August 14th, a Thursday, Pirates versus the Red Sox. First game of a three-game series. I went. Here’s my full report.
Getting there
I drove, because I always drive, because I’m not taking public transit to a baseball game in August when I have a perfectly functional car and the specific kind of stubbornness that comes from having lived in the same metro area for six decades. Parking near PNC is not a disaster if you know where to go, and I know where to go. I will not share this information because it took me years to find and I am not a generous man about parking.
The walk from the car to the gate is longer than I remember it being every single time. I’ve been to this park more times than I could count, and every time I come back after a gap it surprises me how far it is from where I park to the turnstiles. Not a long walk by any reasonable measure. Just longer than I expected.
PNC Park at night in August
I’ll say this about PNC Park, and I’ll keep saying it until somebody tells me to stop: it is one of the best-looking ballparks in the country. The view from the right field seats — the bridges, dahntahn lit up behind the outfield wall — is one of those things that makes you glad you live where you live. It was a clear night, still warm but not the hundred-degree nonsense we had back in late June, and the park looked the way it looks when everything is right. Lights on, field green, city behind it.
The Pirates are 57 and 60 on the season, fifth in the NL Central. Which is a polite way of saying they’re not going anywhere this year. I knew this was going in. You accept it when you’re a Pittsburgh baseball person. The park is still beautiful and the hot dogs are fine and you go anyway because it’s a summer evening and what else are you doing.
The Red Sox situation
I did not anticipate the number of Red Sox fans who’d be there. I don’t know why I didn’t — Boston people travel, everyone knows Boston people travel — but I was genuinely surprised by how many red jerseys came through the gates. They weren’t obnoxious about it. I want to be fair. They were just numerous. And loud at the appropriate moments, which were unfortunately more frequent than I’d have preferred, given how the game went.
Pirates lost 4–2. The Red Sox scored three runs in the fifth inning, which was the exact inning I had gone to get a hot dog and therefore missed. I’m sure those two things are completely unrelated.
The seat, and what it did to me
Here is what I did not fully appreciate when I bought these tickets: stadium seats at PNC Park are plastic. They are not cushioned. They are the correct width for a person who was perhaps twenty years younger and twenty pounds lighter than I currently am, and three hours on that seat did something to my lower back that I am still, four days later, having a conversation with.
I’m not saying it was bad. I’ve had worse. I’m saying that when I stood up in the seventh inning to let someone through, I made a noise I was not planning to make, and the woman in front of me turned around to see if I was alright. Told her I was fine. I was fine. I was also, at that moment, very aware of being sixty-three in a way I hadn’t been when I sat down.
Getting home
Got back to the car around ten-thirty, home around eleven. Biscuit was at the door the moment the key hit the lock — she always is — and then spent a solid forty-five seconds sniffing me like I’d come back from somewhere extraordinary. Hot dogs, sunscreen, stadium grass, twenty thousand strangers’ evenings. That’s a lot of information when you’ve got a Lab’s nose. Rusty, for his part, was on the couch in my spot and showed absolutely no interest in moving. That dog is slippy when it comes to holding onto a good seat. I took the chair. My back preferred it anyway.
Would I go again
Yes. Already thinking about the Cardinals series in late August. I’ll bring a cushion this time, and I’ll get the hot dog in the fourth inning instead of the fifth, because apparently timing is everything.
A thought on the standings, since I looked them up when I got home:
The Pirates are at 57 and 60 as of August 7th. To finish above five hundred they need to go roughly thirty-one and nineteen in the games that remain. They have done that over a fifty-game stretch exactly once in the last four years, and that was a stretch in June that got everyone briefly optimistic before July reminded us who we were dealing with. I am not saying it cannot happen. I am saying I have been a Pittsburgh baseball person for six decades and I know the shape of this particular hope. You hold it loosely. You enjoy the park on a warm night. You buy the hot dog. You go home and tell the dogs about it and they are appropriately interested, mostly because you smell like a ballpark.
More soon. Rusty just knocked something off the kitchen counter and I need to go investigate.
__________________________
Hey, thanks for stopping by. This is just a place where I write about everything I’ve tried lately: old watches, the dogs, movies, interesting sports games, and any new app or website that catches my eye. Just one guy’s take, nothing more
Leave a Reply