Chicago White Sox game & US Cellular Field

When evening came we went in search of the baseball stadium. We had bought a parking pass when we bought our tickets, and so we drove down there.

I had always heard that the area around that stadium was pretty frightening, and part of it was.  But there was also a nice residential area right near the stadium, too, with neat well kept little houses.

Our seats were very near the top of the stadium, and the views of downtown Chicago from the escalators going up were breath taking! We paused to take some pictures of the skyline.

The stadium was very tall. By the time we reached our seats (a few rows from the top) we felt we had been walking up a steep path in the Smoky Mountains. A guy from Ohio sitting near us kept making jokes about mountain climbing and needing oxygen!

The stadium was all high tech and glitz and gloss, and it lacked character and soul. It could have been any modern stadium in any city. There just wasn't anything particularly special or distinguished or fun in its design; it was very generic. You would think that with Chicago's rich architectural heritage they could have come up with something special. And it's not because the stadium is new - Comerica Park has plenty of character, and I have heard that the new Cleveland and Baltimore ball parks do, too.

The game itself was a fairly fun one to watch - Cleveland got far ahead early and the Sox made a valiant attempt to make a comeback in the bottom of the ninth inning ~ they made the score go from 10-2 to 10-8 before they lost. I can see why a team like that, which refuses to give up, won the championship last fall!

We must have been sitting in an unlucky section, as many of the Sox fans in our area of the stadium were loud mouthed and rude heavy drinkers. I am sure that this does not characterize the average Sox fan, but the ones sitting around us did somewhat mar our experience of the game. Luckily, there were a few Indians fans sitting next to us, with small children, and they were not drunkards, not rude, and not loud mouthed. So I am sure the game could have been much less enjoyable if not for the Ohioans beside us and the Iowans directly in front of us. And they were all shocked by the way the surrounding Sox fans were drinking, too. We're not talking a couple of beers to be sociable here - we are talking drinking to get drunk. At least when the Sox got far behind a lot of the worst ones went off to find bars and left the stadium.