So Tuesday I went to a baseball game. The game was the New York Yankees vs. the Toronto Blue Jays. Went with three of my friends via the train to New York from New Brunswick. One of my friends lives on the Rutgers campus, so we went to his house first and then walked over to the station.
I don’t ride the train too much, but when I do it usually is to New York City, so wasn’t too unfamiliar with the process. Bought a ticket via the ticket machine and hopped on. A roundtrip from New Brunswick to Penn Station costs a whopping $18 dollars. The train runs pretty regularly during the day, so didn’t have to wait for too long for it to come.
The NJ Transit trains are fairly basic. There are a lot of seats and room overhead to store luggage if you have any. There isn’t much leg room, but it’s not too bad. At least not for me since I am fairly short.
The view outside of the train isn’t exactly exciting. You can see tracks, other stations as you pass by, and the towns as you go through. Other than that, it’s pretty boring.
Took about an hour to reach Penn Station in New York. Penn Station is pretty large – you have trains coming from various states along with a lot of the subways. There are a lot of places to eat, a few places to browse, and your random musical or talent entertainers. We actually ate in Penn Station before heading off to the subway.
Using the subway costs money too. $8 dollars gets you 4 rides with a discount. We bought 2 subway cards with 4 rides to get us to the stadium and back. This trip already cost me about $60 dollars for the ticket, transportation, and food. And food was pretty cheap since we ate at Taco Bell (blehh).
I took a picture of the subway map. We had already taken a subway from Penn Station to a different station, where we would take a last subway all the way up to Yankee Stadium.
We arrived at the Stadium about 40 minutes before the game actually started, which is why the Stadium seems fairly empty. We were in the bleacher seats in the far back, which is why the tickets were fairly cheap (at least cheap for Yankee Stadium seats). You can see that there was still practice equipment lying around.
There are huge billboards and displays behind centerfield that constantly displayed advertisements or information about the game.
Not too long after arriving, there were workers moving all the practice equipment off the field and into storage somewhere I assume.
The workers even rake the dirt in preparation for the game.
…and then they water it. Maybe it’s for better traction or something when the players are running.
After waiting a little while longer, the game finally started! Joba Chamberlain was the opening pitcher for the Yankees and started out pretty strong. He did let 3 easy runs in during the 3rd inning though and his innings afterwards seemed kind of shaky. He did manage to pitch the remaining of his innings without letting anymore in though.
Forget when, but after a certain inning, a team of guys comes out and smooths the dirt out with some type of dragging equipment.
While this is going on, the stadium plays the YMCA song and the guys smoothing the dirt dance along. I thought that was pretty entertaining.
Was hard to get a good close up pic of a player batting. The first reason is because my camera’s zoom isn’t the greatest and second would be its capability to take fast pictures. This is probably one of the only ones that came out decently. Too bad it’s a picture of Derek Jeter getting a strike.
The Toronto Blue Jays were actually winning the majority of the game, 4-3. In the bottom of the 8th though, a homerun from Hideki Matsui began some momentum where the Yankees would go on to score 4 runs, making it 4-7. This means Mariano Rivera gets to close up the game.
Rivera actually let the Blue Jays score a single home run, but other than that, he cleaned them up pretty well. While Rivera was pitching, my group of friends and I began hustling towards the exit to avoid the rush. If you get caught up in the huge amount of people leaving the stadium, you can be stuck there for a long time just trying to get out. We luckily got out of there and on the subway back to Penn Station within 15 minutes.
Got back to Penn Station in time for an 11 o’clock train ride home. Train is slightly different than the one before as you can see.
The baseball game was overall a very fun experience. Outings like this can get pretty expensive though; ended up spending about $80 dollars on the day, and that’s spending pretty conservatively. The fact that it was a good game helped, but just going out, being with friends, and having a good time is worth it though. I feel that everyone should do something like this every once in a while.
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