Out To The Ball Game

I was pretty excited this weekend, because Friday night, my wife informed me that she had received free tickets to the Saturday Astros game from work, enough for all of us to go. 

Then we made our way to our seats...which was a really long walk. We were in section 413, which, as you might have guessed, is on the very top level, the fourth deck.

None of our noses started bleeding, which was a mercy, but we did get pretty winded ascending all of those stairs. I guess the air was pretty thin way up there, and we're not used to that kind of high altitude anymore.

We've been to Astros games before but the rest of the family never got very into baseball. I'm really the only one who is a big enough fan to name most of the players, and even I'm losing track as the team changes from year to year.

Baseball might still be a little much for my nine-year-old. He had a pretty hard time sitting still, especially as the game got longer. I started to wish I wasn't sitting next to him as he squirmed into all the oddest positions that anyone could possibly sit on a stadium seat.

We did get him and my daughter an ice cream cone each. A big splurge considering that each cone cost about two dollars more than the most expensive half-gallon would have cost us at the store.

We were all really thirsty as well, and, of course, the drinking fountains were turned off due to covid. Wouldn't you know it, it cost more than $7 for a bottle of water. It must have been special water brought down from Mt. Everest on Yak back, because there's no way someone would charge that much money for the same bottle of water you could buy at the grocery store for $2. That couldn't be possible. Especially not when they'd turned off the drinking fountains.

Anyhow, the game was pretty good. The Astros took an early lead on a two-run homer by Yordan Alvarez, but the Diamondbacks took the lead on a three-run inning in the fourth. The Astros tied it back up in the sixth inning with a sacrifice fly.

We stayed locked up through the ninth inning. My wife was not pleased. She likes baseball okay, but feels that the games just take too long, and that's for a normal-length game. Now we were going into extra innings.

It didn't take much longer, however, because in the tenth, the Diamondbacks doubled their run total, and the Astros couldn't manage to reply, so we lost 6-4. Here's highlights of the game if you'd like to check them out:

Long game and downer ending notwithstanding, we still had a good time.