Saw Sox Spank Braves

I am a Taurus, grounded, which means I don't like doing things on the spur of the moment. So when my brother Matt called on Saturday and said, "Let's meet in Atlanta to watch the Red Sox play the Braves," all I could think of were the reasons not to. But, spurred on by my family and by my desire to hang out with Matt, I said I'd do it. So I spent 6 hours driving to Atlanta Tuesday, and another six back on Wednesday, to watch 3 hours or so of baseball. The result–totally worth it.

View from our seats

My brother Tom, despite living in Vegas now, was able to score us some great seats behind home plate–but far enough back that when the game was briefly delayed by rain we didn't have to move. Matt and I were joined by my cousin's husband Dave and my Vervago colleague Lee. They were a great group to pass an evening with. The crowd was almost half Sox fans, and we went home happy with a 4-0 win. Matt and I (and dozens of other Sox fans) stayed at a Holiday Inn walking distance from the park.

Turner Field is a gorgeous park, and I enjoyed my evening there. But visits to other parks almost always reveal what is so special about Fenway. On our way into Turner the ticket-taker says, "Welcome to a real park," to which I replied that we (the Sox) invented real parks. I mean, does he think that his retro-new park, which is starting to look like the other parks of its generation, is somehow more original than Fenway, one of the parks (along with Wrigley) all these retro-new parks are trying to emulate?

Lee Bob Matt Dave

Then there is the noise. There is no trust that the fans sitting in the stands are going to be entertained by the actual competitive event they supposedly bought a ticket for. So instead we get bombarded with video board messages and audio–music, that obnoxious mechanical hand-clapping, etc–every moment there's not a pitch being thrown. I can tolerate this most of the time–even my beloved Carolina Hurricanes do this, and hockey has much more going on to capture one's attention than baseball does–but at Turner Field it was really loud, so that we could really only talk to one another when the game was going on!

But the last straw for me was Coco Crisp's diving shoestring catch of a line drive–which the Braves' video crew found unworthy of a repeat showing. Red Sox fans are great baseball fans, and not only would, say, Andruw Jones making the same catch get replays at Fenway, the locals would also applaud the great play. This idea that the hometown fans can only appreciate good things by their nine, while any evidence of competence by the visitors may make them reconsider another visit to the ballyard, is ridiculous. I understand that today's fans, with short attention spans, needs lots of stimulation to stay interested, but please trust that the beauty of the game itself can generate some of that stimulation.

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