ASNN

baltimore

As I mentioned, I had to hustle to actually make Baltimore. 1100 miles in two days may not seem like much, but after the "fun" I had I was pretty wiped out. Driving a whole bunch was not high on my list of things to do. Also, I wasn't even sure the game would be played, what with Hurricane Isabel doing her thing. As it turned out, it was a beautiful, cool night for baseball.

I managed to pull into Oriole Park at Camden Yards just before the game started. The neighborhood is quite bad, but moreso in the drive to Camden Yards. The path Yahoo! Maps picked out for me took me through an area I wasn't entirely comfortable in during the daylight, much less trying to get back during the night. Lots of people hanging out on street corners, lots of yelling (mostly people yelling at unseen adversaries), rundown and decrepit buildings... just not a fun place.

The Camden Yards area was a little nicer, and Oriole Park is beautiful. I saw the area where fans were maintaining a countdown to Cal Ripken's record-breaking 2131st consecutive game played, which was cool. I had fairly good seats up the third base line, field level, up a bit. While the fans around me knew what was going on and could cheer intelligently for their Orioles, the people directly next to me were kind of pricks.

Me: "Do you mind if I leave my stuff here while I go get some food?"
Man: ...
Woman: "Uh, why should I care what you do?"

Well excuse me for being polite. I guess that's when I realized I had arrived on the east coast. (Never mind that the people in NY and Boston were wicked awesome compared to these jerks... :-P )

My luck with beer didn't change from the previous couple of parks, as Camden Yards had nothing of note on tap (not even Old Style!). At least they did have Heineken in a can, which I ate with a reasonably good sausage. The cool bit about the sausage there (which I discovered appears to be an east coast thing) is that they slather it with grilled onions and bell peppers and wrap the whole thing in a crusty bun. Mmmmm...

The game itself was quite good. Again, lots of good pitching (unlike the STL game, more like the two CHI games), but the Baltimore bullpen fell apart late in the game. The Orioles ended up losing 5-2 to the Blue Jays in a well-played game (which probably would have been even better if either team was still in their prospective division races).

All in all, I might like to see Camden Yards again, but if I don't I probably won't miss it (or, at least, I wouldn't miss Baltimore).

game: blue jays at orioles (9/19/03)
park: oriole park at camden yards, baltimore
game quality: 7
park mystique: 7
park beauty: 7
crowd ambience: 6
neighborhood: 3
food: 7
beer: 4

Posted by pcg at September 27, 2003 9:25 AM