the current Tigers team, but really appreciates the team’s long tradition. This also went along with the decorum of the stadium itself. The stadium was very modern, with all sorts of amenities that I will get into in a minute, but it also was covered with brick, making it look very old school. It had a great combo of old time and newness. Furthermore, the amenities: there is a carousel and a beer gardens (which is my favorite kind of garden).
Now, as I mentioned in my rant on Pittsburgh, I love statues of players. Comerica has many of them. In center field, there is a line of 6 players: Cobb, Gehringer, Newhouser, Kaline, Horton, and Greenberg. All greats, all kick ass. However, it was cool to see them all at once, but I like the way Pittsburgh did it more, having them spread out, because I think you appreciate them more that way.
I was sitting in left field, behind the bullpens, and I had some very interesting company. I was surrounded by ten guys who were all there for one of their bachelor partys. These guys SUCKED. The groom was bragging to his buddies how he almost called off the engagement because his fiancée stopped using birth control and she wanted him to use condoms, and he really wanted to use the “withdrawal method” and he refused to compromise. This was clearly a 9.1 on the “Oh my god” meter; I wanted to kill this guy. I feel bad for his fiancée.
Okay, onto good news, the FOOD. Okay, the hot dog, it was all beef, which was great. And it came with the grilled onions, an added bonus. We tasty and juicy. Top notch dog. Also, the stadium had two very interesting food items. First, they had organic hamburgers, which confuses me. I’m not sure how hamburgers couldn’t be organic, or how you make them so that you can them label them as organic, but I don’t know, I didn’t eat one, I was too confused. Second, they had mini donuts, which I did it. They were great, for two reasons. One, well, they are donuts, they tasted so good that it was like there was a party in my mouth and everyone was eating donuts. Second, you get to watch the donuts being made, it was like watching a movie, I was having a hell of a time, watching all those little pieces of dough being deep fried, it was fantastic.
Now, doesn’t it sound like everything was well and good, with a few hitches and weird anecdotes? Well, yes, that was okay, but then things got to be SHITTY. The drive from Comerica to my hotel, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. Now, since I’m heading to Chicago tomorrow, I decided to get a hotel about 30 minutes west of Detroit. Well, the bane of my existence, Mapquest, said that I should take 75 to 96 west. I started that, but 96 west was closed, I mean, the whole damn thing was closed, who does that? So, I figured out that I should take 75 North to 696 west, which would eventually hit 275 South where 96 west would’ve hit it. Sounds good, right? Well, it would’ve been if 75 wasn’t closed TOO. I mean come on! I had to take a detour off 75, and the detour ran into 8 mile. Now, I don’t know much about Detroit, but I do know that 8 mile is not a place I should be. Well, I ventured through it, and I think I made a wrong turn somewhere trying to get back on 75. Well, being un-guy like, I went to a BP and asked for directions. It was awful, I spent 15 seconds explaining to the cashier girl where I was trying to go, and she spent the whole time with her mouth wide open in disbelief. And then when I was done, she said “that is some shit, you are crazy lost”, that did not make me feel good. Well, she gave me directions and I got on 696 West. I was on there for about 20 minutes, and I hadn’t seen any signs in a while. I thought I was fucked, and I was getting really nervous and thought that things were on the verge of going to hell. Then, as I came over a hill, I saw it, staring me in the face, a sign that made me regain hope. I saw a building that had on the top in large letters “Watson Wyatt” (for those who don’t know, that’s where Seth works). Finally, after all that crap, I finally saw a familiar face that eased me a bit. 30 seconds later, I found 275 and I was two minutes from the hotel. Well, after that ridiculousness, I found it. Quite crazy, but it all worked out.
Morale of the story, Detroit roads are awful and I hate them. The stadium itself was great, and I decided to give the whole park a B+, the stadium loses points because of the surrounding awfulness that is Detroit and its terrible roads and unabashed construction.
Well, 3 down, 17 to go.
Be sure to keep checking the Blog, and you guys are welcome to post as well.
Laz