Miami Livin': Baseball Edition
Capping off a generally slow and uneventful week (the only other thing it occurred to me to post was another mini-anecdote about the grocery store (which seems entirely inappropriate (I guess it took me a long time to get over quitting French horn, I suppose it will also take a long time (proportionally) to get over quitting grocery clerking))), I went to the Pirates/Marlins game last night at Dolphin Stadium with my friend Dave. Dave had initially balked at my suggestion of going to the game (a native Chicagoan (Sox fan), he was not thrilled to make his first game of the year one between a bad, but young team with lots of promise (Marlins) and a terrible team with only a sliver of hope of maybe showing some promise in 3 or 4 years (Pirates), but he acquiesced once the usual North Miami boredom set in for the weekend.
Going to a Marlins game is definitely a unique experience. Dolphin Stadium is out in the middle of nowhere (actually pretty close to where I live), a few miles west of Hollywood (the first municipality north of Miami-Dade county). I can't recall ever being to a stadium before (outside of minor league baseball games) where the stadium was so far removed from an urban setting. Parking was only 10 bucks though, so it could have been worse. It actually looks like it'd be an excellent place to watch a football game. For baseball, though, it makes the field a bit distance, and with the small crowd (very small) that was there, it made the stadium feel cavernous and empty. Apparently, not even the promise of a post-game concert by Bret Michaels of Poison was enough to draw in any extra thousands.
Especially with so many empty seats, Dolphin Stadium is rather unpleasant to look at - the color scheme of the seats is primarily all tangerine orange with a band of teal seats running through the middle, definitely a step or two too bright. There's plenty of people watching to be done, perhaps most noticeably the 30-something dumpy white men pulling around their heavily plastic-surgered women around the stadium by the hand (and one incident of the same kind of dude leading around a terrifyingly anorexic woman with no body mass and fake boobs (it really should be illegal - the relationship between the two was unclear, but the man should have had to wear a t-shirt that said something like "I am actively working to make this woman's life better." or something)).
As for the game itself, if there was any question lingering in the minds of the readers of this blog that maintain even a passing (mild) interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates as to how they're going to be this year, let it be known: they are fucking terrible. Like, uncomfortable to watch bad. Granted, both Jack Wilson and Freddy Sanchez were sitting due to injuries, so our team was that much worse than normal (only the Pirates would miss a shortstop like Jack Wilson), but still, it's hard to believe they're a Major League team. Adam LaRoche, continuing his April doldrums (he had two hits in the opener on March 31st and has had none since) looked like a lost child at the plate and also had a fielding error. Maholm didn't look terrible on the mound - he struck out a bunch of batters, but he gave up a first inning home-run to Hanley Ramirez, and then a few innings later decided to plunk Ramirez (an incredibly obvious hit-by-pitch) to load the bases and then promptly gave up a Grand Slam, which got him pulled from the game before the 5th inning was complete (and for the record, that means that no Pirates starter, in the first go-round of the rotation, got past the fifth inning (said our manager after Morris' outing on Friday, (something like) "He managed to keep us in the game for five innings, and that's all we can expect of him.")) Gah.
Dave and I went ahead and stuck around after the game for the Bret Michaels concert, which was worth it for the novelty of it alone. Apparently, Michaels has a TV-show on VH-1 where various women compete for his "love." He thanked the crowd for "making his show the highest rated program in VH-1 history," which I suppose is quite a feat? We left after the 4th song or so, just after a rather amusingly terrible cover of "Sweet Home Alabama," where Bret Michaels, did, in fact, switch the words towards the end to "Sweet Home South Florida," which really meant a lot to me, as a South Florida resident, and just before the song which was being "sent out to all our men and all our women overseas fighting for our freedom." Between every song Bret Michaels of Poison thanked everyone for coming out and let us know that the whole evening was about partying and having a celebration. A celebration it was, both during the game and after; a celebration of trying really hard but not quite getting to mediocre.
Going to a Marlins game is definitely a unique experience. Dolphin Stadium is out in the middle of nowhere (actually pretty close to where I live), a few miles west of Hollywood (the first municipality north of Miami-Dade county). I can't recall ever being to a stadium before (outside of minor league baseball games) where the stadium was so far removed from an urban setting. Parking was only 10 bucks though, so it could have been worse. It actually looks like it'd be an excellent place to watch a football game. For baseball, though, it makes the field a bit distance, and with the small crowd (very small) that was there, it made the stadium feel cavernous and empty. Apparently, not even the promise of a post-game concert by Bret Michaels of Poison was enough to draw in any extra thousands.
Especially with so many empty seats, Dolphin Stadium is rather unpleasant to look at - the color scheme of the seats is primarily all tangerine orange with a band of teal seats running through the middle, definitely a step or two too bright. There's plenty of people watching to be done, perhaps most noticeably the 30-something dumpy white men pulling around their heavily plastic-surgered women around the stadium by the hand (and one incident of the same kind of dude leading around a terrifyingly anorexic woman with no body mass and fake boobs (it really should be illegal - the relationship between the two was unclear, but the man should have had to wear a t-shirt that said something like "I am actively working to make this woman's life better." or something)).
As for the game itself, if there was any question lingering in the minds of the readers of this blog that maintain even a passing (mild) interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates as to how they're going to be this year, let it be known: they are fucking terrible. Like, uncomfortable to watch bad. Granted, both Jack Wilson and Freddy Sanchez were sitting due to injuries, so our team was that much worse than normal (only the Pirates would miss a shortstop like Jack Wilson), but still, it's hard to believe they're a Major League team. Adam LaRoche, continuing his April doldrums (he had two hits in the opener on March 31st and has had none since) looked like a lost child at the plate and also had a fielding error. Maholm didn't look terrible on the mound - he struck out a bunch of batters, but he gave up a first inning home-run to Hanley Ramirez, and then a few innings later decided to plunk Ramirez (an incredibly obvious hit-by-pitch) to load the bases and then promptly gave up a Grand Slam, which got him pulled from the game before the 5th inning was complete (and for the record, that means that no Pirates starter, in the first go-round of the rotation, got past the fifth inning (said our manager after Morris' outing on Friday, (something like) "He managed to keep us in the game for five innings, and that's all we can expect of him.")) Gah.
Dave and I went ahead and stuck around after the game for the Bret Michaels concert, which was worth it for the novelty of it alone. Apparently, Michaels has a TV-show on VH-1 where various women compete for his "love." He thanked the crowd for "making his show the highest rated program in VH-1 history," which I suppose is quite a feat? We left after the 4th song or so, just after a rather amusingly terrible cover of "Sweet Home Alabama," where Bret Michaels, did, in fact, switch the words towards the end to "Sweet Home South Florida," which really meant a lot to me, as a South Florida resident, and just before the song which was being "sent out to all our men and all our women overseas fighting for our freedom." Between every song Bret Michaels of Poison thanked everyone for coming out and let us know that the whole evening was about partying and having a celebration. A celebration it was, both during the game and after; a celebration of trying really hard but not quite getting to mediocre.
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