DISCLAIMER: I don’t know much about baseball. A friend of mine took me along for my first game. Blue Jays VS. Texas Rangers at the Rogers Centre (formerly the Skydome), June 8th 2013.
- The baseball pitch is really pretty in an odd, geometric kind of way.
- Lower bowl seats are worth the extra money. There is only one jumbotron and the baseball is tiny and white and not very visible from way up there.
- The NBA, NHL, and MLB utilize the same crowd-engaging chant cues.
- Baseball’s rules are really really complicated to understand without reading up/asking people around you who sorta kinda know when to cheer.
- There are technically 9 innings in a game, but if the two teams are tied up at the end of the 9 innings, the game goes on for however long it needs to until one team pulls ahead. In this case, the game went on for 18 innings! But the Jays won, so yay Toronto!
- Toronto loves José Bautista. When he comes onto the field to bat, his stance is kinda funny.
- Baseball players have weird names. Jurickson Profar, Edwin Encarnacion, JP Arencibia to name a few.
- I love sports arenas. As is evident by my post about my first ever NBA game experience, I am totally in love with the Air Canada Centre too.
- This is the second sports experience I’ve had where Toronto’s playing against a Texas team! First, the Spurs (who are my favorite team now) and now the Rangers.
- My siblings and I used to play baseball as kids, using a pestle as a baseball bat and Time-Life encyclopedias as bases. Needless to say, the spines of those encyclopedias had to be (heavily) taped up. My mom is a hero for putting up with all of it.
- If you wanted to throw a big party, you could do it at the Rogers Centre! Wouldn’t that be the greatest?
- There are a lot of different scores to keep track of. There’s a “ball” count which is a score against the pitching team, “strike” which is a score against the batting team and “outs”. After 3 outs, the inning is done.
- 3 strikes and a player is out, any more than 3 “balls” means the batsman gets to walk to the next base. When that happens, another batsman comes up to bat.
- A home run is worth 1 point. All that work for 1 measly point.
- There is minimal commentary at a baseball game. Sometimes, young fans get to be guest commentators. It’s kinda cute.
- Rogers Centre has a lot of gates that are confusing to navigate from the inside.
- The Rogers Centre opens up like half way through so half the audience is in the sunlight while the other half is immersed in shadow. It’s asymmetrical.
- Baseball cheerleaders wear real clothes!
- There are these baseball songs that everybody (except me) knows the words to.
- Parking at the Rogers Centre is expensive.
- People start filing out after every inning post the 9th ‘cause they don’t know when the game will end.
- The food places shut down somewhere around the 13th inning. It must be hard to predict when the game will end, I suppose? It sucks that the concession stands are closed when people are starving though.
- If you have baseball tickets, don’t plan anything else after that.
- The Bay-Lakeshore area is not the best for food.
- Baseball players are slightly older than I expected them to be.
- Kids are the best jumbotron baits.
- Now that I sorta kinda know the rules, I could get used to watching this
as long as it doesn’t interfere with the NBA season.
