in the Pitt
May. 29th, 2025 04:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOn my trip, I did something I hadn't done in over fifty years. I attended a major league baseball game. The home team Pittsburgh Pirates defeated the Milwaukee Brewers 2-1, so all the locals went home happy.
The game was an optional add-on for attendees of the wedding, the day before the ceremony, and I figured it would be a good occasion to socialize with my fellow guests. It was also a glimpse into a world I rarely see.
Not having a smartphone to load my ticket onto, I had to stop at the box office to pick it up. (None of the team's or stadium's web material that I could find said where around the stadium's perimeter the box office was, and I couldn't reach them by phone. I presumed it would be near the gift shop, whose location was given, and I guessed right.)
Our seats were on the other side of the stadium, but instead of walking around the outside and using the gate there, I entered at the main gate by the box office, took the escalator (! - I'd never seen a sports stadium with an escalator before) up to the second level, where our seats were, and walked around the inside - in both senses: the walk around was inside the park, and it was inside the building, not open to the air.
PNC Park is, I understand, one of the new breed of baseball parks that are smaller and more intimate than old school, but it looked awfully big to me. The long, curved (so you couldn't see how much further there was to go), seemingly endless corridor was like nothing so much as a concourse at a huge airport. Tiny signs indicating the doors outside to numbered seating sections were inconspicuous; what occupied the attention was a vast sequence of concessionaires, and the crowds occupying their seating. The concessions were a bit different from what you get at an airport: frequently repeated outlets for junk food (no actual restaurants), and the same sequence of whiskey bars. The stadium opens 90 minutes before the game starts to allow attendees plenty of time to get lubricated, and judging from what I saw on quick visits to the restroom during the game, many people never bother to go out and watch the action.
When I finally got to my section, the weather outside was balmy. The seats were up a steep flight of steps, and at first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see home plate from up here - oh, there it is - and such view outside as wasn't blocked by the giant scoreboard was impressive: the large river with downtown behind it, just like at the wedding venue, only this time it was the Allegheny, the river on the other side of downtown.
I've occasionally seen baseball on tv, and watching a game in person is different in a couple important ways. First, there's no play-by-play commentary. The PA limits itself to announcing the name of the next batter. If you don't know the umpire's signals, you have no way of telling a ball from a strike without averting your eyes from the field and looking way up at the scoreboard, which half the time isn't displaying the box score anyway, preferring pictures of the batters or animated geegaws - if a visiting team player strikes out, the scoreboard displays a gif of three cannons firing, that sort of thing.
That's the other thing about watching baseball without a tv camera to guide you - it's hard to know where to look, or when. Baseball is not like other sports. In basketball or soccer or hockey the action is nearly constant. In American football it's intermittent, but you know it's going to happen when the players line up and the quarterback takes the snap. But baseball consists of a long sequence of pitches that the batter doesn't hit, or fouls, interrupted at unpredictable intervals when something exciting happens. It only lasts a few seconds, so if you happen to be looking away you'll miss it. And you usually need to be looking at two widely separated places at once. The ball has gone out to the outfield over there, while the runners are on the base paths over here, and knowing what's going on with both is vital to following the game.
At any rate, despite having few hits and almost no runs, the game wasn't too boring as sports games go. My brother told me that in recent years, rule changes have prohibited the characteristic baseball activity of standing around not doing anything for long periods. So things proceeded on with dispatch - after the first couple innings, I wondered if the game would be over in an hour, though in fact it took more than two - and there were a couple exciting double plays, and so on. I'm not likely to do it again, but I didn't feel my time was wasted.
Tomorrow: food, transit, and birds in Pittsburgh.
The game was an optional add-on for attendees of the wedding, the day before the ceremony, and I figured it would be a good occasion to socialize with my fellow guests. It was also a glimpse into a world I rarely see.
Not having a smartphone to load my ticket onto, I had to stop at the box office to pick it up. (None of the team's or stadium's web material that I could find said where around the stadium's perimeter the box office was, and I couldn't reach them by phone. I presumed it would be near the gift shop, whose location was given, and I guessed right.)
Our seats were on the other side of the stadium, but instead of walking around the outside and using the gate there, I entered at the main gate by the box office, took the escalator (! - I'd never seen a sports stadium with an escalator before) up to the second level, where our seats were, and walked around the inside - in both senses: the walk around was inside the park, and it was inside the building, not open to the air.
PNC Park is, I understand, one of the new breed of baseball parks that are smaller and more intimate than old school, but it looked awfully big to me. The long, curved (so you couldn't see how much further there was to go), seemingly endless corridor was like nothing so much as a concourse at a huge airport. Tiny signs indicating the doors outside to numbered seating sections were inconspicuous; what occupied the attention was a vast sequence of concessionaires, and the crowds occupying their seating. The concessions were a bit different from what you get at an airport: frequently repeated outlets for junk food (no actual restaurants), and the same sequence of whiskey bars. The stadium opens 90 minutes before the game starts to allow attendees plenty of time to get lubricated, and judging from what I saw on quick visits to the restroom during the game, many people never bother to go out and watch the action.
When I finally got to my section, the weather outside was balmy. The seats were up a steep flight of steps, and at first I wasn't sure if I'd be able to see home plate from up here - oh, there it is - and such view outside as wasn't blocked by the giant scoreboard was impressive: the large river with downtown behind it, just like at the wedding venue, only this time it was the Allegheny, the river on the other side of downtown.
I've occasionally seen baseball on tv, and watching a game in person is different in a couple important ways. First, there's no play-by-play commentary. The PA limits itself to announcing the name of the next batter. If you don't know the umpire's signals, you have no way of telling a ball from a strike without averting your eyes from the field and looking way up at the scoreboard, which half the time isn't displaying the box score anyway, preferring pictures of the batters or animated geegaws - if a visiting team player strikes out, the scoreboard displays a gif of three cannons firing, that sort of thing.
That's the other thing about watching baseball without a tv camera to guide you - it's hard to know where to look, or when. Baseball is not like other sports. In basketball or soccer or hockey the action is nearly constant. In American football it's intermittent, but you know it's going to happen when the players line up and the quarterback takes the snap. But baseball consists of a long sequence of pitches that the batter doesn't hit, or fouls, interrupted at unpredictable intervals when something exciting happens. It only lasts a few seconds, so if you happen to be looking away you'll miss it. And you usually need to be looking at two widely separated places at once. The ball has gone out to the outfield over there, while the runners are on the base paths over here, and knowing what's going on with both is vital to following the game.
At any rate, despite having few hits and almost no runs, the game wasn't too boring as sports games go. My brother told me that in recent years, rule changes have prohibited the characteristic baseball activity of standing around not doing anything for long periods. So things proceeded on with dispatch - after the first couple innings, I wondered if the game would be over in an hour, though in fact it took more than two - and there were a couple exciting double plays, and so on. I'm not likely to do it again, but I didn't feel my time was wasted.
Tomorrow: food, transit, and birds in Pittsburgh.
