Uhh, hello? Hello? Hello! Hello Cleveland, ha ha ha!
Umm, sorry for the lack of updates. I have a draft of a post with a bunch of updates that I haven’t completed yet. I’ll post it when I get back into Cambridge.
James and I decided to take a weekend trip to visit a couple of baseball parks, and settled on a two-day trip to Cleveland and Pittsburgh. We left Cambridge today (Saturday) morning, and after a long drive along I-90 through Massachusetts, New York, a tiny part of Pennsylvania, and northeastern Ohio, we arrived at Jacobs Field in Cleveland at around 6:15 p.m., about an hour before the Indians’ game against the Mariners. Our first pleasant surprise was discovering that there was metered parking available on the street about a block from the stadium. Our second pleasant surprise was finding out (from a Yankees fan, no less) that metered parking is free on Saturdays. After buying tickets from one weird-ass scalper (he paid $2 for a bottle of water I was carrying, which it turns out was good since I couldn’t carry it in to the stadium anyways), we headed in and proceeded to explore a little bit of the stadium. The game itself was a fairly decent pitchers’ duel, which the Indians lost 3-1.
Like any major-league stadium, Jacobs Field has its fair share of pros and cons, but it happens to mostly be pros in this case. The “Jake”, along with Camden Yards in Baltimore, was one of the first parks to be built in the modern wave of baseball stadium construction. Unlike just about all the other parks built during this period though, Jacobs Field is not really a “retro” park. The stadium has a very clean, simple, and thoroughly modern design, and it fits well in the rest of downtown Cleveland without going out of its way to include chintzy little details from the surrounding neighborhood (like the warehouse wall in San Diego) or ridiculous playing field quirks. Seating is comfortable, and just about all the sight lines are great (even in the nose bleed seats that we had). Combined with the great weather, it seemed like the perfect atmosphere for watching baseball. After the game, downtown Cleveland seemed to be full of people hanging out at local restaurants and bars, but not packed into the places shoulder-to-shoulder and with a line out the door (as would happen near Fenway). Apparently Jacobs Field has played a major part in revitalizing downtown Cleveland, which is really nice. And it turns out our convenient and free parking spot was also about 200 feet from the interstate on-ramp, which meant no real after-game traffic, the last (and perhaps most pleasant) surprise…
The Jake does have some drawbacks though. The ushers were downright dictatorial about keeping people out of empty sections for some reason, even though the ticket price for the sections was equivalent to that for the ticket we bought (James theorized that they were trying to avoid having cameras capture a pathetic image with just a couple of people in one of the more desolate sections). Food, as with all other parks, is stupid expensive. The video scoreboard, although ridiculously huge (supposedly the largest video screen at any sporting venue in the world), was rather poor at displaying pertinent information, with a little bit too much space devoted to useless crap like team ads and a line score that’s repeated all around the park. I’m sure we could probably write some better software to run the damn thing, because it definitely has potential…
Other than that though, the park was pretty damn good. It also felt really, really nice to get out of Boston for a while. I’m not sure what it is about the place now, but I kind of feel suffocated there…
Spending the night in Akron, Ohio before heading to Pittsburgh tomorrow for an afternoon Pirates game against the Giants. Then probably off to see Muth in Jersey. Will update when I get back home.