It’s late January, and that means that subtle reminders of baseball are beginning to pop up: Daily baseball articles start appearing in the newspaper, teams are getting ready for spring training, and the Mariners hold their annual fanfest; a chance for deprived baseball fans to dust off their caps and head down to the ballpark.
Meghan and I were lucky enough to get in to the private Fanfest specially scheduled for full season ticket holders (Meghan’s coworker gave us two of his tickets), so went down to Safeco Field Saturday evening. The event itself wasn’t that terribly interesting, I think mainly because it was no different than last year (the first year we went). They do give fans the option to go down onto the field, wander freely through the Mariners clubhouse, or catch pop-flies in the outfield, but I think the thing I really like best about it is just being back at a baseball field after months of deprivation.
The nerve-wracking part of the night came when both Meghan and I got called up on stage to compete in a trivia game called Last Fan Standing, a game that I actually got into the championship round of last year. There’s five contestants and they give you a category (example: Mariner players with 20+ at bats in 2006) and each contestant thinks of a player in that category. If you can’t think of one, you’re out, and the last contestant left wins. Meghan and I got our raffle tickets drawn for the same game, so we were pitted against each other in trying to name players who played catcher for the Mariners for at least one game since 1996…ugh. We were abismal, Meghan named Kenji Johjima and I pulled Chris Widger out of somewhere, and then we were both knocked out on the second round. On the plus side, since we got knocked out of the game so early, we had a chance to go get our newly won hats signed by J.J. Putz and Yuniesky Betancourt.
So cool…I love baseball. And I love the Mariners, although they haven’t been too loveable lately. In all their (mostly sad) history, they had never had two last place finishes in a row until 2005…now they’ve had three in a row. Oh well, the next year is always the year.
Pitchers and catchers report to spring training February 14th, position players on February 19th, first spring training game is March 1st, and then opening day on April 2nd. Then it’s baseball through October! Hot dog!
The Place to Ourselves…Almost
Professional Infield Dirt is Oddly Squishy
Sunset from the Mezzanine
January 28, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Stage fright got yeh, eh? Off the top I can think of Rene Rivera, Dan Wilson (duh!), Miguel Olivo. I probably would have blanked on Kenji, and there’s no way I would have come up with Chris Widger. There were a whole ton two years ago.
Someday we’ll make it to a FanFest. I almost tried to win tickets the other day, but didn’t.
Nice day to be at Safeco.
You write long blog posts.
January 29, 2007 at 11:34 am
Yeah, those names were all said in the first round, except Ben Davis instead of Rivera, then the winner got Rivera and the rest of us were stumped. I think the guy who won had many more in his head…he started rattling of names like Miguel Ojeda and Yorvit Torrealba after the game was over.
The blog post did turn out kind of long, didn’t it…I’ll have to work on it.