happy
Kudos to the groundskeepers at Greater Nevada Field for getting the field into shape after the drenching it got on Friday. The tarp is rolled up there in front of us, and this is the scene as the first Isotopes player came to the plate for the first of the two games. If the place looks mostly empty, it's probably because not a lot of people got the word that first pitch was 5:05. (The start time of the originally-scheduled game was 6:35 PM.) Even people who had stuck it out on Friday night until the game was officially postponed (like those sitting behind us) hadn't all got the word that the start time was moved up. I had heard the original announcement and also checked the Aces' Twitter feed and web site.
The seats down low were pretty good, but you have to pay attention. There were a fair number of foul balls hit over our way. One in particular was snagged by one of the many Boy Scouts there, who brought his glove and got a ball. (It was Scouting Night; they held a parade with all the various packs/troop's banners between the two games. We cheered for Fernley's pack and troop as they passed in review.) I'm really glad he did so, because the ball had ricocheted off a seat and was headed generally toward me, and my hands were full of a soda and garlic fries and thus I was not in a good position to field it myself. (The garlic fries were pretty meh. They do them much better at
One advantage of the early start for Game 1 for Lisa and me (and
travelswithkuma) personally was that we had plenty of room to spread out for most of Game 1. Albuquerque took the first game 2-1. Reno had the tying run on base with one out in the bottom of the seventh (minor league baseball double-headers are shortened from nine to seven innings) but bounced into a game-ending double-play.Near end of the first game, the seats around us began to fill up. In fact, it got crowded enough that we moved over to the next section and up ten rows, where the view might not have been quite as good, but we had plenty of space around us.
The breeze that had been blowing during the first game died down, and a good thing too as it started getting chilly, and was only tolerable because of the lack of wind. Lisa and got out our extra layers from my Giants tote bag and were okay. Incidentally, I worried a bit about wearing Giants gear given than neither team playing were San Francisco affiliates, but from what I could tell, there were a lot of Giants fans about, some of whom admired our Croix de Candlestick and such.
Part-way through the second game, Lisa suggested that instead of going out to dinner after the game, we just go straight home. That seemed fine with me.
Because we would not be going to dinner, I went and got us two more foot-long hot dogs from their grill. We had also bought "endless" soda cups early in the first game (more of a bargain in a double-header, of course), and I bought an "endless" bucket of popcorn (much less of a bargain because Lisa couldn't eat any of it because of the yellow dye in the margarine and because it wasn't very good popcorn anyway). Walking over to the grill, I snapped this photo from the concourse directly behind home plate.
Here's the view from the first base side near the sausage stand. Lisa is actually in this photo if you know where to look, as we were sitting in the last section on the third base side before the "party zone" area (the wedge-shaped area with table seating).
Minor league teams do strange promotions, and the Aces didn't disappoint. They picked a person from the stands randomly for the "duct tape challenge." They duct-taped the guy to a wall and he had a half-inning to escape to win the prize. When I saw how securely trussed up he was, I said, "He'll never get out of it," but to our surprise (and the fans' delight), he actually got free, and won $25,000 for his trouble. That's a ball game he'll never forget.
The second game was a back-and-forth affair, but Albuquerque exploded for 4 runs in the sixth inning to break it open and Reno was unable to respond, dropping the nightcap 8-4. Insamuch as Lisa is a New Mexico girl, she had been cheering for the Isotopes and we went home happy.
We did enjoy the games, and got a good deal for the price, what with getting two seven-inning games for the price of one. As it happens, had we gone to today's game, we would have almost as much baseball, as it was a twelve-inning game decided by a single run scored by Reno in the bottom of the 12th to win 1-0.
I hope we'll get a chance to go see some more games, because they are good value for money and it's a comfortable place to watch a baseball game.