O's

Last night I went to the Orioles-Red Sox game, here are some notes:

- An albino man was sitting two rows in front of me. That part wasn’t the weird part, I think at 26 I’ve finally matured to the point where a physical abnormality isn’t going to cause any giggle fits (so why did I even mention it? Because I just did shut up). What was weird was the binoculars he used to view they game. Instead of traditional binoculars he had two individual eyepieces suction cupped to each lens of his glasses. He looked like a jeweler who got the loupe stuck in his eye and instead of seeing a doctor about it just went ahead and used the other eye, but then he got that one stuck too. And all game he kept turning around to talk to his friends, it was really freaking me out.

- Guess what? The Red Sox have a new Japanese pitcher. I’m not talking about Dice-K though; I’m talking about Hideki Okijima, a left handed reliever. One of the more obnoxious Red Sox fans, and there were plenty of them, was calling him Japelbon (after their closer Jonathan Papelbon). While it’s a mildly amusing play on his name, isn’t that also sort of racist? You might want to keep that one to yourself instead of yelling it in public.

- Speaking of Red Sox fans, there were definitely quite a few more of them in the stadium last night than there were Orioles supporters. This is almost always the case when the Yankees or Red Sox are in town. There are a few reasons for that. There fans travel well because it’s much more difficult/expensive to get tickets in Boston or New York so they go elsewhere to catch a game. Also no two teams in all of sports have had their bandwagons more overloaded in the last few years then them so they have “fans” everywhere. Be that as it may, if I was an Orioles fan I would be pretty appalled to go to a game and feel like it’s a road game because the other team’s fans outnumber you and are much louder. ESPN.com lists Baltimore’s average attendance as 21,964 a game. Good for 24th out of the 30 teams in the league. I’ve been to 5 of the 12 home games this year and I’m pretty confident that number isn’t even close to correct. Either that or I’m really bad at estimating because at least three of the games I’ve been to have seen less than 10,000 come through the turnstiles. There are 2.6 million people in the Baltimore metro area, and that doesn’t even include the millions of people in the D.C. metro area who live just a little ways down 95. You’re telling that on a nightly basis less than 1% of the population doesn’t want to come to a baseball game. Everyone laments the Yankees and Red Sox for the money they spend, but they spend that money because they make that money. Fan indifference isn’t really going help create a quality product on the field. I’m also a very firm believer that a great home crowd is worth a few wins a year, and for a team like the Orioles this year that could mean the difference between a playoff push and finishing 4th. Again. Get with it O’s fans, you have a beautiful stadium (easily top five in baseball, if not top 3) and you only outdrew the Nationals by 100 people last year. 100. Have you been to RFK stadium? It’s a hole. And the Nats may be one of the worst teams ever put together, they’re awful to watch, yet only 100 less people chose to see them play. That’s embarrassing.

- There was a woman in the stands looking at paint swatches and furniture catalogs the entire game. Seriously, you paid money for a ticket to do this? I guess I can’t complain though, at least she was there.

- Every inning when the outfielders are warming up a relief pitcher comes out of the bullpen to throw with the leftfielder. Every inning the pitcher waits for Corey Patterson to finish tossing with the right fielder then runs a crossing route while Patterson leads him to the bullpen door. I thought you should know that. It makes me like Corey Patterson a lot more.