Take me out to the ball game

Buy me some peanuts and garlic fries...

One of the few drawbacks about Portland is that it doesn't have a Major League Baseball team. That partly explains the city's love affair with its one professional sports franchise (Go, Blazers!) and it also means you've got to make a three-hour trek to Seattle if you want to see MLB.

So when the opportunity came up to make an early-season getaway with my oldest son, Nathan, I grabbed it. Rather than put my old VW bug through the stress of travel on I-5, we traveled by Amtrak (a quiet, comfortable ride with cushy seats and ample leg room) and arrived mid-afternoon, which gave me enough time for a pre-game run through downtown Seattle, all the way up to the Belltown district.

We engaged in the friendly banter of negotiations with scalpers trying to unload their tickets, knowing we held the upper hand. I mean, come on. It's a Monday night game vs. the last-place Baltimore Orioles -- a far cry from trying to score some tickets for a weekend Yankees or Red Sox series. We wound up in the lower deck, 30 rows up from the Mariners dugout, and paid about one-third of the face value for the pair. (Turns out the crowd of 14,528 was the smallest in Safeco Field history.)

I'd hoped we'd have time for a nice sitdown meal to avoid most of the rich, greasy food at the ballpark but we ran a little short on time and settled for happy hour at a sushi bar with a make-your-own-art on the walls decor and some Japanese music videos playing silently near the front door.

As I write this, Nathan is still asleep so I've got to run upstairs and get him up for breakfast. It's great having father-son time like this. Totally relaxing and a nice change of pace for both of us. Did I mention we're staying at a hotel literally across the street from the ballpark? Thanks to hotels.com, we got a good deal on the room, too.

As for those garlic fries, they've become the most popular item at major league ballparks. I first had them a few years ago at San Francisco's PacBell Park -- fitting because the world's garlic capital is in Gilroy, about 80 miles south of SF. They've become a must-have item for us here at Safeco.

Oh, final score: Mariners 8, Orioles 2.