San Francisco Giants @ St Louis Cardinals (game 1)

This evening I went to the first game of a three game series between the Giants and the Cardinals.

I bought tonight's ticket on StubHub instead of via MLB.com - it's an official resale ticket, so it appears in the MLB Ballpark app like any other ticket does - once I'd added my work email address to my MLB account, anyway.  The ticket was about half the price, for a better seat, so I'll be trying that more often.

As the visiting team, San Francisco batted first and the second batter of the game, our new star mid-season acquisition, Rafael Devers, hit a home run.  Not to be out done, Willy Adames followed with another home run to put the Giants up 2-0 before St Louis had even had a bat.  The Giants added another 4 in another inning, and even though St Louis managed a couple of runs, San Francisco added two more to win the game 8-2.

I came the closest I have ever come to catching a foul ball in tonight's game.If I had been sitting in my assigned seat, I would have had to catch it as it was travelling extremely quickly off Nolan Gorman's bat directly at my seat.  As it was, with so many empty seats, we'd all spread out a bit so we didn't sit right next to each other.

It's difficult to judge how fast it's actually coming because you can't really see it moving - it just gets bigger as it gets closer!  The people in the row behind didn't catch it either but it fell to the ground and the man next to be, also a Giants fan, got it and presented it to a young boy in the row behind, as is the tradition.

In between innings,  all sorts of entertainment carries on.  In one break, we had the St Louis mascot, Fredbird, come up into our section for a promo, along with his two girl minders and camera crew.  

There were 22000 people in attendance tonight, which was a few thousand more than for the Athletics series, but there were still lots of empty seats.  Hopefully that continues for the rest of the series and we can continue to space out.