After a week off from baseball, it was back to this place:

…for a match-up between my two favorite teams in baseball. (Well, actually I don’t know about that, but I’ll possibly get to that in an offseason entry.)

When I got in, this was my view:

However, the only reason I came to  an 85% full Target Field was because the Yankees were a power-hitting left-handed team. Thus, I was going to try again to go exclusively for hit balls, and my view was this for almost all of batting practice:

For a while, I was misjudging balls left and right. That “while” was called batting practice. I don’t know why, but when I’m on the same level as a baseball (i.e. field level), I have no problem judging fly balls. But whenever I’m elevated, I become a complete klutz trying to judge them. Despite this, I managed to snag a ball off the bat of Nick Swisher after in bounced in here:

Do you see the logo? That was an Oriole Park at Camden Yards ball. All of the balls I snagged during batting practice were.

It was about at this time that I saw how empty the section of seats in right field was compared to the standing room:

So I walked down into the section. That’s when I heard a voice behind me say, “Excuse me, you need a ticket for this section.” It was the usher right at the entrance to the section

“What?” I said, “Even for batting practice?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it just something for the Yankees series or the whole season?”

“The whole season.”

I didn’t want to blow up on him and make at least one new enemy, but that was absolute BS. That had never been a rule, and wouldn’t be in any of the games I would go to afterward. Since the ushers don’t always have the same usher for the same section, it was obvious he was a club-level usher or something like that and misinterpreted something his supervisor told him. Anyway, I had my one ball, so I just bit my tongue and moved on with my life.

I headed over to left field for a few hitters, but that yielded nothing but a look at some crowded bleachers:

Not to mention the searing sunlight those guys are shading their eyes from:

I forgot exactly all of the members of the group, but when a group of mostly lefties came up to hit, I went back to right field. There, I got a Curtis Granderson home run that landed in a beer vendor’s ice:

So yeah, that’ll be a fun fact to tell people: I’ve snagged a ball that was hit into ice.

Then I missed about three different balls out in the standing room. One resulted in some one getting a bloody nose and another almost took my head off because I looked away just as it was hit and didn’t see it until it was about ten feet away from me. After this, though, I managed to catch my first ball on the fly in the standing room ever. I just barely did, as it missed the flagpole by less than a foot before landing in my glove. I gave this ball away to a kid out in the standing room.

Then batting practice was about to end, so I started making my way to the Yankee dugout. When I just about got there, I noticed it was too crowded around the dugout for me to get a ball. Instead of pushing through the autograph seekers, I took this picture that illustrated me not knowing who to root for in this game as the transplanted New Yorker:

This was in left field. While I was there, I noted that even though batting practice had ended, the Yankees forgot to pick up a ball in foul territory, so I headed into foul ground and this was the result:

Yes, I used the glove trick to reel in the ball.

For those of you wondering, this was where the ball had been sitting:

Well, when I reeled it in. I actually had to knock the ball closer to get it into range.

I then went back to sit in my seat in left field when I realized: “This is stupid. I’m trying to get 222 baseballs this season. Why am I limiting myself by not asking for balls today? I mean, yeah, it makes me focus on hit balls, and I may very well benefit from it, but I have a goal to reach.” If you didn’t know, one of my goals at the beginning of the season was to double my career ball total up to that point. Before the season my career ball count was 222, so my goal for this year was to snag that many; or get the career total up to 444.

Anyway, so when Mike Harkey came into the bullpen and picked up a ball that had been hit in there during batting practice, I called out to him and he tossed me the ball:

Obviously, I’m used to getting balls from Mike Harkey tossed to me from much longer distances, but I’ll take that.

As for the game, the two lineups were mostly lefty. And given my seat was in left field, I played home runs in the standing room all day:

Out there, there were a couple things of note: 1. FSN had this camera installed right above the standing room that I had never seen before:

I was at all of the games I could possibly watch from this point on in the season, so does anyone who actually watched a game on the network know how it would possibly be used?

The second thing of note takes some setting up, so bear with me. When I’m out in the standing room, the fact that I have my glove on and stand further back than anyone watching the game often brings people to talk to me. Well to guys eventually did talk to me, and through our conversation I brought up that I give balls away to kids. A few innings after I talked to these guys, another guy showed up and asked me if I was the guy who gave baseballs away to kids in the hospitals. I’m guessing he misinterpreted what the other guys had told him, but we straightened things out. Anyway, he told me his son, Tucker was in the (I believe it is a specially children’s) hospital in Mankato. He asked me if I could possibly be willing to talk to the kids about what I do. During this conversation, what ended up happening is I gave him two baseballs, one with my e-mail address for the hospital to possibly talk to me about the opportunity and the cleanest OPACY ball I had snagged during BP for Tucker:

As for the actual game itself, the Yankees’ lefties were bombing away on Liam Hendricks, but I had nothing to show for it. Although, I did make it into the highlights for two of them.

1. When Curtis Granderson bombed his 40th home run of the season, it was hit so high that even though I was in the standing room when it took off, this is where I was when it landed:

I had run all the way up the stairs to the second level in right field. Link to the full video: here.

2. When Raul Ibañez yanked a ball down the right field line and the cameras cut to showing the standing room, this is where I was:

I was turned around when he hit it, but you can see I’m the first person reacting( in terms of moving) in the standing room. When the ball first showed up on the screen, this is where I and it where (hint: I’m not the one soaring through the night sky):

It felt like I was moving in slow-motion at the time, but looking at the replay, it looks like I was going really fast. Here is where I and the ball where when it bounced:

It then took a series of bounces away from me, and then a group of guys converged on it as I watched helplessly:

If you want to see the full thing, here is the link.

Suffice to say, I wasn’t thrilled with the trend:

Then in the seventh inning, Pedro Florimon came up to bat. As he had been since I got to Minnesota, he had yet to hit his first career home run. Then this happened:

I was in the standing room when it landed, but when I saw that it was indeed a home run, I rushed over to see what the deal was/ if I could miraculously find it while people searched the wrong place. But there was nowhere to stand, and you had a genius who did this:

If you didn’t notice it the first time, this was where I was in that highlight:

If you noticed, the guy put the flowers down just as the camera cut away. That’s because this supervisor came running down the stairs yelling at them to put the flowers down:

And let me clear up that this is isn’t a bad usher; it was just some fans doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. The flowers had been planted the previous day, so no one wanted them to get ruined just a day after they had been planted….even if that’s what eventually happened.

What ended up happening to me is this was my view for the remaining two innings of the game while I prayed no one hit a home run into the standing room:

I wanted to make sure these guys never left my sight:

After the game, this was the scene behind the flower beds:

This was the first flower pot they pulled out to search. When they found nothing there, they pulled out a second pot:

Meanwhile, I was showing the security officers the footage of the home run, so we could try to pinpoint which flower pot held the baseball. Here they are trying to figure it out:

The guy on the right even suggested I should get the ball if they found it to negotiate with Florimon. They main problem in finding it, though, was the camera was at an angle. So even  though it was in the middle of the partitions in the metal fence, it was most likely one or two flower pots off that in real life. Unfortunately, the guy on the right would leave before the ball was found, so his suggestion was lost.

Meanwhile, we had become the main spectacle in the stadium:

The game ended at 9:56, and we had been there for a good half-an-hour.

Eventually, I was allowed to search in the flowers as well:

I felt like Charlie from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (or Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory if you want to go by the movie’s title); just hoping for that golden ticket.

Sadly, after almost an hour of searching, it was an employee, and not myself who found the ball- which will probably lead to a life of negative word association with the word “Yahtzee”:

So yeah, that was a slightly anti-climactic ending, but I’m glad I was at least around to see what happened with the ball. For the record, there were a total of four flower pots pulled out to be searched. And if you’re wondering; Yes, they did make a mess in the seats:

At this point, it was 10:54, or almost an hour after the game had ended, and I’m pretty sure I was the last non-employee left in the stadium:

Although, the FSN guys were still in their mini-studio out in the standing room, having just finished with their segment:

Oh, and if that wasn’t late enough, I got lost for an hour and a half on my way back to my dorm when I was supposed to be studying for a test that same morning. (Yes, it was past midnight by the time I eventually got back to my dorm room.)

STATS:

• 5 Balls at this game (2 Pictured because I gave 3 away)

Numbers 428-432 lifetime (you get logos this time because I don’t like to write on commemorative baseballs if I don’t have to):

• 210 Balls in 50 Games= 4.20 Balls Per Game
• 5 Balls x 33,720 Fans= 168, 600 Competition Factor
• 59 straight Games with at least 1 Ball
• 9 straight Games with at least 2-3 Balls
• 42 Balls in 11 Games at Target Field= 3.82 Balls Per Game
• 10 straight Games with at least 1-2 Balls at Target Field
• 9 straight Games with at least 3 Balls at Target Field
• Time Spent On Game 4:15- 12:35= 8 Hours 20 Minutes