The Daily Parker

Home, finally, after a pretty relaxing day of traveling and reading, with some help from American Airlines getting me home four hours earlier than expected. I hadn't planned to post tonight, but then I heard about this:

That's the 21st time in Major League history:

It was baseball's 21st perfect game and first since Philadelphia's Roy Halladay threw one against the Florida Marlins on May 29, 2010. It was the third in White Sox's history, joining Mark Buehrle against Tampa Bay on July 23, 2009, and Charles Robertson against Detroit on April 30, 1922.

Nice work, Mr. Humber. Nice work.

Poor Tropicana Field. It's the last of the old domed multi-use parks. It opened in 1990, just two years before Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the park that brought back classic baseball architecture.

Despite my complaints about the pretty-but-sterile "Baseball Experience" at Marlins Park, I do understand the need for roofs in places where it gets hot and rainy. I actually like Miller Park quite a bit, and mostly I like Enron Field Minute-Maid Park. They feel like baseball parks.

Tropicana Field tries so hard but has so much to overcome. Its façade, for starters:

Inside, it has some really good concessions (two thumbs up for Everglades BBQ and their pulled pork sandwich), good seating (enhanced by having only 18,900 people show up to the game), some fun fans (more cowbell! more cowbell!), and a baseball team who seem to enjoy being there. The roof is kind of cool, too:

I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to be on the field during a hurricane, but it does keep the rain and heat out.

It's clear to me, after visiting 21 parks, that the era between the last jewel-box park in the 1940s and Camden Yards in 1992 produced some of the unhappiest places on earth. Let me turn it around: I am very happy that baseball architects have, for 20 years, built enjoyable parks that still evoke the best parts about going to a game. This summer I plan to go to Petco Park and, possibly, Citi Field. Oh, and Wrigley, of course.

Which reminds me: yesterday was the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park's opening. Wrigley's century is two years from now. Possibly one of the teams will make the post-season by then.

I'm pooped, so I'll just post the Obligatory Field Photo from my (inexpensive and very good front-row upper-deck) seat:

More photos and some stuff about the longest, straightest road I've ever driven, when our program continues...

What a surprising phenomenon.

Miami has constructed the—well, let's not pussyfoot here—newest baseball park in the country, and somehow has created the most boring venue in history for watching a baseball game ever devised.

In fairness, I went to the park expecting the Marlins to win, for the simple reason that my Cubs suck like a Dyson this year. (No, really, I mean more than usual.) The Cubs did not disappoint, leaving forty men on and losing 127 to 3. I feel confident that we'll go all the way to 160 games this year, and possibly next year, though I'm skeptical of the Cubs getting into the post-season during Parker's lifetime. Or mine.

I digress. I was excited to go to the newest of baseball's jewels, and to see what $515m buys a club these days. I was...underwhelmed. And then I got antsy. And then I decided that $515m buys a baseball park so devoid of anything resembling baseball that it's best described as a "Baseball Experience" at some theme park in a place where no child has ever held a bat or a ball.

By the third inning, I hit upon the one thing that, more than any other, explained my discomfort and disappointment. There are no shadows. Not on the field, the players, the stands, on nothing. Everything looked flat and sterile. It was like being locked in a warehouse on the first spring day of the year, knowing that life was brighter and more real outside, but unable to join it until the sadness in front of you finished.

Outside, it was 25°C and sunny. Inside, it was 23°C and...inside. No breezes, no shadows, no connection to the rest of the world. Inside Marlins Park I experienced Entertainment, not a baseball game. (I spoke to a press agent at the park who confirmed that they closed retractable roof about an hour before game time, because they worried about the heat. The heat. In Chicago we cry for joy when we have a game day this beautiful; in Miami, they close the roof.)

Apparently I'm not the only one who thought so, judging by my section around the 5th inning:

I'm not satirizing here. This was the 7th game ever in this park, and barely 3/4 of the seats had asses in them. And do you know why? (I'm addressing you, Mr. Loria.) Because it wasn't baseball. It was indistinguishable from any other corporate-designed, corporate-managed Experience that attempts to distill something down to its marketable components and misses entirely the reason that people enjoy it. People who like Marlins Park will probably Olive Garden, the Twlight books, and Mitt Romney: facsimiles all. But none of them real.*

I mean, would Wrigley Field ever stoop to this?

All right, I concede, Ricketts might hire cheerleaders, but they'd be real cheerleaders, dammit.

I will close with this, the view from my seat, which the park designers got right. Every seat in the park, I am certain, had a good view (which we know is not the case at Wrigley). But after tomorrow's game, I'm going to rank-order the 20 parks I will have seen, and I suspect Marlins Ballpark might come out poorly.

* And also not worth $40 for the ticket and $10 for each beer. Not to mention, for the love of dog, can you at least have more than four awful beers on tap? Heineken, Corona Light, Bud Light, and Miller Light qualify, collectively, as 1.25 beers—and Heineken is 0.8 beers on its own. Is there a single brewery in Florida? Dang.

The Atlantic Cities today examines the retro ballpark trend, of interest to anyone following my 30 Park Geas:

The retro style quickly split into two schools; one, like Camden Yards, that strictly embraced classical design elements and the other that used more progressive forms (i.e. curtain walls, retractable roofs) while still implementing postmodern idiosyncrasies.

The historical references and unique site configuration that makes Camden Yards successful was eventually re-imagined in other cities through forcibly quirky stadiums surrounded by seas of parking. The best example of that, and what fittingly could be the last retro-classic ballpark, would be Citi Field.

The more modern half of the movement, meanwhile, has pushed along to an almost unrecognizable point. Since the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati opened in 2003 with its contemporary, glass-wrapped facade, newer stadiums are more willing to embrace less familiar forms.

The anti-Camden trend takes its next step when Marlins Park officially debuts next Wednesday. Similar in form to the spaceship and entertainment palace known as Cowboys Stadium, Miami's new facility moves baseball stadium design even further from the nostalgia-drenched movement.

Next up for me: Miami and Tampa Bay in two weeks.

I don't mean the tax is stupid; I mean a tax on stupidity. As in, mine.

I'm planning two baseball trips this year, the first to Florida to see the Cubs play the Marlins on April 19th, and the Twins at the Rays on the 20th. So far, I've got my flights, the Rays ticket, and a car reservation. Marlins tickets went on sale this morning.

This is when I discovered I have to pay a stupid tax. Because, when I checked out the Marlins' schedule a couple of weeks ago, they were planning on a night game on the 19th. Unfortunately, the final schedule has the April 19th game at 12:40pm. Remember how I have my flights already? Oops. I need to come in Wednesday night for the Thursday day game.

American Airlines will be pleased, I'm sure. I will not, as this is suddenly the most expensive set of flights I'll be taking this year, including this month's trip to London. Stupid.

Update: This is why I love American Airlines, and why talking to an actual person is helpful. It turns out, the fare to arrive the night before is $11 less. Unfortunately, I had to pay a penalty to change the ticket—but it was a lot less than I had feared.

Despite the teams involved, I must (begrudgingly) accept that yesterday's bottom-of-the 11th, two-out, two-strike World Series home run was pretty damn cool. (So was the bottom-of-the 9th, two-out, two-strike game-tying triple that the same guy hit a few minutes earlier.)

And yes, I would say the same thing if the American League team had done it.

For readers outside the U.S.: The Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals have a baseball rivalry going back over a century. Think Arsenal and Chelsea, only without the hooligans; for hooligans, see under "Chicago White Sox."

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title.

The Daily Parker is about:

• Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
• Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
• Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until a few months ago when I got the first digital camera I've ever had that rivals a film camera. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.
• The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
• Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.

I've deprecated the Software category, but only because I don't post much about it here. That said, I write a lot of software. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got about 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. Facebook's lawyers would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior claims, which contravenes four centuries of law.

Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it (unless otherwise disclosed). I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. My photos, however, are published under strict copyright, with no republication license, even if I upload them to other public websites. If you want to republish one of my photos, just let me know and we'll work something out.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

Yesterday I flew to California to continue the 30-Ballpark Geas, arriving at my first-row seat in Angel Stadium just in time for the first pitch.

A short time later, the Angels got a grand slam, which ultimately devolved into the pitcher's duel you see here:

Yes, with 16 runs and 23 hits, most of the 8 guys who pitched in the game saw their ERAs rise a bit—more than a full point in winning pitcher Jered Weaver's case.

At one point during the game I counted four beach balls tossed around. Occasionally one would land in the field to a chorus of boos the ball's destruction. A couple of them managed to stay alive the whole game:

Later today I'm flying up the coast to visit my family, but first I've got brunch with an old friend in Hollywood. Yes, it's that kind of weekend.

This evening at Angel Stadium in California:

Canon 7D at ISO-800, 1/250 at f/8, 18mm, here.

The home team won, which I always like to see when I'm not someplace the Cubs are visiting. More photos and game info tomorrow night. Right now my body thinks it's midnight.