Regardless of whether you live in the states and have some experience with Baseball or are coming from abroad with little to no knowledge of how everything works, Baseball can be an absolute jungle to understand.
The goal with this text is to offer up some helpful advice for those just starting to get into baseball or perhaps visit their first game ever. If you’re someone who has a lot of experience with baseball and regularly attends games, this text might not offer all too many helpful tidbits to take with you during your visit to a ballpark.
The game of baseball
The game of baseball hails from sometime during the 1800’s. Invented and most popular in the US, some of the best baseball players of all time are cultural icons. The game is slow-paced by design with flashes of extreme explosiveness and incredible athletic abilities. Hitting a baseball is commonly regarded as one of the hardest things to do in sport and a hitter often has less than 0.4 seconds to react to a delivered pitch.
The season
The baseball season is one of the longest in all of global sports, with each team playing 164 games during the regular season. This then leads into various tiers of play offs where the best performing team from both the American League and National league face each other in the world series for all the marbles.
The tickets
Due to the season being so long there are several opportunities so find great tickets at very attractive prices. During “the dog days of summer” in June, July, and August one can usually find very attractive seats at reasonable prices. The best way to secure a spot is to buy your tickets as soon as you have a date set for when you’re going to be in town. This way you can make sure that you get the tickets that you want without having to pay astronomical sums of money.
The best seats that can be found at reasonable prices are at the baselines running from home plate to first and third base. If you’re looking to get a better view the second bleacher above home plate can offer a fantastic view. Get more information here about how buying tickets work.
If you’re planning on going to a game
There are a couple of things to keep in mind to ensure that you have the best possible experience when visiting a game at an MLB stadium. First and foremost: get there early. Only some ballparks are reachable with public transport and therefore the traffic around some of these stadiums can be quite insane. By arriving early you can ensure that you get a good parking spot, which will help when it’s time to leave after the game. But arriving early also means that you get the chance to watch the warm ups, batting practice, and walk around the stadium. The batting practice is the absolutely best way to truly understand how skilled these athletes are at what they do and who knows, maybe you’ll even catch a ball to bring home as a souvenir. This will also allow you to explore the different food options, and if it’s one thing that the MLB does well across all of their ballparks it’s the food on offer. Sure, they might not be the healthiest alternatives all of the time but treating yourself to some proper ballpark food is a great time.
Which ballpark should you visit?
It’s very much a personal preference type of thing when it comes to what ballpark and team to visit. Just about every major city in the USA has at least one baseball team and in several cases the city hosts two baseball teams. When it comes to what ballpark will offer up the best experience, the opinion of this writer is either Wrigley Field or Fenway park. Both of these arenas are teeming with history and it almost feels like being transported back in time when walking down the bleachers in either of these impressive ballparks. However, these cities can be quite expensive if you’re traveling only to watch the game so you’ll have to do some thinking in regards to what your budget can handle.
