Citizens Bank Park

Ok, this is a baseball roadtrip blog after all. After the jump, you'll find photographic evidence that we attended today's Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park.

First of all, the Philadelphia sports complex (the set of four stadiums where the Phillies, Eagles, 76ers, and Flyers play) is located in the middle of nowhere, far from downtown. Here's the gate we entered:


And here's the view of downtown from that same spot:


Here's what the ball park looks like on the inside:










Our seats were in the 2nd row in left field (just above the left side of the Bud Light banner you can see on the left field wall in the middle of the previous photo). The view from those seats looked like this:


Fans of last year's blog will note the same fuzzy spot in all of my photos. Guess I forgot to clean the lens. But I digress... The seats were great. I liked the perspective, although I'm really looking forward to the infield seats we'll have at Camden and Fenway. We baked for a while at the beginning until the sun dipped down behind the stadium. Occasionally, cool breezes blew in from the east.

Having just eaten a cheese steak, I didn't have much to eat at the park--just an overly chewy pretzel. Ed went for another cheese steak (deluxified with mushrooms, peppers, and pizza sauce) and said it was pretty good. Everything else we saw (brats, fries, bbq) looked and smelled good. Our search for an appropriate souvenir cup came up woefully short, however.

As for the game, we were excited to find out that Cole Hamels (the 'jewel of almost any franchise' that Ed mentioned) was pitching for the Phils. As it turned out, he didn't have the best day, losing a three-run lead in the Braves' 9-run 4th inning. The next inning, the Phillies scored 7. They held on to win 10-9.

We thought the park was ok. Just ok. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing special about it, either. Reminiscent of U.S. Cellular in Chicago. We'll probably elaborate on this after we visit some more parks.

Tomorrow we head to Baltimore and have another afternoon game that we're both looking forward to. Oh, and the room service arrived an hour late and was free. The tradeoff sounded fine to us.