1 {photo of the Sydney Cricket Ground configured for baseball}
1 Caption: Interlude

Me and my wife at AT&T Park.

I had planned a relatively normal annotation for today, but my week has been disrupted by recovering from some minor surgery. Nothing to worry about - just removal of something which has been giving me trouble for a while.

I figured with a week at home to rest, I could get a lot of stuff done, but it's funny how it doesn't quite work out that way when you're moving gingerly and in a bit of pain. I ended up watching a lot of Top Gear and Man v. Food reruns on the tele, among other things.

A cool thing I did a couple of days before my surgery was to attend the opening game of the 2014 Major League Baseball season: the Los Angeles Dodgers versus the Arizona Diamondbacks at the Sydney Cricket Ground. I've watched a lot of cricket at the SCG, and a few rugby league games, but this was the first time baseball has been played there in 100 years. It was a fantastic experience - a real piece of Americana imported and dropped into my home town of Sydney. They had lots of special American style food available, including a metre-long hot dog. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) I was at the time on a restricted diet prior to surgery, so I didn't try any of the food.

As it happened, just a couple of weeks earlier I'd been in San Francisco, and took a guided tour of AT&T Park, the home field of the San Francisco Giants. I was struck by the small size of the park compared to my experience with cricket grounds. Reconfiguring the SCG for baseball involved chopping off quite a lot of the field area, and some parts of the crowd were left quite a long way from the action. I was seated just inside the first base foul line (as you can see from the photo above), and had a reasonable view.

And I'm afraid with that I should probably wind this up for today and get back to watching QI.