This weekend marked my yearly pilgrimage to a Major League Ballpark where the Red Sox happen to be playing. We can really only afford to do this once a year, so I tend to think it's awesome no matter what. This year happened to work out well as the Red Sox were playing in Cincinnati

It's about a four hour drive from where we live to Cincinnati (I know this because my wife is from Cincinnati and have had to make this identical journey hundreds of times by now)(Seriously; I have specific rest stops and gas stations I go to every time. I don't know what I'd do if I was running out of gas [my expectation would be "Very uncomfortable]).

Cincinnati has a beautiful ballpark with one of the more serendipitous corporate sponsors (Great American Insurance) to ever name a stadium (Great American Ballpark). First thing we did when we got to the park was find our seats, then promptly stand up to go and find some Skyline Chili (If you don't know what Skyline Chili is, god help you. Suffice to say, it's delicious). Along with Skyline Chili there was the difficult decision as to whether the overpriced, most likely watered-down beer was in our future. It was, and wasn't nearly as watered-down as I thought it would be. 2 beers, 13 bucks, slight buzz.

One thing I have to say or I would be unable to sleep later on is that this year the Reds management introduced a new tiered pricing system for games there are the regular* games which are one price, then they have the premier* games which are probably say double the original cost, and now they have we'll say diamond* games which cost 3 times as much as the regular* tickets and there are only 4 days in the entire season that they utilized this price point; opening day, and the 3 games vs. the Red Sox. So I had to pay 3 times what nearly anyone else has to pay to see a game in Cincinnati against the Reds because it's the Red Sox. Capitalism run amock I say! (*I couldn't remember the actual names of the ticket tiers, so I made some up that will promptly be stolen by the Tampa Bay Rays once they figure out how to sell their tickets).

Meanwhile the tickets themselves: they weren't great, but they did just fine (Second tier, left field, 3rd row 23 bucks a piece). Evidently no one in Cincinnati wanted to go to this game (the sheer volume of tickets for sale on Ebay and/or Stubhub were my clues). Considering this, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the largely equal Red Sox fan attendance. Truth be told, at one point around the 5th or 6th inning a chant of "Let's go Red Sox" was started. Which the Reds fans took a bit of offense at. They tried to drown it out, but couldn't, They could not chant louder than the visiting teams fans in their own stadium. I guess that's what you get for a decade of mediocrity.

Right away you knew this game wasn't going to go well for the Redlegs as there was a lead-off single from Jacoby Ellsbury, followed by a quick stealing of 2nd, followed by a quick stealing of third. Deflating at best. To top it all off the next hitter who was down to his last strike lifted one into center and delivered a sacrifice to start the game off 1-0. It only got more and more ugly after that until at the end of the day it was 9-0, and Mike Timlin is finishing the game off. By the end of the 7th inning about 1/3 of the audience had left, and by the time the 9th inning came it was probably down to about 1/3 of the audience left. But I paid for those tickets I will stick around until the bitter (or sweet) end.

Josh Beckett pitched a good game (not great, but good). The Red Sox had some great hitting going on from some unlikely sources. Most unlikely was Coco Crisp, who I'm glad to say has been hitting pretty well lately. and it was a good game to watch (if you're a Red Sox fan).