We have been regularly doing a ballpark trip every year, and this year followed the Nats out to San Francisco and San Diego.  Below are my notes from AT&T Park - Petco Park notes will be posted in a few days.

AT&T Park looks a lot like OPACY has been transplanted to the Oakland Bay, and this park certainly has the prettiest natural setting of any baseball park that we have seen.  It was particularly nice to get to the right field walkways and seats, as these have a terrific view of the Oakland Bay Bridge, which seems to be increasingly incorporated into the Giants’ logos and the like (unlike the recent All-Star game, which had the outline of the Golden Gate Bridge in the logo).  The main concourses have lots of pictures of the ballplayers from various eras, grouped by position, and include a big picture of Livan Hernandez, now of the Nats.  There are also framed uniform shirts from different eras.  Up in the mezzanine club (like the club in Baltimore) there is a year by year history of the club with memorabilia and pictures, and a particularly big display in the middle for the recent World Series. Both the home and visitors’ bullpen are on the field, in the foul area of left and right fields respectively – surprising that bullpens were not incorporated into a modern stadium design.

We sat in three locations in the park, section 315, top of the park, behind home plate; section 136, the far left field bleachers, and section 220, the club level behind home plate.  While I have concluded that the bleachers have too much testosterone for me, in all places the fans were friendly.  We met one young woman who was pleased to discover that we had particularly come to see the ballpark – she and her husband were headed off to Florida in a couple of days to see the parks there, and she was close to having visited all thirty parks.  Two friendly drunk young men were very chatty, and early in the game were enormously ticked off at a guy who was smoking a cigarette, called the usher, etc.  Other more sober patrons in all sections described having lived in Washington or having visited Nats Park. 

While I have heard enough ‘Blue you suck, xxx player you suck, Nats you suck’ from all sections to last a lifetime, the cheering and support for the team was terrific – the first game we saw went to extra innings, finally won by the Giants on a go-ahead hit by Freddy Sanchez, and chants of ‘Freddy, Freddy’ reverberated as we all went down the ramps to leave.  The Nat-Pack member equivalent showed up in a hockey mask all over the park, getting  sections to out-shout each other, but overall only in the recent 8-6 game against the Cardinals have I seen in Nats Park the spontaneous shouting that seemed natural at AT&T.  I hope we get there.
Other items of interest – one of the between-innings activities is the fist pump cam, which is lots of fun, also the singalong inning – Don’t Stop Believing (two games) and My City By the Bay, and soap bubbles regularly being blown in the upper deck, drifting around.  At the end of the game (of course) they play Tony Bennett’s I Left My Heart in San Francisco.  On the outfield concourse there is a miniature baseball diamond for kids, a giant glove, and a giant Coke bottle which turns out to have long slides in it, for both adults and children.

There are seagulls swooping around constantly, and in the extra innings game they became particularly prevalent, clearly waiting for the stands to clear so that they could come in and eat any leftover food, which is exactly what happened immediately once the stands started emptying.  I expect that this happens at every game, but was especially noticeable in the extra innings game, when dinner was effectively delayed by an hour or more.

One other item about the park – while the weather was mild by San Francisco standards, it was windy, and chilly to be sitting around, so hoodies and warmer gear are in order.  A propos of nothing, as a matter of interest the stadium announcer is a woman.  It also seems to be a requirement in the California parks that an evacuation procedure be announced, probably a good idea in an earthquake-prone area.  Both AT&T and Petco Parks had an announcement at about the 6^th or 7^th inning that the ushers would be collecting recyclables, but at AT&T Park we only saw said usher in the club.