Spring Training

Now that I’m caught up with baseball outings from 2011, we can finally get ready for the regular season. In 2011 we saw the Diamondbacks vs. Giants at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona, the Phillies vs. Braves, Phillies vs. Rangers and Phillies vs. Cubs at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, and the Yankees vs. Red Sox at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

It occurs to me that we saw some pretty good teams in 2011 — I definitely didn’t expect the D-Backs to be that good when we saw them back in April. We saw four playoff teams play. In fact, I challenge anyone to have seen teams with a better combined record than we saw in 2011 (minimum five games? can we create a variable to take into account how many total games one saw?). Let’s tease this out:

Arizona Diamondbacks: 94-68
San Francisco Giants: 86-76
Philadelphia Phillies: 102-60
Atlanta Braves: 89–73
Texas Rangers: 96-66
Chicago Cubs: 71-91 (you can always depend on the Cubs to screw up at least one thing a season)
New York Yankees: 97-65
Boston Red Sox: 90-72

Total win-loss record: 725-571 for a .559 winning percentage.

Well, did any of you do any better?

Mom and Dad were in town while the Red Sox were playing the Yankees and they had never been to see the new stadium, so we went early. I had never seen Monument Park, and neither had they, so we got to see that. Much has been said about the giant Steinbrenner plaque in the center of everything. Here it is:

We also had time to visit the Yankees Museum with all the hardware:

The collection of signed baseballs from everyone who ever played for the organization is actually very cool. Here’s Cory Lidle, who crashed the plane he was flying into an Upper East Side building in 2006:

And I searched out Ian Kennedy’s ball:

This was the first full season after Steinbrenner died, so there were a lot of tributes to him around the park (in addition to the oversized plaque in Monument Park:

Oh, and we had good seats, for once:

This was Jorge Posada’s last season, which we didn’t know at the time:

And “We Want Pie” is a shoutout to A.J. Burnett, if I’m not mistaken (yup, that’s it); that’s all behind us now as well:

The Red Sox won, by the way; A-Rod struck out to end the game:

Philadelphia 2011

We didn’t get down to Philadelphia as much as we usually do in 2011, what with moving and baby stuff, but there were a few Phillies games we went down there for, basically in May and June.

We (or some of us at least) ate a Pork Scrapple slider at White Dog in University City:

Before we installed the toilet at Kawama, and before we even ordered the toilet on Amazon, we checked out toilets at the Lowe’s in South Philadelphia. They want you to know that it’s not too difficult to install them yourself:

Just across the parking lot at IKEA (where we bought pulls for the cabinets) you get a nice view of the S.S. United States from the Meatball Chamber:

At the Braves-Phillies game, we saw how much of the Spectrum was finally gone:

Later in May, I think I took this picture because I was surprised how expensive gas was. That seems reasonable today . . .

At the day game on the 21st against the Rangers, it was just after the end of the world and everyone was still a little anxious:

And at the game in June against the Cubs, expectations about the season were sky high:

Of course we know how that turned out:

When Theaters Become Duane Reades . . . And Chase Banks And New York Sports Clubs

This Times article about the Millennium Theater in Brighton Beach was interesting — so many theaters have been shuttered over the years that it’s cool to see a theater being used for something approximating what it was meant for — i.e., some performance of some sort.

It’s cool because so many theaters are now Duane Reades or whatnot, to which @RICANROLL tweeted like the theater on 30th Avenue and Steinway is now a Duane Reade. Yup, that’s exactly which one I was thinking. We walked by it yesterday:

In this case, the Astoria Sixplex (which I actually went to once or twice before it closed in 2002) actually became a Duane Reade, a Chase bank and a New York Sports Club.

I’m not even upset that @RICANROLL fucked me by spoiling a Walking Dead plot point.