jgrussell – my world

Months and months ago, my brother Bill, his wife Carolyn and I agreed that we would get tickets for the August 28th night game at Yankee Stadium — the Yankees against the Chicago White Sox. Carolyn is a Cubs fan so she wouldn’t mind seeing the White Sox lose, and Bill simply loves sports. It was to be the first regular Major League game for my nephews Dennis and Duncan, and I’m doing my best to turn the boys into Yankees fans (as long as they’re not playing the Cubs, that is). Almost as soon as I got the tickets, Bill discovered he’d be on travel this weekend and wouldn’t be able to make the game. Fortunately for me, the rest of the family was willing to make the trek without Bill (and another sibling took the extra ticket) and we headed off to the Bronx on a chilly, dark, rainy Friday afternoon.

The first thing that struck me was that I was really surprised at how very much I like the new Yankees Stadium. I didn’t expect that, because I loved the old one. But this one immediately won a place in my heart. It’s big, but feels intimate. Even though we were in Section 315, the view was terrific — there aren’t many bad seats in the place. The beer is still cold (there are even cupholders in the new seats), the hotdogs still warm, and I was able to turn six hand-held shots into this panorama of the new stadium (you have to click on the image to see it bigger):

(Some of my camera friends thought the image should be brighter, so here’s another view with brighter processing — but the one above is really what the stadium looked like then!!)

Dennis was thrilled to be at the major league park and the wet seats and light drizzle didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

Duncan is nowhere near as much of a sports fan as Dennis, but he was game, and was a real trouper throughout the long rainy evening. (Hotdogs and popcorn helped a bit, here and there.)

It’s awfully hard to argue with a baseball game that starts the real action with a home run by one of your favorite players. Watching Derek Jeter swing for the fences and blast a first inning home run was a fantastic way for the boys to begin what we can all hope will be a lifelong love of baseball (and the Yankees, right, Carolyn?).

Got a few other action shots during the game… Mark Teixeria swinging away…

… CC Sabathia with yet another strike…

… but with the rain continuing to fall and the very real chance of a rainout looming at any moment, all I really wanted out of the entire game was to get to the middle of the third inning. I know Carolyn kept wondering why I kept saying I would be perfectly happy if we could just get in three innings in the game (she knows perfectly well you need five for a legal game)… but she found out during the middle of the third inning when I told the boys to make sure they watched the left-center field video board…

At that point I basically sat back and enjoyed the game (5-2 Yankees with a three-run walk-off home run by Robinson Cano in the bottom of the 10th!!) and brought the camera out from under the poncho I was wearing only rarely… such as for the seventh inning groundskeepers…

… and to see if I could even begin to capture the weather…

A good night, a lot of fun, and we really did miss you, Bill! (Well, maybe not Kacy so much, but…)

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2009 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.