San Francisco Giants @ Baltimore Orioles (game 1)

Tuesday was my first complete day in Baltimore, and I spent most of it in my room trying to sleep.  The workmen using a pneumatic drill on the street below all morning did not help.  I'm on the 5th floor.

I don't think I want to take another overnight flight like that again, because I've felt sick through exhausation all day.  Although it was a first class seat, it is just a seat.

If I was to do a west-east overnight flight again, I'd fly San Francisco (or Los Angeles) to New York, because United treats those flights like the transatlantic flights and uses those planes with Polaris seating.

That would have been a much better experience with proper individual flat bed seats - and then I could still have taken the train to Baltimore, just heading the opposite direction.

Returning to the same stadium in consecutive years all feels very familiar.

I was ill last year, and I just hadn't noticed that the sponsor on the top of the scoreboard was no longer the Baltimore Sun newspaper, who had been the sponsor for over 30 years until last year.

It is reassuring to find that everything else is just the same as it ever was.

Of course, with the Giants being the visitors here, the game presentation is completely different: it's the Orioles players getting bigged up on the scoreboard as they come to bat, with the Giants players just a perfunctory introduction.

Just as I was still walking around the concourse to my seat, Mike Yastrzemski hit a home run to lead off the game - a lead for San Francisco!  In fact, it was more reminiscent of last Wednesday's clattering of the Brewers as San Francisco racked up a 10-0 win, much to the annoyance of the majority of the crowd!

I had excellent seats at an excellent price.  Even though the website showed that there were very few available, there were plenty of empty seats.  This is very frustrating, because it's season ticket holders are not reselling tickets for games they are not attending.  Some brief research shows that teams may be limiting ST holders in the number of games they are permitted to resell, which may explain it.

At least if they had marked them as not going to be used, I'd have been able to choose where to sit so I didn't have to sit directly next to anybody.

I was sitting next to Beatrice, an Orioles fan.  She showed me her MLB passport - which is a collectible pass book that you buy and then get stamped at each stadium you visit.  I'm going to look into getting one of these, although it's too late for this year.  They do say they can backdate stamp things - I'm not sure how many years they'll go back, though!