I finally had a chance to sit down last night and watch the MLB Network's "Hot Stove" show, a one-hour nightly program that will serve as sort of a practice run for the network's full-evening programming during the season which will run highlights and cut-ins of all the games going on each day.

I was pleasantly surprised by how good it looked, less than a week after its debut. Hosted by Victor Rojas, former Texas Rangers broadcaster and son of ex-player and Cub coach Cookie Rojas, who is amiable, well-spoken and keeps the show moving, it examines the top stories of the day (yesterday's was the press conference introducing Mark Teixeira to the NYC media) and also has various features. Yesterday, they had each of their ex-player analysts (Harold Reynolds, Al Leiter and Joe Magrane) play the role of the GM of a downtrodden team (Reds, Padres and Pirates) and choose ONE pitcher they would sign as a free agent.

Reynolds, the longtime ESPN veteran, is very comfortable on the air and made good use of the huge studio, which also serves as a backdrop that the ex-players can use to demonstrate various plays. I assume they'll do quite a bit of this during the season. Leiter, who has worked for both Fox and the YES Network doing color commentary, and Magrane, a longtime color commentator on Tampa Bay games, are both well-spoken. MLB has chosen well in getting men who both played the game and who know how to talk about it in an articulate fashion.

I also liked Tom Verducci's contributions as the non-player analyst. He's got useful opinions without being smarmy as ESPN's Tim Kurkjian is or know-it-all like Buster Olney.

MLB has also hired two female reporter/anchors, Hazel Mae (from NESN) and Trenni Kusneirek, a Milwaukee native who worked for FSN Wisconsin on Brewers games last year. Kusneirek's very good -- she's a former TV sports anchor from both Milwaukee and Pittsburgh and knows the game. Hazel Mae... well, let's just say she's nice as eye candy. She did two taped interviews, one with Teixeira, one with Yankees manager Joe Girardi. The questions seemed pretty ordinary and she seemed somewhat uncomfortable.

Those interviews were among the couple of quibbles I had with the production, less from a baseball standpoint than from a TV production standpoint -- this is my TV directing background speaking now. In the interviews, both Hazel Mae and the interviewee were holding microphones; that not only looked odd, but must have been strange for the person being interviewed.

Also, the network needs to ditch the fake crowd noise and fake ball-hitting-bat sound effect during highlight video. They were distracting and made it difficult to hear the voiceover narration. And, some of the shots of Rojas squeezed him onto a small sliver of the right-hand side of the screen, dwarfed by a plasma screen with a mostly meaningless graphic in it. In general, though, the graphic style is good -- readable without being overbearing, and their "crawl" is occasionally used as a "flip", where you see one story at a time, which is much more readable than a continuous crawl.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how good the show looked, and I'm sure they are tweaking it as they go, considering they still have about seven weeks before the first spring training games. The network also has some other off-season programming that looks interesting, including detailed looks at various seasons in baseball history, "Baseball's 9", which is a look at the "Top 9" in different categories, and other baseball history, including running all of Ken Burns' "Baseball", and some old World Series films. Last night, they ran the 1946 World Series -- fascinating to see the way those were filmed, using extreme closeups of players obviously shot before the game, intercut with game action, to make it look semi-live; remember, in those pre-TV days, this was the only way anyone who wasn't at the game got to see any baseball action.

That's something that from a 2009 perspective, where if we pay for it we can watch almost every game we want to (and maybe the MLB Network will eventually allow everyone to do so regardless of location), and see highlights and keep up with scores nearly instantaneously. I give the MLB Network high grades so far, and if they keep up the good work, there should be no need to watch "Baseball Tonight" any more -- since ESPN often pre-empts it for other sports, and the MLB Network will be constantly updating scores and highlights for six or seven hours every night.

Good work, MLB. Didn't think you had it in you.

ROYSTON, Georgia -- I owe today's excursion idea to BCB reader HectorVillanueva, who posted this comment the other day in my review of the Louisville Slugger museum. Coincidentally, this morning BCB reader One F posted this diary, detailing Ty Cobb's experiences in the 1907 and 1908 World Series; the young Cobb had played in two WS by the time he turned 22 years old in December, 1908, winning neither of them -- and in fact, he never did play on a WS winner, playing in only one more (the 1909 Tigers lost to the Pirates).

That's a short introduction to the 70-something mile drive I did today from the eastern suburbs of Atlanta, to Royston, still a small town seemingly in the middle of nowhere, to visit the Ty Cobb Museum. Driving there, in fact, you see no billboards or other mentions of the museum on the highways leading to Royston; only when you enter Royston do you see the name "Cobb" and signs to the museum almost everywhere.

The Ty Cobb Museum is somewhat prosaically located in a low-rise, modern office building called, lengthily, "The Joe A. Adams Professional Building of Ty Cobb Healthcare System". It seems an odd location for a baseball museum, but there's a pretty good reason for this -- Cobb, after his retirement, became very wealthy through his investments in, primarily, Coca-Cola and General Motors, and donated quite a bit of money ($100,000 in 1950 dollars had to be a huge amount of money in this part of the country) to build the first hospital in Royston, and the Cobb Memorial Hospital ("Memorial" to Cobb's father) still exists to this day, and much of the healthcare system in that area still bears the Cobb family name. Much of the money Cobb had at his death in 1961 -- his estate at the time was valued at well over $11 million, bigtime money in those days -- went to start the Ty Cobb Educational Foundation, which has awarded over 7,500 scholarships totalling over $11 million as of about a year ago.

The museum is small -- and otherwise deserted on a Wednesday afternoon in October -- but contains, at the entrance, 100 bats engraved with important events in Cobb's career, some of which are sponsored by well-known people (Reed Johnson of the Blue Jays bought one of them, among others). There are some baseballs and other things signed by Cobb, a uniform and a glove (I still marvel at how players in his era could have caught balls with those flat, four-fingered gloves); Cobb's 1907 American League batting title medal, and a banner showing the Tigers had won the 1907, 1908 and 1909 AL pennants. Cobb became "first among equals" when entering the first Hall of Fame class in 1936; he received 98.2% of the vote, more than Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner, the other four original inductees. The 98.2% vote ranked as the top percentage until 1992, when Tom Seaver got 98.8%. (Since 1992, Nolan Ryan -- 98.79% -- and Cal Ripken -- 98.5% -- have also surpassed Cobb's number.)

There's a short video as well as timelines which describe Cobb's life in Royston and how he played professional baseball -- at first, against the wishes of his father, but when he at last became established, Cobb's father told him to apply himself and not be a failure and not to return until he succeeded. There's a reproduction of a letter Cobb's father wrote to him, telling him this and also to "be good", which he carried in his wallet for most of his life. The museum mentions the tragic and possibly life-altering event of Cobb's life, when his father, entering his home through a window, was shot to death by his mother. It doesn't mention the reason W. H. Cobb was entering his own home through a window -- apparently, he suspected Amanda Cobb of cheating on him and wanted to catch her "in the act". Amanda Cobb was acquitted, but young Ty -- this happened in 1905, when he was not 20 years old -- was affected deeply by this event, and some think that this gave him the drive and aggressiveness that he needed to succeed.

100 years after he first made a splash onto the major league scene, Ty Cobb, almost certainly the greatest hitter of his generation and one of the greatest of all time, is somewhat forgotten -- I thank One F for posting that diary, which gives you an idea of how good Cobb was and how many records he still holds. His .367 batting average (and they sell in the gift shop at the museum, a numbered set of cards which total 367 cards, in honor of this) is still the best in history; to give you an idea of how good that is, the leading active player in BA is Ichiro Suzuki, whose .333 average ranks twenty-fifth. Cobb ranks second in runs (though if Barry Bonds plays in 2008, he'll pass him), second in hits (the museum, incidentally, gives Cobb's hit total as 4189, which is the generally accepted new-research total, and which means Pete Rose actually broke his record on September 8, 1985 at Wrigley Field), second in triples, fourth in doubles, fifth in total bases, and in the top ten in many other categories. Ichiro, in fact, is a pretty good comp to Cobb in the way he approaches hitting (without the anger, of course). Ichiro turns 34 next week, and combined between his Japanese career and his seven years with the Mariners, he has totalled 2870 hits (combined batting average: .342); with his work ethic and hitting style, there's a possibility that, combined, Ichiro could pass both Cobb and Rose to have over 4000 hits, and maybe even 3000 hits in the major leagues. Cobb, I think, would approve.

While this stop was a bit out of the way, it was well worth it to see the memorabilia and a bit of the career of one of the greatest ballplayers ever, and to drive through small towns and countryside that hasn't changed much in the last 100 years, you can get a little bit of an idea of where ballplayers came from a century ago.

LOUISVILLE, Kentucky -- Yes, I'm in Kentucky. Or more correctly, I was in Kentucky this morning.

Why was I there? Well, I booked a week of vacation from work because I thought I was going to be able to go somewhere (Denver, as it turns out) to watch the Cubs in the playoffs. You all know how that turned out. But by the time the Cubs were eliminated, it was too late for me to re-schedule my vacation time from work, so I decided to take a little car trip, through parts of the country I've never seen before, and also visit some friends in Atlanta (the same friends I stayed with during the Cub series in June).

So on the way to Atlanta, I stopped this morning in Louisville to see the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory. The first thing you see is the replica of a Babe Ruth bat outside the front door; it's not as cheesy as you'd think, it's actually pretty cool-looking. It weighs 68,000 pounds, and is a giant-scale exact replica of the style bat the Babe used.

Inside, there's a museum of bats, going back to the earliest days of the Hillerich Company in 1884; they've made bats for all sorts of minor and major league players for over 100 years. In addition to a timeline showing how bats have changed over the years, there's a display which you can use to simulate how fast a 90 MPH fastball comes from a pitcher's hand. You choose a video of an active pitcher (I chose Greg Maddux, and had to watch him "throw" wearing a Braves uniform, and yes, I know he doesn't throw 90 anymore), and on the video he goes through his motion, and a ball flies out from somewhere behind the screen right at you (you're standing behind another screen). The narration tells you that you have two-tenths of a second to figure out what sort of pitch it is. Which makes it even more amazing, as Ted Williams once said, that baseball is a profession where "you can succeed three times out of ten and be considered great".

After you walk through the museum there's a thirty-minute tour through the actual factory. They have displays of the old hand lathes that they used to use to make bats by hand; everything is now done by machine, from honing the bats to cutting off the little wood "handles" that result from the lathing process (they have a box from which you can take a souvenir "handle"), to sanding them and painting them. The tour guide, of course promoting sales at the gift shop throughout, also talks about various minor and major leaguers who have had bats made -- and showed us the cabinet in which they keep the metal plates that have the signatures of every single major leaguer that has ever signed a contract with them, 8500 plates in all.

He also got a little dig in at Barry Bonds. After showing us the maple bats that Bonds prefers, and mentioning that Bonds' breaking of the single-season HR record in 2001 using a maple bat started the current craze among major leaguers to use maple bats instead of ash (almost half now use maple, which is more brittle than ash, which is why you see more broken bats than ever these days), he said, "So is it the maple... or is it something else??" Interesting little editorial comment.

Despite admonisments to "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!" you really do feel close up to the work, as you are within a few feet of men actually making major and minor league bats, and this was one of the best factory/museum tours I've ever been on. You get a free souvenir mini-bat at the end of the tour, and if you are so inclined you can buy personalized bats (for anywhere from $15 to $80, depending on the size and type of personalization you want), ordering before the tour and picking it up when the tour's done.

And I found a parking place on the street in downtown Louisville less than a block away, and parked for about $1.50 in change. You can't beat that.

So if you're in the general area, or traveling through, I'd highly recommend this tour -- price was $9, less for kids and seniors, and well worth your time (total time spent: about 90 minutes) and the price.

Brandi Carlile's music defies any category.

At times she rocks out like Melissa Etheridge. At other times there's a touch of country, of Bonnie Raitt or Emmylou Harris. She's recorded with the Indigo Girls.

What she is, is a refreshing breath of fresh air in today's music scene, and her show last night at the House of Blues, nearly three hours of live music (including the opening act, "A Fine Frenzy", was a welcome distraction from the constant reminder that I should have been at Wrigley Field last night watching game two of the NLCS between the Rockies and Cubs... well, never mind. We cannot lament what simply did not happen this season.

A few words about the House of Blues; last night was the first time I'd ever been there. It has quickly become one of my favorite concert venues. It's all standing room, except for a few barstools on either side of the standing area, and also in the multiple balconies. Despite that, it seems and feels spacious; the very high ceiling makes the acoustics nearly perfect and the sightlines excellent. Security is omnipresent but not oppressive; I found the staff both attentive and friendly. I'd highly recommend the HOB for any show you'd like to see.

Carlile (who, keeping this Cub-related, was born on the same day as Carlos Zambrano, June 1, 1981),  first came to prominence last spring when several of her songs (notably, "Turpentine") were featured on the ABC prime-time show "Grey's Anatomy". She's equally at home with a song like that, or the harder-rocking "My Song", which started the set, or a cover of Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison". She also did covers of Elton John's "Madman Across The Water" and Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", demonstrating her range, and when introducing Cash's song she said, "You don't mind if we go a little country on you?", and then briefly launched into a phrase or two of Tammy Wynette's "Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Woman", to laughter, before starting the Cash song. She also did an "acoustic set" which at one point got completely acoustic -- the entire band gathered at the front of the stage, in front of the mikes, and sang and played without electronic accompaniment. The crowd (mostly) hushed, and the size of the venue made it easy to hear the song.

The opening act, A Fine Frenzy, is a trio headed by 22-year-old Alison Sudol, a tall woman with fire-engine red hair and a big voice, who kept apologizing for extending her set (she kept saying she hoped they'd ask her back after playing so many songs). The extended opening set (45 minutes long) was worth it; A Fine Frenzy was featured on iTunes a month or so ago with their single "You Picked Me" chosen as iTunes' free "Single of the Week".

With the price of major arena concerts by bigtime bands approaching the stratosphere, it was refreshing to see a show of this length by two talents who I think are going to make a significant impact on the music scene in the next few years -- and pay only $20. Their tour continues in the US for another few weeks, before heading to Australia and the UK. (The Australia dates aren't in that link but they're in November.) If Brandi comes to your town go see her show. (And no, I wasn't the oldest person in the venue, either.)

Not long after the Cubs' big win yesterday in Cincinnati, I packed up my kids and headed out to the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, to take in something different from their normal classical music fare, The Baseball Music Project. From their website:

So while we await the Cubs' attempt to tie the Brewers (who are idle today) for first place, a little something for all you Culture Vultures.

The Ravinia Festival, if you've never been there, is held during the summer months, with mainly classical concerts featuring the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and a few pop/rock concerts (later this summer, for example, Hootie and the Blowfish, Natalie Cole, and Aretha Franklin are scheduled to appear), with a pavilion seating about 5,000, and lawn seating for several thousand more, where some people set up elaborate picnic tables complete with balloons and candles, and food that's more expensive than you'd find at most fancy restaurants.

We didn't go that route -- a couple of folding chairs and sandwiches were enough -- and settled in to both hear and view this show, which featured some baseball photos and paintings shown on large video screens.

The show was hosted and narrated by Cubs PA announcer Wayne Messmer. He played to the overwhelmingly Cub-centric crowd by throwing in some topical references to his narration ("Half a game out, baby", and "Who would have thought we'd be rooting so hard for Albert Pujols to hit a home run today?"), and in addition to narration, Messmer also sang the National Anthem to begin, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game", and, to the accompaniment of the Ravinia Festival Orchestra, did a dramatic reading of "Casey At The Bat", as well as several other baseball poems, including one of my personal favorites, Bart Giamatti's "The Green Fields of the Mind", which begins with these evocative words:

Many in the crowd were wearing Cub T-shirts and jerseys, though I also saw a Jason Varitek T-shirt and, inexplicably, a Pujols jersey. I've been to classical and pop shows at Ravinia before and this crowd seemed much more like an average group you'd find at a Cubs game (there seemed very few White Sox fans there, though I did spot a couple of A. J. Pierzynski T-shirts).

The conductor of the show was Bob Thompson, whose biography says that his baseball claim to fame is:

And, the guest soloist, Misty Castleberry, sang well-known baseball songs, including "Joltin' Joe DiMaggio", and "Slide, Kelly, Slide", a song written in 1889 about the legendary Mike "King" Kelly, profiled last January as #41 in the Top 100 Cubs of All Time series; the song was not only the first song about baseball to really reach all levels of public consciousness, but may have been the first true "pop culture" hit song ever.

This was an enjoyable evening and for me, an attempt to get my kids somewhat interested in hearing and seeing something other than the music of their own generation. They seemed to enjoy it, although Rachel appeared more interested in the mostly-overpriced merchandise at the gift shop (we didn't buy anything), and though Mark was listening to the music, he spent a fair amount of time playing Tetris on his newly-acquired cellphone.

If "The Baseball Music Project" comes to your town, go see it -- their website doesn't list any performances after May of this year, but I imagine they'll have others this summer and fall.

AYRating:

Photo by Al

While the Cubs were dispatching the Nationals handily in Washington 4-2, largely thanks to the contributions of Daryle Ward (two hits, two RBI), Mike Fontenot (three hits) and the bullpen (3.2 innings of scoreless relief), and moving to within 4.5 games of first place with the Brewers' loss in Pittsburgh, I was at Wrigley Field.

For more on last night's game check out the diaries by NittanyCub and Chris.

Being at Wrigley Field last night for the concert by the band that, from 1978 to 1984, was the #1 rock band in the world, was somewhat surreal. Everything surrounding the neighborhood and the ballpark was the same... only different. The feel of the crowd was different, although certainly many, besides myself, attend Cubs games there. People were dressed differently, much more "dressy" than for a ballgame -- there were a few people, though not many, wearing Cub clothes, including, at the very end of the set, Police drummer Stewart Copeland, who came out for the encores wearing a Cubs home jersey with "COPELAND 07" on the back.

Those of us who had field seats (the photo above is taken from my seat, right about the spot where Alfonso Soriano patrols left field -- they did ban cameras, and I didn't see any, except for camera phones, which is how I took the photo) entered through the bleacher gate, then went down the LF concourse and directly through the area where the ground crew stores all the Turface that they use during rain delays (there was, instead of the Turface, a large store of grass seed which will be used to help restore the field). The entire field was covered with plastic, which hopefully will allow the grass to breathe somewhat, although the case with almost every concert that's been on a grass spots field has been that the grass has been pretty severely damaged. Let's hope that's not the case here.

You could walk right up to the edge of the infield and peer into the dugouts; security, though omnipresent (both Police-hired security and Cubs security), was pretty laid-back.

The opening act was FictionPlane, a British band fronted by Sting's son Joe Sumner. They're pretty hard-rocking, and finished their set with a song laced with F-bombs, which I thought somewhat inappropriate for a crowd that was filled with the forty- and fifty-something fans of the Police and their kids (there were MANY kids in attendance). Sumner said that FictionPlane's drummer Pete Wilhoif, who was wearing a 1980's era Cub road jersey, was "a longtime Cub fan" -- don't know if this is true or not.

Both bands kept pretty much on schedule, because of the local noise ordinances which prevent concerts from going on much past 10 pm (the last encore ended about 10:10); the Police finally came out about 8:25, and played what everyone wanted and expected -- all their hits. It struck me that every single song of the (approximately, I didn't count) 20-song set was a monster hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and the Police, for their six or seven year reign, was every bit as big a band on the world stage as, say, U2 is today.

Despite the reportedly acrimonious breakup of the Police in the mid-1980's, all three of them at least looked like they were having a good time, particularly Stewart Copeland, who is an absolute wizard on the drums -- and everything else he puts his sticks to. Wearing the Cubs jersey was a nice touch, though he could have had it on the entire evening rather than just for a fifteen-minute encore. Sting is now almost 56 years old and on some songs his voice didn't hit the high registers that he was so well-known for -- except on "Roxanne", the final song before the encores, where he hit the high notes perfectly.

Early in the show Sting mentioned that the last time they had played in Chicago was in 1983 -- at the old Comiskey Park. That brought boos from many of the Cub fans in the crowd, and I don't think Sting really understood why. He also mentioned that they had played at the old Riviera at Lawrence & Broadway in 1978.

And as I looked around at the crowd surrounding me, many of whom weren't even born when the Police were the #1 band in the world, listening to all the great music of my youth, I realized that this is a way of connecting generations, because the music of the Police still resonates, more than twenty years after they broke up. If you're going tonight, you'll have a terrific time. At one point Sting asked for the crowd to "get loud", and they did. But it was still louder when Aramis Ramirez hit the walkoff HR last Friday.

On the night that the Astros made the World Series for the first time in their 44-year history, I took in the sold-out, 20,000-plus-attended, McCartney concert at the United Center.

Sitting behind me were a couple of women who were discussing seeing him at "White Sox Park" (to keep this marginally on-topic), as they called it; that would have been August 20, 1965, more than forty years ago.

It's a sobering thought to think that McCartney, the second-youngest of the Beatles, was an international star then at the age of 23.

Now 63 (there was a sign in the crowd last night reading "Welcome To Chicago -- Once More Before You're 64", referring, of course, to the Beatles track "When I'm Sixty-Four"), McCartney rocks just as hard as ever.

You wouldn't believe that if you read either Chicago newspaper review today; both Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot basically said that Macca was resting on his laurels and that the show was somewhat mechanical.

I didn't find it that way, though I could have done without the oddly-dressed DJ-type guy who was playing remixes of old Beatles and McCartney songs before the red-and-gold curtain was raised, and the video montage/history of Paul's career was rather dull and ordinary as well.

But once the music started, it didn't stop for two hours and forty-five minutes, and he played several new songs ("Fine Line", from his new release, was the best of them), as well as many, many old favorites.

How else can anyone who's been playing music as long as Paul McCartney do it? Since it's true that most of the music that made McCartney popular is thirty to forty years old, that's the music that people want to hear -- and the crowd was mostly people my age and even older, although there were plenty of kids and teenagers too, since his music really does transcend the generations.

His touring band was the same band that toured with him in 2002, last time he played the UC, and they were just as good this time. As both newspaper reviews said, though, McCartney was at his best when the band wasn't even there; solo acoustic guitar work on "Blackbird" and "Yesterday" and another new song, "Jenny Wren", were among the highlights of the show. Paul pointed out proudly that one of the acoustic guitars was the very same one he used on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964, the one I remember watching with my then-horrified parents and grandparents, who didn't grasp the grasp that these "long-haired" kids from England (check out the haircuts and see how laughable the "long-hair" claim was!) were about to have on this country, and the world.

Maybe the reviewers are holding McCartney up to impossible standards because of all this history. I enjoyed the show just as much as the 2002 show, and many, many of the songs spoke to me, brought me back to earlier, happy times in my life, and what's so wrong with that?

Something I mentioned in connection with the U2 show I saw last Friday came out yet again with this show. Of course, McCartney said how much he loves Chicago, called it the "Windy City" -- though lead guitarist Rusty Anderson embarrassed himself by saying he had been out shopping on "Michigan Street."

Had a smart person in McCartney's PR entourage mentioned the White Sox to him, I'd bet Paul would have made an on-stage mention of them, and that might have revved up the crowd. But it didn't happen.

That's a quibble -- I loved the show, and I hope Paul comes back next year for a "When I'm Sixty-Four" tour.

AYRating: *** 1/2

One last note on the now-set World Series matchup: just as in 2002 when the choices were the never-winning Angels and the not-since-1954 Giants, you now have the never-winning Astros and the not-since-1917 White Sox. This is a much more evenly matched series than White Sox/Cardinals would have been. Houston's pitching matches up well with the White Sox offense; the Sox are the hotter team (having won 12 of their last 13), but have had a week off. Houston has an excellent DH candidate in Jeff Bagwell.

I look forward to a good Series. I'll be there Saturday and Sunday.

NEW YORK -- This will be a multi-faceted thread, as I will be in a meeting all day.

Cardinals vs. Astros, 3 pm CT, Fox.

White Sox vs. Angels, 6:30 pm CT, Fox.

Since the ALCS was being conducted 3,000 miles from here, I decided to go to the U2 concert at Madison Square Garden.

Not having a ticket and having had no luck either online or at the box office, I started looking around for people selling. Got lucky -- I found three seventeen-year-old kids who for some reason had bought four tickets, and had a nice lower-tier extra seat they were selling at face value.

The opening act was a British band called Keane, far better than Dashboard Confessional, the act that opened the U2 show I saw three weeks ago in Chicago. You could perhaps best categorize Keane as "power pop", but they had pretty good range from slow songs to upbeat rockers, and had good interaction with the very-slow-arriving crowd (there were still pockets of empty seats even five minutes before U2 took the stage at 9:30 pm), constantly praising U2 and thanking them for the chance to open for them.

U2's set ran nearly two and a half hours, with two long encores -- during the second one Bono pulled a young woman from the first row of the ellipse and danced with her for two songs, "Fast Cars" and "With Or Without You". According to the above-linked review, this is the second time this particular U2 fan has been so selected.

The set was very similar to the United Center set; for anyone who's gone to a U2 show (or any rock band's show, for that matter) in your own city, of course Bono played up how much they enjoy playing New York City. Same thing they said in Chicago, of course. They did play a few bars of the Ramones' "Rockaway Beach" as a kind of "tip of the cap" to the New York-centric crowd; this was the last of five Madison Square Garden shows on this leg of the tour, though they do return to NYC in November.

I'd never been in MSG before -- it's been extensively renovated over the last fifteen years or so and appears just as modern as the United Center. The main difference is that it feels smaller and more intimate than the giant UC, and as a result, the seats are closer to the stage, and the acoustics are far better than the UC, which was designed to magnify the crowd noise for sporting events.

Bono and the Edge spent quite a bit more time on the ellipse than they did at the UC, and from my seat in section 50, I was probably only a couple of hundred feet from them at times. In a giant arena show, to be able to be that close to the performers (without having to stand in line all day to get close to the front of the ellipse) made the show well worth it. They finished with a rousing encore of "Vertigo".

AYRating: ****