Camden Yards

One of the highlights of our trip to Baltimore this weekend was a game at Camden Yards. A great place to see a game.

I would have preferred a better game, but it was pretty much over by the third inning when the Red Sox took a 6-0 lead. LF’s son noted that the Red Sox play 150 home games a year, as their fans travel all up and down the east coast because it’s so hard to get tickets at Fenway. From where we sat, you’d swear we were in Boston. Red jerseys outnumbered orange by at least a 10-1 margin, and every clutch Red Sox hit — and there were quite a few in the 9-3 win — was met with loud cheering. Even when the last Oriole batter was up in the bottom of the ninth, the handclapping when the count went to two strikes was emphatically not hoping for a clutch hit.

The more I looked around, the more it seemed that the stadium in Cleveland is pretty close to a carbon copy. The street-level entrance with views of the field, the layout of the stands and bleachers, the position of the scoreboards, the way the concourses are laid out in an open-air fashion with outside seating. And that’s good — it works, so go with it.