Well the A’s continue to keep winning baseball games and are up to 11 games over .500.  But more important than that, I went to my first game of the year last night!

I left work just befor 4 PM to pick up Wendy and the boys.  We drove to Oakland from Roseville in 1 hour and 45 minutes, not bad considering it was rush-hour… although it helped that we were going the opposite direction for the majority of the trip.  After a 15 minute chat with my Mom, we left the boys with their Grandma and took my brother Brian, who had come to my mom’s house, to the game.  At the game we met Brian’s girlfriend Sarah, who had come straight from work via BART.  We all met up at the stadium at around 6:30 PM for the 7:05 start.

(Side note: the reason we went to the game was because it was Brian’s last day at his job before he took a new job, with a significant pay raise, tomorrow.)

The first order of business was to find “the big dog”.  I’m sure many of you have had the unsatisfying experience of paying $3.50 for a hot dog at a game only to find out you’ve received a cocktail wenie in a similarly sized bun.  Well, Oakland found a solution to the problem: the $6.75 big dog.  Sure it’s expensive, but it’s a dog that lives up to the name being 2 to 3 times the size of your average supermarket hot dog.  In stadium food terms, it’s well worth the money.

Next order of business was to find the seats.  Brian is a partial season ticket holder in the bleachers and was able to help me get us good seats right behind home plate.  You could really tell if the ball was pitched over the plate from our vantage point.  The harder part was telling if the ball was high or low.  Although it is usually a good spot for foul balls, none came to our section.

I had so much fun chatting with everyone that I didn’t pay as much attention as I usually do.  I did make sure to get in my usual “too high” comment for all of the home runs.  Overall it was a relaxed game despite it being fairly close.  The Texas Rangers openned a 4 run lead early and I think it got me into the “I’d better enjoy this game some other way than the score” mode early.  For some reason when two back to back homers in the bottom of the 4th by Swisher (3 run) and Payton tied things at 4, I didn’t switch gears.  The only point where I really got back into the game was in the bottom of the ninth when Huston Street almost blew the save.  Up 7-4 at that point, he gave up two runs.

The end of the game was an odd one.  With a pinch runner (running for Hank Blalock) on first, and DeRosa with a 3-2 count, Street struck out DeRosa while the runner tried to steal 2nd.  He was safe, but DeRosa had so badly missed the pitch that he stumbled in front of the plate and interfered with the throw by catcher Jason Kendall.  The home-plate umpire had no choice but to call the runner out because of the interference, thereby ending the game.  We’ll take it… particularly because Street was struggling and I’m not so sure he would have got the last out before someone could have singled the man on second home.

After the game got out at 10:15 PM we drove back to my mom’s house to pick up the boys before heading home.  Gregory (our oldest) had refused to go to sleep up in the guest bed and so was sleeping on the sofa next to his grandma while she watched the news.  We got the boys into the car and left just before 11:00 PM.

When we got home around 12:30 AM, we were exhausted.  The boys had hardly slept on the way home and had spent most of the trip in intermixed delirious giggles and whining with an emphasis on the giggles.  It was quite cute actually to see the two of them feed off each other.

All it all it was a fun night and worth the time, effort and money.  Congradulations to Brian on his new job!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 at 11:35 am and is filed under Sports, Sports - Oakland A's. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.