Saturday at PNC

After flying in early saturday morning from chicago with many other cub fans and as I later realized Notre Dame fans since Pitt was playing Notre Dame on Saturday also, we arrived at the park around 30 minutes early or so.  

Normally when I go to away games I end up talking to other cub fans.  With that in mind I smiled at two people in cubs fans outside PNC and they asked if we had tickets and I said yeah and started to walk away since being propositioned by a scalper isn't anything new but as we turned she said "because we are trying to give these tickets to a cub fan" we(my girlfriend and I) stopped and told them they had ok upper deck tickets but we bought them over the internet which in my experience yields bad tickets.  The tickets they were offering were a field box so I assumed they were better and graciously accetpted.  We told them we had tickets already but they said these should be better.  Well long story short as we start walking down the section looking for Row F we soon realized Row F is the very front row.  Needless to say the game was off to a good start.  

This was my first trip to PNC and Pittsburgh.  If you have never been I urge you to go.  It's easily the nicest ballpark I have ever been to though I've only been to 15 or so.  As you can see on TV the view of downtown is obviously planned by the designers and they hit it dead on.  One notable thing they do is how at most parks the mascot and some cute girls will use slingshots or air guns to shoot T-Shirts into the crowd.  They did that but they also used a more non standard ammo,  hot dogs.  Now, I like a hot dog as much as the next guy but I don't know if an air fired hot dog that was fought over by sweaty dudes is my idea of a snack.  Plus you better fire some ketchup right afterwards ( With Heinz being based in pittsburgh I would think they could work that out).  

Both Cedeno and Murton got the start.  Cedeno is much more muscular in real life than he looks on TV and Murton has really thick legs.  Cedeno started off looking good and Murton looked cold until his HR and then got another single.  I don't know how Cedeno getting hit looked on TV but from right next to where they were examining him I didn't think he was going to stay in the game.  We'll see if it has any long lasting effects.  
The Zambrano injury looked less serious and I was a little surprised the trainers came out for so long.  I haven't yet seen a replay of it though.  

Overall Pittsburgh as a city gets a bad rap.  I was talking with a Pittsburgh resident during the game and she was the first to bring it up.  I thought of it as "dirty steel town" but the downtown area and everything around the ballpark was beautiful and I recommend booking tickets for next year or even this year if you don't mind not seeing the cubs.  I think there is enough there to warrant it.