Front Row Seats

We took our friends Fernando and Belen to their first baseball game ever this evening. Fernando is a postdoc from Spain I’ve been working with this year, and Belen is his sweetie; they’ll be headed back to Spain at the end of the month so we wanted to make sure they had the cultural experience of seeing a baseball game.

The game we went to was the Sacramento River Cats playing the Salt Lake City Bees in the first round of the Pacific Coast League playoffs. We ended up with seats in the very first row, on the right field foul line about 100 feet back from first base. It couldn’t be better for a field level view of the action.

It was hardly a pitcher’s duel though. There were many hits and a good number of home run — by the time we left the River Cats were losing 9-13. We were cheated though: our plan was to stay through the seventh inning stretch but they replaced “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” with “God Bless America” played on the sax. The horror of it all. That was very unfair to our guests.