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Progressive Field, Cleveland (MLB #23 - The Jake Lives Up to its Reputation)

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  Cleveland’s Progressive Field (“The Jake”) has a reputation as being one of the best ballparks in which to watch a game. I won’t disagree. The stadium is old, by major league standards. It opened in 1994, which makes it the 10 th oldest of the 30 MLB stadiums. However, at the time it was ground-breaking, the second stadium (after Baltimore’s Camden Yards) to be built in the “ Retro-Classic ” style, a style that many parks since have tried to emulate. In many ways, it remains one of the best. It is situated in the heart of a rebuilding downtown. In fact, the NBA arena across the street was hosting a second-round playoff game as we walked to the game from our hotel. It has wide concourses, so you don’t feel like you’re going to get crushed trying to get to your seat. Note the amount of space in the outfield concourse around the statue of Jim Thome in the picture above. It has the fewest permanent seats of any team’s park, 34,820 (not counting Florida stadiums that clos...
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Lomond Elementary School, Shaker Heights, Ohio (High school girls' softball #1)

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  If there's a ball and a bat involved, sign us up. Friday evening, we watched a high school girls' softball game. Scout Harvey of Shaker Heights has the best ERA in the Greater Cleveland Conference, and her father, Ralph, has been a friend of mine for decades. We invited Ralph and his family to the Cleveland game Sunday, so they invited us to Scout's game Friday.  We've been seeing progressively smaller attendances throughout the week, over 30,000 in Wrigley last weekend, roughly 3000 in Toledo Thursday, and probably under 100 (of whom we may have been the only ones who weren't related to the players. And the field is just a field hacked into a grade school playground, with a mesh fence, although unlike Wrigley, it does have a scoreboard that shows the score to the people sitting behind home plate.  It's the same game, but at a much different level, a slower pace, none of the diving catches, none of the instinctive knowledge of the game situation when things go...
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Fifth Third Park, Toledo (MLB #23 - We'll Always Have Toledo)

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  Most people wouldn’t think that Toledo would be one of the stadiums we’d be looking forward to the most in our five-year quest, but it was. This was the 45 th stadium we’ve been to, and the first one where Kerry has gone out of her way to buy some team-branded merchandise (other than souvenir plastic margarita glasses). Note the Mud Hens logo on her new shirt. Moreover, in many ways, it more than lived up to our expectations of an enjoyable evening. In fact, if we have a more enjoyable evening just hanging out at a baseball game, particularly a minor league game, in this five-year project, I’ll be surprised.   There are two things that make the Toledo Mud Hens special, particularly for Kerry. The less important one is that some of Kerry’s earliest memories are from Toledo, although she hasn’t been here in over 60 years (yes, we’re that old). Her father got a Master’s degree in Math from Bowling Green State University (he went on to get a PhD, and become a college prof...
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Comerica Park, Detroit (The ball-strike challenge system is a welcome improvement - Too bad they got it wrong)

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    With the ABS (Automatic Ball and Strike) challenge system going into place this year, Major League Baseball has taken a huge step forward to make sure that the outcomes of games are decided by the actions of the players, rather than the umpires. It’s too bad they did it wrong. The ABS challenge system The way the ABS challenge system works is that after every pitch where the umpire calls a ball or strike (i.e., every pitch on which the batter doesn’t swing), there is an opportunity for a challenge. But the challenge has to be made “immediately,” and can only be made by the batter, pitcher and catcher, by tapping their cap or helmet. In practice, I’ve seen few pitchers make challenges, so it’s really the batter or the catcher. If there’s a challenge, a graphic shows up on the scoreboard, which shows the trajectory of the ball, and then shows where it is in the strike zone. An example is here , or a set of stills from the process is shown below (the image above is re...
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