Baseball Stadiums: Angel Stadium of Anaheim

Last week, I attended a conference in Los Angeles, and I was very excited because I thought it might allow me to visit Dodger Stadium.  As it turned out, the Dodgers were out of town during my stay, but the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim opened their home schedule during the week.  So I made my first trek to Angel Stadium of Anaheim.

The game was slated for a 7:05 p.m. start, but my friend and I attended a taping of the Conan O'Brien Show that afternoon.  We also had to pick up two more people at a hotel in downtown and endured rush hour traffic, so we did not arrive at the stadium until almost eight o'clock with the game in the 3rd inning.  The pictures outside the stadium are a bit blurry, and I could not get a quality photograph of the "Big A" because the sun was almost down when we arrived at the stadium.

Main entrance.

Main entrance with one of the oversized baseball hats.

With seats along the third base line, I had a great view of the scoreboard in right field and the California Spectacular batter's eye in center field.

Right field videoboard.

The California Spectacular batter's eye along with pennants for the Angels' various championships.

Due to arriving late for the game and the sellout crowd, I did not get to explore the stadium in search of unique food items.  Instead I opted for the banal Angel Dog, and waited almost 10 minutes for the hot dog.  The service is amongst some of the slowest I have ever endured at a ballpark, but fans in front of me in the line assured that they had received much quicker service during sold-out games.  So I'm not sure what caused the delays during the third game of the season, but I was certainly frustrated by the inferior service.

The drove of fans waiting for food in the upper decks.

The food was OK, but not spectacular.  The most entertaining part of the experience was listening to Angel fans complaining about the team's poor performance and watching many of them leave in the 7th inning.  It made me laugh because slugger Josh Hamilton, who signed with the team during the offseason, complained about fans in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex as not being true baseball fans.  So I wondered how he'd feel about the crowd flooding out of the stadium barely a week into the season.  I hoped for a better experience at the ballpark, but left unimpressed and hoping for something more.

Maybe when I visit Southern California again I can arrive before the 3rd inning and explore more of the stadium, and hopefully leave the ballpark with a better feeling than I did last week.