Wrigley, Sox Park, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and now… San Diego. This will be the 7th MLB stadium that my son will visit. Petco Park, here we come!
Not much traffic getting to the game; we got there super early. On the way from the freeway to the stadium, we seemingly passed through skid row, which came into play when deciding whether or not to drop $30 on parking. Of course, I’m always ready to look for cheap or free parking, but my wife… not so much in this case. She was right, and we chucked it up to park less than 2 blocks from the park.
The nice thing about going to see the Cubs on the road is that we get to see them take batting practice. Once we got in, we headed down to the field to watch BP and hopefully get a ball. The Cubs were really rocking the ball. Rizzo hit 3 straight out. Schwarby hit a bunch. My son was absolutely loving it. We were standing about 8 rows off the field, as I stood him up on a seat to get a great view of the action. A couple of the guys flipped a ball or two into the stands, but nothing close to us. As batting practice wrapped up, my son was ready to go back to our seats. We had pretty decent seats; they were 29 rows off the field, just past the Cubs dugout on the 3B line. I turned to walk with him, but told him to wait for a minute…
I saw Lester Strode walking this way. I yelled out, “Lester!”, and pointed to my son, who I was holding again, as he stood on top of the seat. He nodded. He then reached down and fired a ball our way. My son had his glove. I’m not 100% sure he would have caught it… he may have… but I didn’t want to take any chances. I grabbed it right next to his glove hand. We got a ball!!!
As we turned to walk back to our seats, yelling out to my wife to show her the ball we just got, another one sailed over our heads. It ricocheted right off my wife’s shoulder; she quickly recovered, as she scrambled to grab the ball. Now we have two! It was Lester again, as he fired multiple balls into the stands… a couple even on the level above us. I told my wife he probably saw the pretty girl sitting in the stands, and tried to get her a souvenir. It worked!
That was some exciting pre-game action. One other thing happened… As we were walking into the stadium, my son told us he saw a picture of me and him on the scoreboard. I didn’t see it, and immediately dismissed it; why would the Padres throw up a picture of 2 Cubs fans on the scoreboard? And secondly, what picture? Well, as we were watching BP, it popped up again; he was right! It was a picture of us that my wife took at a restaurant before the game. She sent it out to the Twittersphere, and the Padres grabbed it. Unbelievable!
OK, time for the game. Grabbed a couple cold ones, and settled into the middle of a sea of Cubbie blue. Let’s get that W!
MK
Pretty damn cool getting 1 ball let alone 2. Lester is the man! He has been aWesome again this year and seems to be an overall good dude. A picture on the scoreboard on top of the 2 balls and the pregame was set. Time to get that W in Petco, which seemingly was full of Cubs fans. What was the percentage…90-10 Cubs fans? Sure seemed like it all weekend long. GO CUBS GO!!!