Honeymooning in Pittsburgh and Baltimore

Well, Claire and I are off. This will mostly focus on my baseball notes, but will have some other flavor.

I might come back to Pittsburgh as I don't have all my notes of things I wanted to say about it. One thing of note, however, is that driving in Pittsburgh is the pitts. Every exit seems to split at least three ways and the highways are all named something other than Claire's GPS calls them. It seems like there was no plan when laying down the roads.

PNC Park is amazingly awesome. It looks great, overlooks the water, has the requisite statues, good food, great beer selection (including Detroit-brewed Atwater Brewery Dirty Blonde). Parking wasn't bad, but I imagine it being terrible if the Pirates were drawing more than 15,000 fans. I also came to the realization that I think all the Pittsburgh teams share the same colors. Smart thinkin' Lincoln. A free program including scorecard. A free t-shirt on every Thursday game. They're giving away Negro League caps soon. I was astounded with the number of really cool promotions they do. It almost makes me want to be a Pirates fan. Alas, they're no good and I don't live in Pittsburgh. The scoreboard was nice, and included really nice previous at-bat info - including describing it by position number. This almost made up for not listing the position numbers on the scorecard (something I've gotten used to in Detroit). It would be really hard for a new fan to try to keep score with no positional numbers or common notations. The game got interesting towards the end with a McCutchen home run, but alas, the home team did not prevail.

Pittsburgh had a ton of walking traffic after the game and the skyline looked gorgeous. It's really something for Detroiters to be envious of as a post-industrial city. After the game we stopped by the recommended Church Brew Works which had converted an old Catholic church into a brewery/restaurant. We had an absolutely delicious "cinco fromaggio" pizza and a couple decent brews. It was a bit of an awkward feeling, sitting in a giant cathedral whilst drinking Thunderhop and chowing down some pizza, but it was really cool as well - after you got over the musty smell of old church layered under the other undesirable smells of bars.

For now, Claire and I are enjoying Baltimore. We got in this afternoon round-abouts 2 and, after checking in, walked down to the National Aquarium. They had a giant tank on the main floor filled with rays and what looked like smaller sharks. The highlight of the trip, for both of us I think, was the Jellyfish Invasion exhibit. Claire has a thing for jellyfish, and I have a thing for weird things.

After getting the obligatory collectible Hard Rock shot glass and snacking on some Cheesecake Factory, we walked on over to Oriole Park at Camden Yards to watch the Orioles host the Texas Rangers. The park was certainly nice - though perhaps not quite as impressive as I was led to believe. There was a fair amount of character, but you could definitely tell it was the first of it's kind. They have new scoreboards that look great - when you can see them which wasn't from our seats tucked under the upper deck behind home plate. I'm noticing that I find little things to like and dislike about the scoreboard displays. at OP@CY the pitch board displays the type of pitch which is fun. However, there is nowhere that displays previous at-bat results (other than the batters' record for the game: 0-1, 2-3 etc.). That was frustrating to me as I was trying to keep up with my scorecard and take pictures. I think I only missed one at-bat while Claire was gone, but it would have been really annoying if I'd been hungry enough to leave my seat for an inning.

The game was enjoyable with C.J. Wilson of the Rangers taking a shutout through 8 2/3 innings whilst Orioles Nick Markakis (RF) and Buck Showalter (manager) getting ejected separately during the game.

One thing I have noticed about Baltimore - and perhaps all of Maryland - is that people hate to use the rightmost lane to drive in. If there are three lanes, the center lane is is you're going five under the speed limit, and the leftmost lane (also known as the "fast lane" or the "passing lane") is used to cruise along at the speed limit in. I found myself in the right lane a lot.

Tomorrow we plan to get some crab before heading out to Philly for some cheesesteaks and to watch the Phillies take on the Nat's "phenom" Stephen Strasburg. Hopefully we got good seats - and don't get puked on.