Baseball Yesterday

I got to go see a game yesterday with Lem, Christina, and her father, who is a big fan of the Angels. The game was the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (the the angels angels of anaheim) against the Kansas City Royals, who have been playing pretty well this season, and had won six of their last eight games against the Royals.

Highlights from the game: Watching Torii Hunter play center field. Man, he's fast and has a lightning arm. I saw at least two plays where the ball was hit well into center field, easily a double and possibly a triple, and he was on it with a laser throw to second base that would easily catch anyone trying for third or even just rounding off the base too far.

The pitching was good, but our seats were by the left field foul pole (and were quite good), so I couldn't actually tell a lot of the small details about it, like pitch selection and so on. However, we did get to see Francisco Rodriguez come up for a save situation, which was pretty awesome. He did let a run score, but in my opinion the Royals were pretty lucky to have that chance: he gave up an initial single, struck out the next batter, and then the next play was a hard hit ball at the third baseman Chone Figgins (who has a cool name. They pronounced the first name sort of like Shaun or Sean). He nearly had it for an easy out, but ended up only knocking it down. A single scored the run and then the last two were retired on a foul out and a strikeout.

Negatives: Only one to mention here, and while it may sound like the player, it's more the fan reaction that got to me. The left fielder, Garret Anderson, felt really slow when trying to field balls. Several plays would happen where the ball would drop in front of him while he was jogging there, or similar stuff. Maybe he's not fast, but it really felt like he wasn't even trying, either. However, he did have a good game hitting, driving a really deep double that scored three runs. And while that double would probably have been a triple for someone who ran more, it was still a clutch hit. The annoying part was actually the (drunk-ish) fans a few rows ahead of us who kept ragging on him every time he was fielding. I don't see anything wrong with booing when it looks like the fielder isn't making an effort and a single gets through, but that's a single event. Booing him whenever he's on the field, especially after he was the one who hit in 3 of the 5 runs, just seems wrong. Sure, his fielding may have led to one more run for the Royals, but he did make up for it. And that sort of ragging could easily be distracting and make his play that much worse. The fans ahead of us were a bit drunk and not really receptive to other opinions on how to treat players, so even though it was greatly annoying the people near us, not much changed.

The ballpark: Very very pretty. The center field fountains are really pretty, and they had some fireworks launched from that area that were pretty cool. The layout behind center field was really interesting, behind the rock garden/fountain area was a patio eating area and some of the restaurants. It's hard to compare the actual view with Dodgers Stadium, as I've never sat in a similar location there, but objectively it was very good.

Parking: Easiest parking I have ever seen. The only delays were in the traffic leaving Pasadena. We left after the game finished and it took maybe five minutes to leave the ballpark and get on the freeway, and most of that was just navigation time, not waiting in lines of cars.

The food: Mixed reviews: The tri-tip sliders were excellent, their only problem was that there weren't enough of them. The pretzel, on the other hand, was a shame on ballpark pretzels everywhere. Though the dough was pretty well cooked, it had zero salt. That's just weird, they didn't ask or anything about whether I wanted with or without salt, just I got one with no salt. On the whole though, it looked like the food choices were good: the hot dog seemed tasty (judging by T+C's reactions of scarfing it up), and the garlic fries were similarly received. I didn't see a place to get a decent hot sausage, but presumably that's because I didn't search hard enough.

Anyways, I highly recommend seeing a game at Angels Stadium some time: the field and park are good, and it's always good to see a ball game, even if they play by the silly designated hitter rules. :)