Take me out to the ballgame

I'm not that much of a baseball fan, but my wife and I do like to go see a Seattle Mariners game once or twice a year. Today we watched them play the Texas Rangers - yay, we won; 5-3!

This was at the beginning of the fifth inning (if you don't believe me, you can check the scoreboard :):

I try to get reasonably good seats since we so rarely go to these games; today's seats were great, we were in row 31 and nearly behind home plate as you can see. Makes foul-ball action quite exciting; I was never close enough to get a hand on one, but one did whiz by only 5'-6' over my head.

The baseball stadium in Seattle has a neat feature in that its roof is retractable. You can read more about it at Wikipedia; today was the first time we've been there that they've closed the roof during the game; it was cool to watch. Contrast the picture above, with the following picture which has the roof almost closed:

The roof only takes ten minutes to close (not air-tight, it's designed more like a giant umbrella), which is nice when the rain starts to come down.

Lastly: while it's fun to watch a baseball game occasionally, I was telling my wife we should start going to some minor-league games again. For example, the Everett Aquasox (single-A affiliate of the Mariners); we've been to a couple of their games and the action is just so much more "in your face": instead of thirty rows back, you're less than ten rows back and MUCH closer to the field. Also, the minor league players, at least in the games I've been too, really give it 110% effort. You do see more mistakes being made, but that just makes things more exciting. And Everett (about 30 minutes north of Seattle) is far easier to drive to than downtown Seattle.