Month: September 2014

At Long Last, A Baseball Game

Last night I went to a baseball game in person for the first time in several years. Honestly my baseball fandom has flagged in recent years, but I followed it closely for almost 20 years so I don’t feel too badly about it.

Ticket

I’d actually been invited as part of a group to a luxury box at AT&T Park. I’d been to a Giants luxury box once before, and it’s very nice, but when I got there it wasn’t what I expected: Rather than one of the paneled boxes in the second deck, the “Corona Beach Club” appears to be where the news photographers used to set, so it’s in front of the first row along the first base line, about 3 feet below field level. The view from the box looked like this:

(click for larger image)
(click for larger image)

The folks hosting the box sprung for a fair amount of catered food, for instance this:

The food spread

It was all quite yummy. Well, the sausages were standard ballpark sausages with moist buns, so that wasn’t great, but I mostly stuck to the soft tacos.

It was a pretty exciting game. Admittedly, with only 4 games left the Giants weren’t playing for much, as all that was left to decide was whether they’d be hosting their wild card game or not, and they’d clinched their wild card spot earlier that day when the Brewers lost. Still, the Giants jumped out to a 6-0 lead, then watched it collapse in the 7th inning, backed by a grand slam, and then they retook the lead in the bottom of the 7th, helped in part by a successful suicide squeeze (I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person before), and eventually won the game 9-8. It took three and a half hours – I think a third of it making up that seventh inning.

Looking towards home plate

The team was also celebrating the 60th anniversary of “The Catch” by Willie Mays (which actually happened on September 29, but there are no games scheduled for that day this year), and Mays (who is 83 years old) came out in a very spiffy car, and was driven around the field occasionally throwing baseballs into the crowd. I snapped a couple of good pictures of him, the second one being just as he tossed a ball into our box (no, I didn’t catch it):

Willie Mays in his car

Willie Mays tossing a baseball

Occasionally Major League Baseball is a little too wrapped up in celebrating itself, but it’s hard not to appreciate when a team does something like this for one of its greats.

The weather was great, the game was fun, I got some good pictures, and even enjoyed riding CalTrain to and from the park (and the walk home from the station at a little after midnight was kind of pleasant, too). I’m gonna have to go see another game or two next year.

Celebration of winning a playoff berth

I Love Rainy Days

Rainy Day

I woke up this morning to a rain shower. We’d been expecting it – our second of the season, me having been caught in the middle of the first one last Thursday while biking to work. This one was heavier and lasted several hours before drying up around mid-morning.

I’ve always loved rainy days. I have a memory from probably around 10 years old of having to walk the dog (our Welsh corgi, Punkin) during a hurricane. I’m sure I remember it more fondly than I felt about it at the time, though hurricanes are usually pretty tame by the time they get to Massachusetts.

In Wisconsin we got some great rain storms. I remember driving through a lightning storm on the highway and marveling at the hundreds of lightning bolts coming down in the sky. Also watching a huge storm pass about ten miles north of Madison while watching from my apartment balcony. But also walking through plenty of showers – and a few storms, the rain not stopping me from heading downtown to the coffee shop on any given Friday night. I’d certainly get wet sometimes, since I stopped wearing raincoats in college and stuck with just a jacket and an umbrella. But I didn’t mind.

In California we sometimes joke that we don’t have weather, we have climate. I miss all the weather I’d get in other parts of the country – even the snow, but mostly the rain. Rain here is mostly restricted to November-through-April, and is usually concentrated around Feburary and March. The rest of the year it’s the “eternal summer”, and rain showers are rare and light. But even the winter showers are really just that – showers. We don’t get big storms, we rarely get thunder and lightning, and usually not a lot of wind. Not by the standards of other parts of the country.

But I appreciate the rain whenever it comes (and not just because we’re in a drought). I like listening to it come down on the roof, smelling the scents released by the rocks when they get damp, and even going out and clearing clogged drains with a stick.

There’s nothing else like it.

Khans of Tarkir Prerelease

This morning I drove down to Illusive Comics for the prerelease of the new Khans of Tarkir Magic set. I could hardly top my showing at last spring’s Journey Into Nyx prerelease, but I was hoping to have fun anyway.

I chose Mardu – the Black/White/Red clan with the Raid mechanic – because I basically like to attack early and often, with removal to back up my charge. I opened my packs and my pool looked like this:

(click for larger image)
(click for larger image)

I was sorely temped by the three Abzan cards (White-Black-Green) to find a way to splash Green, but I decided to stick to my guns and go with Mardu. I did consider whether I could swap out Red for Green, but my Green cards were just pretty weak that it seemed like a bad idea. Anyway, I ended up a bit pressed for creatures, wishing I had one more bomb or one more solid 3-drop. I ended up following Marshall Sutcliffe’s advice and playing 18 lands (and zero Banners, because I think the Banner suck, much like the Cluestones from Return to Ravnica sucked).

So, here’s what I ended up with:

My Khans of Tarkir prerelease deck

Besides the three nonbasic lands, I ran 5 each Plains, Swamps and Mountains. I had ten Warriors with some useful cards to enable them.

The most stressful thing about playing these tournaments for me is my opening draws, worrying about getting color screwed or mana short or flooded. Working on choosing when to mulligan has been one of the main things I’ve been working on. And with Khans being a 3-color block, that just exacerbated my worry. I’d hoped to play a 2-color deck with a splash, but that just wasn’t in the (literal) cards. So I had to hope I’d make some decent draws.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

My good deed for the day came after the first match, where I ran over my opponent in two games. I realized afterwards that it was his first prerelease and he didn’t realize that he should play a 40-card deck, and instead put together a 65-card, 4-color monstrosity. So I helped him cut his deck down to a 3-color 40-card deck. Maybe not the best it could be, but perhaps competitive. I saw him briefly at the end of the day and he said his deck had done well after that.

Anyway, so 1-0 to me, but I felt like I hadn’t really earned it.

I lost my next three matches, and each one was a worse beating than the last. I stumbled on colors a couple of times, and I got drastically mana flooded over and over. My fourth match, against another player with a 1-2 record, saw me get badly run over in two games while drawing land after land. 18 land is only 1 more than the usual 17 for a normal block, but it was hard not for my brain to think that it was responsible for my terrible draws. But I stuck it out.

My one triumphant moment was when an opponent played Sarkhan, The Dragonspeaker, hit me for 4, and then next turn I attacked with my 3/3 into his 0/5 wall, and then killed Sarkhan with Arrow Storm. Go me! I ended up losing the game anyway.

In the final match, I gave in and swapped out a couple of lands for another nonbasic and a Banner. I somehow managed to beat him in two games running, including the second game where we both ended up ridiculously mana-flooded. So my final record was 2-3.

I was pretty disappointed in Ponyback Brigade, because the core body is so weak, and the Goblin tokens are annoying because they’re not Warriors and so not affected by all the nifty Warrior cards in the set. And the Ankle Shanker looks nifty, but it also sports a weak body and was almost immediately killed whenever I played it.

I think there are a few lessons for me to take away here:

  1. Sometimes you just have a run of terrible luck.
  2. The most important thing in the prerelease is to have fun. I picked Mardu because I thought it would give me the best chance to win, but I think I would have had more fun if I’d picked Abzan.

Despite all this, I’m looking forward to drafting the set when it’s out. Maybe I’ll see if I can head down to Illusive to draft in person a couple of times over the next few months, in addition to playing online. Though it’s too bad that their only regular draft event is Friday night – a Saturday or Sunday afternoon would probably be more convenient for me.