Mariners Opening Day

We always had such a good time at St. Louis Cardinals opening day that we thought we should give the Mariners' a whirl to be good and definitely legitimate Seattleites.

I had an important choice to make in my closet. Be "that guy" spoiler with some random team jersey on or root root root for the home team?

Lydia had her pregnant Seattle fan uniform on.

Just like in St. Louis, Opening Day here in Seattle was an opportunity for local greats to make appearances to the adoring public. Ken Griffey Jr. luckily was one such appearance.

He and a pack of other Seattle legends threw the first pitches. I don't think I've seen any of these guys in real life before so this was very cool.

Gary Payton and Marshawn Lynch threw a throw as well. Ichiro made a separate appearance later on as well. I think that is officially every Seattle sports figure I've ever heard of.

We're excited about the Cardinals coming to town but it's also in the baby danger zone so we're not sure if we're going to try to attend or not.

I chose conformity and wore my Mariners uniform. Our friends Michael and Miriam were in attendance with us.

I can't get enough of the palm scanning, pick up my own beer and leave magic.

Aside from the winner and loser of today's game, we're all winners today.

Cardinals Opening Day 2016

We got those awesome KMOX 1120 AM "First Pitch Tickets" for Cardinals Opening Day. You have to wait in a couple of long lines to participate, but the tickets are only $11.20 for two. Then you get a random seat or sometimes standing room only. We drew standing room only for this game, probably because it's a pretty popular day at the ballpark.

We initially tried to obey our tickets and stand but it didn't work out. Not only would standing for hours suck but the other standers were blocking our view. No bueno.

Luckily we found a couple of empty seats.

I took a shot of the World Series pennants and texted it to a couple of my Cubs fan friends in case they hadn't seen one before.

St. Louis Cardinals Opening Day 2014

"Skip work for opening day" is item number one on St. Louis Magazine's "101 Things Every St. Louisan Must Do". I didn't need much convincing for this one.

Opening Day is quite the event in St. Louis, and people go downtown to celebrate even if they don't have tickets to the game. Unfortunately it was pretty rainy on this particular day, so a lot of the extra stuff (concerts and so forth) that happens outside the stadium was muted.

I was worried about sitting in the rain for an entire baseball game, so I wore this doofy disposable poncho. It pretty much did its job.

There was some interesting pageantry before the game. First all of the shiny trophy hardware was brought out. I was initially confused because the Cardinals have won the World Series 11 times but there were only 4 trophies carried out. This is because the Commissioner's Trophy wasn't even a thing until 1967. Before then the winning team got a handful of wooden nickels. Fun fact!

Next a bunch of the greats from Cardinals' Christmas past were trotted out, each riding their own car around the field. The only two I recognized were Ozzie Smith and Tony La Russa. Ozzie got his own little highlight reel played on the jumbotron. I felt bad for the other players and for myself. It would have been awesome if they had all gotten their own little video. Then at least I would get to know who the heck all of them are, and I would get to see some awesome old timey Cards footage.

The field was wet so the little worker ants ran around and spread out dry dirt. Because the field was wet the Budweiser clydesdales didn't do their little parade around the field. I thought that was lame.

Luckily for us we are poor and had really bad seats. So bad, in fact, that were were under the awning that sits on top of the stadium. That kept the rain off of our heads quite nicely. Our tickets were really expensive and awful, so I struck back against the man by smuggling in booze. Take that man!

Ultimately I thought it was fun but not worth the crazy price we paid to attend. I'm glad I did it once!