Stewart's 2019 Baseball Trip

I spent the final full day of my holiday at a Scrabble tournament in the middle of Manhattan. Whilst I often talk to people at baseball games about where I've come from and why I'm attending games, these are passing acquaintances of a couple of hours - except for Angelique at the Giants home park in San Francisco, of course. So attending a Scrabble tournament is a different kind of event to go to, because I have something more direct in common with the other people at the tournament.  I actually know some of the people already, have heard of others, and sometimes they're heard of me, particularly as I post in Scrabble Snippetz and on the NASPA Facebook groups. So, it was today, although it nearly wasn't!  For some reason, the alarms on my phone were really quiet and didn't wake me until I woke up naturally just before 9am - I needed to leave the hotel by 9.20am to ensure I got there, as I needed to take 3 different subway trains to get to the venue by 10am. ...

I've posted a flurry of articles today as I catch up with game 3 in Boston all the way to tonight's game. I'm now going to bed, as I've got to be up bright and early to go uptown to the Manhattan Scrabble tournament being hosted by Cornelia Guest at the Honors Bridge Club.

The one and only game in New York, and the final game of all for me this season, was to see the series opener between the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Yankees, who had clinched the AL East division title the previous night against the Angels. After leaving Virgil's BBQ, I went straight up to the stadium, using the 4 express train.  I was surprised at how empty the trains were, because usually they are packed.  Perhaps it was because there was still 50 minutes before the game was due to start, so I beat the rush. That also meant that I entered the stadium much sooner than usual, too.  So I got to hear both National Anthems play - because, of course, games involving the Blue Jays have the Canadian anthem played as all as the United States anthem. I had a cheaper seat than usual, emphasis on the relativeness of the cheapness, given it still cost $135.  However, the view was good from here. Crew Chief 'Country' Joe West was umpiring the game tonight.  ...

I had an early start this morning, as I'd worked out I had to leave my hotel by 8.20am in order to make the 11am flight, with some contingency.  Being right at the end of the line does have some benefits: notably, you can always get a seat, because it's not full when it leaves Riverside. On my travels today, I saw this sign that reminded me of the Korean airliner crash at SFO a few years ago where a news channel had been fed fake funny names of the plane crew and went ahead and broadcast the names anyway ("Sum Ting Wong", "Wi Tu Lo", "Ho Lee Fuk", "Bang Ding Ow") In the end, Green Line, Red Line, Silver Line (actually a bus that starts electric and switches to diesel half way) got me to the terminal with half an hour before boarding was due to begin.  The flight was uneventful and very quick - only about 50 minutes actually in the air. At Newark, I recharged my phone and then travelled into New York by train, arriving at 2pm in ...

Since I had plenty of time to spare before dinner, I decided to wander up to the Charles River and walk along it for a bit. All the space along the river is public and open, unlike in Cambridge back home, where the University of Cambridge colleges keep as much of it private as they can. There are bike trails and walking areas everywhere.  I didn't cross the river into Cambridge itself, but I saw a lot of sailing boats, eights rowing and people just sitting watching. There's an esplanade that's more wooded, and I saw people in canoes that were obviously not skilled in the art given that half of the time, they seemed to he headed into the trees - much like the punters back home. I'd already looked up how to get to my restaurant on the T from Fenway or Kenmore stations, but by the time I'd walked all the way along the esplanade, I noticed that I was only one stop away from Copley Square anyway, so I carried on walking there instead of taking a train for a f...

The final game in Boston saw our best pitcher, Madison Bumgarner - whose nickname Mad Bum and number 40 are on my hat - pitching.  This game should have been our best chance of winning any of the games in the series, but it turned out to be the only one we lost. The weather is certainly turning autumnal, as it was chilly again at the time I left, but due to get quite warm in the middle of the day, up to 28C/82F or maybe higher. My seat was in the Grandstand, section 25, where the seats are quite narrow - they are still the original seating layout from when the park was constructed over 100 years ago. I still couldn't see the main scoreboard properly because of the pillar obstructing the view, but I was able to see left field, which had been tricky in the first two games as I was on top of the wall that you can see in the second picture.  In those two games, I was sitting either side of the right-hand lighting stanchion. The hand-operated scoreboard is one of the last r...