Setting the Bar High

Since we are working out of town, my colleague, Daniel, wanted to go to a Royals game yesterday evening. Zack Greinke was pitching, so I figured I should tag along. Daniel is a big sports fan, so I imagine we will be hitting some more games before our project is done at the end of September. Anyway, we headed out to Kauffman Stadium with no tickets, planning on buying some at the ticket counter. A hundred feet or so before we reached the ticket counter, an older gentlemen came up to us and asked us if we wanted to buy his tickets. He wanted $10 for each of them. We decided that this was a good deal, considering that the seats were 14 rows behind the visitor's dugout in the lower section. Those tickets would cost at least $40 normally, if not more. I guess that man really wanted to sell those tickets. So, yeah, great seats. Also, it was free T-shirt Tuesday, so now I have a KC Royals T-shirt, which is one more than I have of STL Cardinals T-shirts.

It turns out that Kauffman Stadium is a really nice ballpark. It isn't fancy, but it has a good setup, and it didn't look like there were hardly any bad seats in the place. I would definitely go see more ballgames there. I also really like their new screen, which is built in the shape of the Royals "crown on top of home plate" logo, and it was very different seeing a screen that was taller than it was wide, but I really liked it.

The big thing, though, was getting to watch Zack Greinke, the ace of the Royals staff, not only beat his own personal strikeout record of 11 in an game, but set the Royals all-time franchise record for striekouts in a game with 15. Fifteen. The guys behind us working the K count ran out of pre-made K sheets, and had to resort to ripping pages out of a program and writing "K" on them with a sharpie so they could hang them up. So, in my first Royals game ever, I got to see history made. And we got T-shirts. And we got awesome seats for $10 each. As Dan said as we left the stadium yesterday, "I know we're going to some more games next month, so hopefully we haven't set the bar too high already." Yeah, I'm not sure how we're gonna top this one.