Ok... So three days late and $63.50 short.

Anyway. As I sure some of you may have remembered I had tickets to the game on the 23rd. My wife planned a big day in Baltimore for me for our 4th anniversary (which was the 24th, Happy Birthday Duck).

Well, I had no idea what she had planned for me until Sunday after our dolphin excursion at the Aquarium (which WAS really neat, BTW). Then she tells me what we are doing... She got tickets to the "behind the scenes tour" at Camden Yards (7.00 a ticket, plus fees, so more like 10.75 a ticket, but still WORTH EVERY PENNY). It was awesome. I took some pictures, but unfortunately we had a giant finger print the lens so most the pictures look ghosted (damn kids). Anyway. Here they are.

Panoramic View from the Bullpen Picnic Area

Random Orange seat in right-center field (More on this later)	1983 World Series Trophy and Team Pictures

Panoramic View from a left field club box

Orioles retired jerseys in the Hall of Fame Lounge	Cal Ripken's retired jersey

The smaller building in the background is St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, where Babe Ruth learned to play baseball... with a right-handed glove-he was left-handed.	Behind the scenes in the press area, this is the daily game board. As you can see, it has the lineups, the time of first pitch, temperature at the start of the game, attendance, length of the game, and the umpires for the game, as well as the score of the game. After the last game of the season they don't erase it until the first game of the next season.

This me... standing where Jim Palmer stands when on camera during broadcasts... it's about three feet behind where they sit when broadcasting.	This the view from the Sportswriters' press box. Nice seats, huh?

A couple of guys playing catch	The view from the tunnel behind home plate.

The visitor's on-deck circle	My wonderful, beautiful wife IN the visitor's dugout... the O's dugout was being worked on (much like the rest of Birdland).

Panoramic view from inside the visitor's dugout.	Me, in the visitor's dugout.

The orange seat in right-center field. This is where Eddie Murray hit his 500th homerun. It was late and rainy so it wasn't very crowded and the guy who got that ball sold it two weeks later for half a million dollars.	ANOTHER orange seat (there are only two of them in Camden Yards)... this one is where Cal Ripken hit his 278th HR as a shortstop, setting the then record. He continues to hold the record for HR's by a shortstop with 345. A-Rod has 344 as a shortstop, but thanks to MFY he's now at third base.

The scoreboard from the visitor's dugout.	Me and my bride in the visitor's dugout.

Us, ON the field... well, on the warning track in front of the field (we weren't allowed on The Grass, it was the only rule).	Down the left field line.

The O's on-deck circle	The O's dugout.

Kenny Griffey Jr.'s plaque in the Warehouse wall where he hit it during the '93 all-star game homerun derby. The footage is wrong... it's being corrected at 465 feet.	Interstate 395... Cal Ripken Way.

Did you know... The Warehouse's 3.5 million bricks had to be cleaned by hand and that it took crews 30 months to do it when Camden Yards was being built? Yeah, they were to susceptible to power-washing. That must have sucked!

That's all cool, and well and good, but the single most KICKASS thing that she did for me was this...


And the really cool thing about it... she said she sent it to him and he returned it signed within a week. Nick Rocks! So does Mrs. Toe!

On to the game: We got there early to see the O's finish up BP and watch the Jays take BP. There were some old timers from the '83 Series team signing autographs. I got Al Bumbry's but the lines were crazy so that's all I got. 
Apparently I made it into The Sun, or thesun.com... so that's cool, I guess.

It was a great game, and the pregame ceremony was cool. It was nice to see the old guys, even though I wasn't really aware what was going on in 1983. I got pics of the guys walking on the Orange carpet but they're a little lacking.

...and then, with two outs in the top of the sixth--THE RAINS CAME!!!

But it was ok, for us, because we were in section 43 covered by the second deck. So we stayed nice and dry. Of course the game ended up being suspended and we couldn't get back the next day to finish it up, but it turns out the O's are giving anyone who couldn't get back to the completion of the game a free upper level ticket to any game in September (at least that's what tickemaster told me, I have yet to confirm that with 888-848-BIRD). We'll definitely pick one. Maybe by then I'll get to see some of the REAL youngins.

So that was my day in ol' B'more. All in all a great day.