Deth

We have been tossing around the idea of heading to the Phillies game today, but the weather has been questionable. My girlfriend has to work tomorrow, so we need to catch the last AMTRAK train home. It’s also a lot of money if it was too cold for her or we had to leave early, so we wrote it off. Decent tickets were difficult to come by for a decent price, too.

With Thursday’s game being postponed until Friday, that possibility was opened up, but the weather was iffy. Fast-forward to late Thursday evening, and I noticed that it should be sunny and not the backdoor cold front type of weather that happens this time of the year so often. Just for the hell of it, I looked on Seat Geek and found great tickets for a good deal. My evening of relaxing turned into getting ready to catch the train the next morning. Things were looking up when it was clear in the morning.

I remembered and grabbed my Phillies overalls from last fall, but then decided not to wear them as they’re too long. I wanted to get the legs shortened but forgot about it until yesterday morning. Too bad, as yesterday would have been a perfect day to wear them. I noticed they have a shorts version of them. It’s likely that I will pick those up at some point!

We walked over to the train station and ran into some other people heading down. As the train stopped, more fans were getting on the train. I think half of 30th Street Station were Phillies fans.

The El did not smell like drugs and stale piss this time, but the weed smell on the broad street line was practically enough to get me high. I had to laugh at the computer announcement repeating that smoking and drugs aren’t allowed, while someone was clearly smoking.

We got to the ballpark with a little while to spare until we could get in, but at least we weren’t standing outside in the heat like in the first game. The sun felt good. We got in quickly and went to the store so she could get a long-sleeve shirt and explore a bit. I checked out the city view from the park and then headed to grab a drink and get to our seat. It was cool to see the players come out, and that was the first time I’ve experienced an actual flyover with the fighter jets. They flew over often back in Bucks County, but never as an actual flyover.

We had a blast at the game. Wheeler had a good game, but the bullpen did not. Talk about a bullpen meltdown. They all looked terrible. The heckler near us was entertaining. One of my favorites, though, was when he yelled to Bohm “I fucking love this place.” He apologized for using the F word, then did it again. Santa kept buying beers next to us. That was great.

I loved the experience of the game. The strider mocking is so much more fun in real life, as are the DUI chants, too. The sounds on the TV do these no justice, and I can only imagine how much louder they would have been during the playoffs. We almost went to that last game against the Braves last fall.

There’s something really cool about hearing the whole stadium singing Stott’s walk up song.

Now we’ve gotten to see Ranger, Wheeler, and Nola pitch live! The result of the game was disappointing, but I mostly expected it. The Braves are one of the best teams, but they luckily choke at the end of the season. The Phillies start slow every year.

The sun felt good and kept it from feeling too cold, but that wind was ripping. Once the sun went behind the lights, it got chillier, but not bad.

This was my, well, our first time going to the opening day. It was fun to just have the spontaneous idea to go.

We have to remember that the Broad Street Line is free after the game. That train was packed. We got back to 30th Street station just in time to hear the last call for a train to Mount Joy, so we had a zero-minute wait today.