Friday At The Phillies: Life Is (Sort Of) Tweet

There I was, sitting on one of those metal benches, with a crappy view of the game and annoying people around me, and I had no way to complain to you all!

Despite a bout of insomnia Thursday night, with only about a 3-hour nap Friday morning, I got myself to Citizens Bank Park for Friday's Phillies game vs. Milwaukee. As part of the Social Media promotion I previously mentioned, I got my special t-shirt (see photo at left). I got my $10 food/merchandise credit that paid for my jumbo hot dog and large diet soda -- well, not quite since it actually cost $10.25 -- and made my way to the Rooftop Bleachers.

The view from there is not really good. I think it's the worst place of all to see a game at CBP (see photo at right). Sitting above and behind Ashburn Alley, beyond the outfield fences, not only can you not see the area of the outfield closest to the fences, but the brick wall batters' eye in center field (one edge of it is in the bottom right corner of the photo) blocks even more of the view. And where I was, there's a light pole obstructing a bit of the view as well. Plus there are metal benches instead of individual seats.

All of this I knew already, even having never sat there before. Just walking by the area it was pretty obvious that it's not a prime location. The Phils first tried to market the Rooftop Bleachers just to groups, but now they sell individual game tickets and run special promotions (the Social Media one, singles nights, etc.) as well. Sitting there just confirmed what I already knew.

I figured that, being Social Media night, I'd be sending regular updates on Twitter, including the photos you see on this page. I thought I'd do score updates, mention the annoying people sitting around me saying and doing dumb things, and generally having fun. I figured wrong.
First I tried sending a photo to Twitpic to post to Twitter. After a few long minutes where the status was "sending..." I finally got a pop-up saying "message failed." I tried posting to Twitter via a text (without photo), which seemed to have worked, but when I tried checking Twitter itself, and then Facebook, and then just the web itself, the screen on my phone kept saying something about "proxy server error" and "remote server" and so on. I thought that perhaps I was just in a bad spot, but when I got up once to hit the rest room and tried again, I got the same message.

So there I was, metal bench, crappy view, annoying people, etc. Even when, after the 5th inning, I gave up on the rooftop entirely and just wandered around the concourses for the rest of the game, I was unable to access the web. I only learned when I got home that Virgin Mobile had some sort of network outage. I could make calls on my cell but nothing else. I had tried texting my friend Kurt a couple of times, and he didn't reply. Turns out he never got them, because of the network problem. So my one text to Twitter also disappeared into the ether.

So the Twitter portion of my night was a flop and, as I said, the Rooftop Bleachers were undesirable. However, the night was far from a total loss. Besides the t-shirt and food credit, I finally got my own picture of the Phanatic Around Town statue that had been behind security at the airport until now. The complete slideshow can be found here. And the Phillies got a 1-0 win behind strong pitching from Cole Hamels and moved to within one game of first place in the NL East. (They remain a game behind Atlanta despite losing today, though they're still 2 up in the NL Wild Card race.)