Philip Humber made history by throwing the 21st Perfect Game on the 21st of April. The 29-year-old hurler from the Chicago White Sox blanked the Seattle Mariners 4-0 on Saturday, seven years after undergoing Tommy John surgery.
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Humber’s teammates poured on to the field to celebrate the first Perfect Game of 2012, as you’ll see by clicking on the video link below:
It’s only the second Perfect Game ever pitched in April and the first since Phillies Ace Roy Halladay shut down the Florida Marlins on May 29, 2010 (see below for list of all 21 Perfect Games):
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Speaking of Perfect – I have found the perfect road map for baseball fans everywhere. It’s called BallparkEGuides – a wonderful Web site compiled by Baltimore Orioles superfan Kurt Smith who can tell you where to sit, where to eat and what’s the best (and cheapest way) to get to the ballpark.
Kurt provides the inside scoop on 14 ballparks in the East and Midwest – nothing west of the Mississippi River, but I’m hoping he’ll be making a West Coast road trip in the near future, so he can experience the most beautiful stadium in all of baseball, AT&T Park in San Francisco:
AT&T Park
and historic Dodger Stadium now celebrating it’s 50th birthday in Los Angeles:
Dodger Stadium
But in the meantime, until Kurt goes west to add these venues to his site, I can offer this inteview I just completed with the founder of BallparkEGuides:
BBU: What are your top 5 Favorite ballparks and why?
Kurt Smith: Well I get asked what my favorites are a lot, and I know that my top four are Camden Yards, PNC Park, Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, and it’s tough to assign an order to those four, they’re all great. If you asked me to pick a fifth, I’m torn…I love Comerica Park in Detroit, Rangers Ballpark in Arlington and I have a fondness for Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City too. Make me pick one? OK, I’ll go with Comerica for #5.
I haven’t yet been to AT&T Park, Coors Field, Target Field, or Safeco Field, and people rave about all of them, so I may have to revise this list someday.
Fenway and Wrigley are great just because they’ve been there so long, but they also have an ambience that has been built up for a century. It’s just pure baseball in both places, and that’s the kind of thing that you can’t just plant a new ballpark and create. Camden Yards and PNC Park both have that kind of atmosphere too, even though they’re newer. Here’s why I prefer Camden and PNC above all the other new parks: in the upper level of them, you’re still close to the field because of the way the concourses are laid out. In almost all of the other new parks, if you go to the upper level you can almost wave to pilots it’s so high, because they raised the stands so that people could see the game from the concourse. I don’t care about seeing the game from the concourse…I’m not sitting there!
BBU: What are your top 5 favorite ballpark foods?
Kurt Smith: Well number one is easily the Ben’s Chili Half Smoke at Nationals Park in D.C.—it’s a spicy sausage with Ben’s outstanding chili and cheese on it. Really spicy, and you need a spoon to eat some of the chili off of the thing. (Your mouth is watering now, isn’t it?) I hated finishing it…or passing on it when I gave up sausage for Lent once. That was rough!
Next four, in no particular order: the Lobel’s sandwich at Yankee Stadium, which is prime beef soaked in au jus and served on an onion roll with horseradish sauce; the Chicago Bison Dog at Wrigley, with grilled onions and all of the Chicago dog fixins’; the Schmitter at Citizens Bank Park in Philly, a sort of cheesesteak with salami, tomato slices and secret sauce; and the Hard Times chili nachos, also at Nationals Park, with spicy chili, cheese, jalapenos and Old Bay seasoning if you want it.
I still think Nationals Park is the best when it comes to food choices, although I’m somewhat annoyed that they added all of those Citi Field items like the Shake Shack. The Shackburger is good, but that’s for Citi Field. Let D.C. institutions like Five Guys be represented in Washington. I feel strongly about that.
BBU: What is your best experience at a ballpark?
Kurt Smith: Gosh, there are so many…
My first trip to Cleveland to see what was then Jacobs Field in 1994 ranks very high—I will share the story on my website sometime. The weather was perfect even though it was raining everywhere else in America that day, I enjoyed a beautiful ride across Pennsylvania, and the ballpark of course was great.
Or I could say the day I managed to somehow get into Yankee Stadium the day that Derek Jeter homered for his 3,000th hit…a story that I did share on my website.
Or my first Phillies game as a ten-year-old, with the Phillies and Pirates battling to a 4-4 tie till the 14th. The Bucs scored two in the top of the 14th inning and the Phillies scored three in the bottom…I replayed that one in my backyard for weeks! There’s another story I should tell…
Or a doubleheader at Memorial Stadium in 1979, where my beloved Orioles came from behind to win both games, the first on a dramatic walk-off from Eddie Murray in front of a delirious crowd of 45,000. Or Murray’s 500th home run at Camden Yards, a year to the day after Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s record. Or a game at Miller Park last year that featured an inside-the-park home run and a game-winning suicide squeeze (and an acknowledgement from Uke!). Or the game I saw at Montreal in the Expos’ last season of 2004—the attendance was sad but I had a great time!
And any first trip to see a game at a ballpark for the first time counts; that is always magical and those games always stand out among the most memorable.
BBU: What is your worst experience at a ballpark?
Kurt Smith: The first one that comes to mind was a night my sister and I drove down to Baltimore to see our O’s play against the Brewers with my Dad, who lived there at the time. We had seats right next to the bullpen, and I remember getting irritated with women flirting with Brewers pitchers. No loyalty. And everything about that game just rotted. The Brewers scored two runs before the Orioles even got an out, it was 4-0 at the end of the first inning, and the final was 5-0. Every inning, it seemed, the Orioles would get a weak mini-rally going with two outs and then fail to score. Just a bummer of a game all around if you were an Orioles fan. I got a flat tire on the way home, too.
I remember being disappointed in the old Busch Stadium in many ways; seeing the Orioles get crushed by the Red Sox in my first trip to Fenway; another Red Sox-engineered drubbing at Camden Yards that was followed by a traffic ticket on the way home (I don’t know why bad O’s losses at the Yard end up including transportation problems), or a Yankees-Mets game at Shea that was mostly on the unpleasant side in the cheaper seats, as you can imagine.
All these games included though, I can’t think of any time that I wished I hadn’t gone to the ballpark. The odds are pretty good that I’ll be happy afterward!
BBU: What is the best kept secret about any ballpark you have visited?
Kurt Smith: Well if I share secrets there won’t be any reason to buy a Ballpark E-Guide, will there? Just kidding.
Hmmm. Well let me think about this. I know a few well-kept secrets about each ballpark. The free parking on South Lawrence Street in Philly used to be a good one, but people have been getting ticketed for that, so I have to nix that. Tell you what, here’s three I really like:
Citi Field: If you park in the Southfield Commuter lot near the Mets-Willets Point train station before noon on night game days, the price for the whole day is what the commuters pay, around $4. Much better than the $20 that the Mets charge in their lots. You can talk a walk around Flushing Meadows Park or take the 7 train into Manhattan, whatever, it’s New York City, finding something to do for a few hours is never a problem.
Yankee Stadium: Like with most ballparks you can bring in your own food; get a sandwich or a knish before the game at the Court Deli on 161st street, about a block from the Stadium. Good-sized sandwiches, quickly made and very cheap. Long lines but they move fast. Will save you much cash.
Progressive Field: I don’t know if they’re doing it again in 2012, but last year the Indians gave away free tickets to the Tribe Social Deck, to people who won an invitation by filling out a form on the website. The idea was to get young folks to tweet about the great time they were having. Food isn’t included, but you’d be in a climate-controlled suite, and protection from the elements in Cleveland is no small thing!
That’s just three good ones, I’m keeping some of the better ones!
To contact Kurt directly, check out his Web site at www.ballparkeguides.com
