Meaningful baseball

I've been itching to see some meaningful baseball games, so I hopped down to Baltimore twice this weekend to see the O's play the Yankees. On Friday I drove, which was alternately miserable an exhilarating, as I went from crawling to a lane-changing 80 mph to get to the ballpark just in time for the first pitch. Today, Sunday, I took the train instead.

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, as it is officially known, was the first of the new "retro" ballparks, where symmetry is shunned and quirkiness is prized. Because it was first, it's perhaps not as well equipped as, say Citi Field, it is still a lovely place to visit and watch a baseball game.

Setting aside the watching baseball part of it, and the two games I attended were not terribly suspenseful, the highlight is Eutaw Street. This street traverses the park beyond right-center field. One side is the warehouse that you see in pictures of the park, but they close the street off for everyone except ticketholders a couple of hours before the game, so you have a nice little pedestrian mall with shops on one side and food stands on the other where you can hang out before the game. There is also a large gravel patio with picnic tables and umbrellas adjacent to the street.

The highlight of Eutaw, for me at least, is Boog's BarBQ. I know the Phillies tried to duplicate it with Bull's BarBQ, but the food is much better at Boog's. Especially the turkey, which tastes very salty and processed at CBP and is freshly sliced whole turkey breasts at Boog's. And Boog himself is always there and is very friendly. Great cole slaw too.

Citizens Bank Park has a couple of big advantages. First, the standing room there is terrific and it is decidedly not so at Camden Yards. There are 2 small sections that get fans 5 or 6 deep and you either can't see anything or can't move. The other thing, and I can't even imagine what they were thinking when they designed it, is that the right field upper deck faces left field, not home plate, so you spend the whole game with your head turned to the left. I knew this from previous experience and avoided those seats.

The best thing about the games was that they were pretty much sold out, which has been a rarity around there since the Orioles have been awful for the past 15 years or so. It was about 2/3 Orioles fans and 1/3 Yankee fans, The number of Yankee fans is probably normal, but there aren't usually so many Oriole fans there. This made the atmosphere lively. It was all pretty friendly, as Baltimore seems to be a reasonably friendly sort of place, but I did hear the word "suck"more this afternoon that in a normal month.

The game got out of hand and I strolled around the Inner Harbor, which is very pretty but a little mallified for my taste. Then back to the train station. They have a new ticket system on Amtrak, where you can print your own ticket and the conductors scan a QR code on it with an iPhone. On the way home, the conductor couldn't get mine to register and said he couldn't find a record of the reservation, so he would need to take the ticket and then call headquarters or something. He came back around an hour later, when we were 5 minutes outside of Philly. He said. "You're going to New York, right?" And I said, no, I'm going to Philadelphia. He shrugged and said he'd figure something out. I offered to let him pretend to throw me off the train and I could make a scene for the entertainment of the other passengers, but it was the Quiet Car so he said no.