Orioles vs. Twins 4/20/11
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So after two nights of Passover celebrating with family, I
was back at the ballpark on Wednesday.
The O’s have a 10 game home stand now, so if I still make it to 7-8 of
the games, I’ll be satisfied.
I brought my fancy-shmancy camera to this game to get some
photos for the websites I’m a part of (Baltimore Sports Report and
Orioles-Nation) as well as for myself, but I can’t upload those photos here for
a bit. Why? It’s a Sony camera. Sonys use a special memory card called Pro
Duo or something. So I only have an SD slot on my computer, so long story
short, I have to wait until I get to my house sometime to get the cord for the
camera. Till then, I will use a few pics
from my phone and also some sent to me by Zack Hample (because I asked him for
some). You can see more from the game as
well as more pics including me and others over at his blog.
So I hopped on the light rail a few minutes after 4, and
without knowing it, Tim, his friend Sean, and Zevi were all on the train then. We got down to the park by 4:20 (on 4/20) and
waited for gates to open. By the way,
the Orioles won’t let you trade tickets down anymore (as in prime to not
prime). Odd. I’d rather not rant about it here because,
well, it pissed me off that I had to argue with the box office guy for like 5
minutes and accomplish nothing.
Once inside, we ran around (as always) and saw Zack waiting
at the opposite gate on Eutaw Street. He
tried this just two weeks ago on 4/7
and we laughed at him then for his gate not opening on time. Maybe he will learn that that gate is just
bad luck 🙂
I got ball 1 on a Lee home run that tipped off a guy’s
hand. I was running over to the spot, it
hit off him, and I flipped my bare hand up for the grab. Was good to see my reflexes still work.
Ball 2 was a Reynolds home run on the fly. I had to leap high for it, but overall just a
nice catch and that was that.
No balls during Twins BP, though at the end, Scott Baker
tossed me one (ball 3). It has to be the most
random baseball I have ever gotten. As
the Twins pitchers were running in, he picked up a stray ball on the warning
track, and with a line of screaming kids and Twins fans in the front row, he
chucked it up to me about 10 rows up. I
wasn’t yelling or even holding my glove up, and when I got it, I turned around
to make sure I hadn’t just robbed a kid or anything. I went over to ask Rick Gold who it was and if I had robbed someone, and he said I
hadn’t and that it looked to be completely random. Cool.
The fans/ballhawks at this game gathered for some photos (taken by Jona, thanks for sending them Zack so my blog didn’t have to be picture-less):
Everyone in the photo above (from left to right):
1. Rick Gold
2. Dave Stevenson
3. Me
4. Zack Hample
5. Tim
6. Sean
7. Zevi
8. Alex K
9. Ben
10. Matt
I had talked with Ben a bit during BP. Hadn’t met him before, so we just talked about some differences in hawking between Baltimore and New York. I met Alex last year when Joe Faraguna was in town (for the Twins series, ironically).
I then went over to the first base side to attempt to get a
warmup ball. Brian Roberts always throws
with Markakis, and Roberts always ends up with it to give to a kid. The other pair always includes Adam Jones,
and today he was throwing with Robert Andino, who chucked it to me (ball 4) at the
dugout as he walked in. I screamed
“ROBERT” like 10 times, so I guess it paid off.
I spent the first few innings taking some nice photos
sitting close by the dugout (the usher said I could!). Vlad hit a home run in the bottom of the 3rd,
and as I’m taking a photo of him swinging, Zevi taps my shoulder and says “I
think Tim caught that!”. We then saw Tim
celebrating on the scoreboard, so we soon after left the seats to go find him.
Well, he had caught it.
Very, very cool.
We stayed in LF for the rest of the game. I went over to the bullpen a few times to
take pictures and say hello to Donna. Joe
(who works for MASN) came to say hey. It
was a chill rest of the night. We went
out to the player lot after and I got Carl Pavano to sign my ticket (pictured
below). And that was that.
A funny happening post game with a Twins fan; the drunk fan
came over and told us a story:
“I was like, “Hey Perkins, you making pancakes over there?”
and all these Twins fans got ********** and were like, “PERKINS ISN’T JUST A
BREAKFAST RESTAURANT!” then I got timid and walked away.”
Oh yeah, and Jim Hunter complimented Tim on his catch, and
Fred Manfra explained to us that his computer shattering sounded like a bomb
going off.
Fun times. Now back
to the ballpark for the 4th game of this Twins series…
Season stats:
Baseballs: 20 (9 hit, 4 on fly, 7
toss up, 3 found)
Autographs: 4 (Scherzer, Guerrero,
Oliver, Pavano)
Orioles home games attended: 7
Orioles total games attended: 7
Total MLB games attended: 7
Total baseball games attended
(MLB+MiLB): 7
Rainouts: 1
2131 and Beyond 