Athletics at St Louis Cardinals (game 1)

 

The Athletics, formerly the Oakland Athletics, are in town to place the St Louis Cardinals.  The A's are in the process of moving from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2027, when their new stadium is due to be ready, but in the mean time, they were unable and/or unwilling to sign a deal to continue at the Oakland Coliseum until then, so they are now sharing a AAA stadium in Sacramento instead.

I had wondered about trying to get there, but it was expensive to stay.  Maybe I'll try next year, as I could get there by train to or from San Francisco.

The A's are bottom of their disivion and St Louis are in 4th place of 5 in their division, so neither team is really involved in the playoff races.

Now that we've moved into September, rosters have expanded to give a chance for up and coming new players to play in the big leagues for a few weeks.  I barely recognise the names of any of the players on either team.  There's a few Cardinals whose names I knew, but hardly any of the team who visited London in 2023 were playing.  As for the Athletics, not a clue about any of them.

On the scoreboard, they show the players' stats when they come up to bat, and an awful lot of the players on both teams seemed to have fewer than 50 plate appearances.  An everyday player will have around 500 PAs by this stage of the season, so clearly a lot of these players are new arrivals in the majors ad the teams are trying to work out who they're going to want to keep around for the next few years.

I was shocked that there were so few people at this game.  That must be a consequence of the poor position in the standings and the opponent also being poor.  The attendance was announced as just 17000.  It was quite quiet for a lot of the game as a result.

However, this was the fastest full MLB game I've ever attended.  It was all done and dusted in just 1 hour and 55 minutes!  Since the game started at 6.45pm, that meant I was back in my hotel room before 9pm, so I had an hour to get ready to draft my Roku NFL Fantasy team at 10pm.