5.18.2006

Dingeros!

Saturday, May 6

We brought in the weekend with our first complimentary continental breakfast on the hotel roof. You get what you pay for.

After lounging and reading, we took off for Balboa Park, San Diego's cross between Central Park and the Smithsonian, where all the city's museums are housed on a giant greenspace. On the way, we dined on the patio at Sixth Avenue Bistro, where the service was infrequent and the radio hummed Dan Fogelberg, ABBA, and more of the anonymous 1978 wussrock that seemed to follow us everywhere we went in San Diego. When the weather's this good, who needs good music.

The walk to Balboa Park was longer than we thought, so we made a stop at San Diego High School's baseball diamond, where we watched a half-inning of a men's league game. The level of play was unpectacular, but there's something exciting about guys playing baseball on a sunny day day in early May without getting paid.

When we got to the park, we headed straight for the Activity Center for a map and some museum information. Instead, we found the Holy Grail of San Diego attractions- a ping-pong tournament. For about a half hour, we watched young and old, male and female, black, white, and (mostly) Asian athletes of all shapes and sizes slap little white balls at inspiring speeds and alluring angles. I got the feeling that the players were practicing for an actual tournament on Sunday, since we saw a ten-or-eleven-year-old kid playing a grown man, several women playing men, and a guy in a wheelchair playing a bipod, but this might have just been the nature of the truly open tournament. Either way, I couldn't ask for a better pre-culture diversion.

Jill had a better idea about how to get around the park than I did, and found the tram near the entrance. We squeezed on and sat through three green lights just to go straight, as San Diego's pedestrains exercised their right of way with cool disregard for those of us cooped up in automobiles. Fifteen minutes (and a quarter mile) later, we got off at the center of the park, where we checked out the Botanical House, the Art Museum gift shop (the free part), and some of the impressive courtyards that bind the museums with a sense of Southern California's history, culture, and landscape.

We finally settled in at the Spreckles Organ Pavilion, where a diminuitive, jeans-clad San Diegan plyed a giant bronze organ, providing a sometimes eerie, sometimes circusesque soundtrack to a sunny afternoon weddingfest. Twenty-year-old Mexican kids must have been getting married all over the park, because the grounds were loaded with wedding photographers and tiny brides, grooms, groomsmen and flower girls posing for pictures at the white-pillared pavilion. I was most impressed by a groom in a white tux with a pink vest and his ten little groomsmen (his brothers?) pimping their pink vests all over the park.

We caught a much more efficient tram back to the entrance and walked downtown, where we had a beer and listened to a west-coast troubador sing Jimmy Buffet and Little Mermaid songs at an outdoor fish joint whose patrons flossed their Cubs and Padres gear (no two Padres hats are the same) while wisely munching on affordable haddock and clams, saving the $14 they'd pay for a Miller Lite and a slice of cheese at Petco Park, our destination down the street.

The Mrs. had her Red Sox shirt on, and I was posing aas the great Jonathan Papelbon (#58) for the evening, so I decided I needed a Padres hat to celebrate my love of San Diego and my respect for Dave Roberts, Mark Bellhorn, and Mike Piazza (my favorite player in the same way that the Jews were my favorite Europeans in the late '30s and early '40s). We hit the Padres store and Jill bought me the hat she thought looked best on me.

We were inside the park early enough to watch the Cubs take batting practice, peruse the stadium's attractions (a tiny [and crowded] baseball field for kids, a mini Hall of Fame exhibit, and cages where you can pitch to a major league hitter or hit off a major league pitcher, among many others). Natives of Fenway Middle School & Penitentiary, we were shocked to hear ushers tell us "you can sit or stand wherever you want until 6:30" and "I recommend you go to your seats this way, so you can take pictures at field level on your way". One usher even answered Jill's questions about the Padres' retired uniform numbers with brief anecdotes about Steve Garvey, Tony Gwynn, Dave Winfield, and Randy Jones. We snapped a few shots of Pat's favorite future Hall of Famer, Juan Pierre, and Mark Bellhorn, who will someday be the co-namesake of Pesky and Bellhorn's pole, and found our seats with plenty of time to spare.

Perhaps the trip's greatest disappointment was the announcement that Eric Young would lead off and play left field for the Padres, meaning Dave Roberts had the night off. I took the opportunity to pretend I'd drunk more $7.50 beers than I actually had and yelled "we want Roberts," "Roberts would have caught that," and other quasi-appropriate epithets at various times throughout the game, but it didn't do much to ease the sorrow of missing a chance to give a standing ovation to one of Boston's most prolific suicide-preventers.

Not much less disappointing was local hero Jake Peavy's introduction music (that's right, pitchers hit out here... and everyone bunts!), the Dukes of Hazzard theme song, a delightfully racist statement on a night dedicated to several Negro League greats in attendance (including Buck O'Neil and Don Newcombe). We decided to root against Peavy and revel in Cubs rookie Sean Marshall's no-hitter through 5 1/3, but were not too crushed when Rob Bowen's 10th inning homer won the game for San Diego, 2-1.

We stopped at a Mexican restaurant around the corner from our hotel for over-filling appetizers, and I put back a potent blue margarita, refusing to go to bed sober for the first time in San Diego.

Jill will tell you about Sunday.

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