Mariners

They said it would be cold this week, and boy they weren’t wrong.  Although I’ve resisted so far, it might be time to start turning on my heating – it was SO cold last night and this morning.  But not as cold as Saturday night, when I went to see the Seattle Mariners play.  Good job I brought some layers with me, because it was utterly freezing sitting in the stands.  It was the last weekend of the regular season – and our company has corporate sponsorship or something with the Oakland Athletics, who were the team playing the Mariners, so we got free tickets.  And on level 2 – which I think is some kind of corporate level because we have our own concessions, nicer toilets and what seemed to be wider and better padded seats.  No executive suite for us though!  Baseball still sucks however, and this game was about as meaningless as it could be (Mariners have one of the worst records, the A’s were already guaranteed a wildcard spot in the playoffs).  And, to be frank, it was an awful game – it finished 1-0 to the A’s.  One solo home run, and that was the entire scoring for the game.  It seemed to be a really poorly attended – maybe a third full at best, with next to no atmosphere, and it looked like most of our company’s allocation never showed up.  And a lot less people left by the end of the game – I certainly didn’t stay to the end.  I didn’t like the location of the seats either – down past the first base line, too far along to get any foul balls heading in our direction and really difficult to actually see strikes and balls and so on from where we were (judge for yourself from the photos).  There was a TV you could watch, but it was on a slight delay so it was really disorienting.  I think perhaps the highlight was the national anthem – which was a guitar version of The Star-Spangled Banner performed by Pearl Jam, one of Seattle’s finest.  I did promise myself I would try one of the food delicacies that the stadium is known for – and I’ve included a photo of it below – grasshoppers!  Not worth it – tasted “dusty” for want of a better word  That was definitely a strikeout.