Seven plus hours of Cubs Baseball Tuesday

Arthur had tickets for the Cubs game Tuesday afternoon and invited us up.  The six boys and I arrived when the gates opened at 11:20.  We went to the end of the Cubs dugout, and Mark got an autograph from Junior Lake.  Mark then saw Dave Kaplan and told him he was the kid with the big sandwich that he tweeted about, Kap said, "Opening Day".....Mark and Kaplan chatted awhile.  Then the boys saw that Aramis Ramirez was taking batting practice....They started walking toward home plate when an usher yelled at Peter not to walk through the box seats.....He said "I told you before not to walk through there." (He had not.)  Peter quickly moved out of the section.   The usher then loudly called Peter an "idiot"....

Peter was not too happy about this and sent an email to Tom Ricketts (thanks Mike Wille)...He explained what happened and said he thought the usher could have handled the situation more respectfully.  Two minutes later he received a response from Mr. Ricketts that he would look into it and wanted to know the name of the usher.  By the 5th inning a representative from the Cubs (Hannah) was sitting next to Peter discussing the incident.  She spent several minutes with us and eventually was chatting about Arthur's upcoming wedding among other details about our family.

An inning later she returned and came to sit by me.  She asked if we would be able to stay for the second game and sit behind home plate a few rows back. She also said she would have a ticket for Arthur's fiancé to be able to come with us.   (about $600 total face value for the 8 tickets..) She apologized for the usher's behavior and said that Mr. Ricketts was very impressed by Peter's email and wanted to do something for us to make up for the rude behavior.  She additionally told us we would be allowed on the field between games to get our picture taken by the Cubs. 

The games were very exciting, but disappointing losses.  The first game the Cubs missed a walk-off home run by a few feet and the second game the Brewers were down to their last out with three consecutive batters:  a close play at first, a 3-2 pitch called a ball that was in the strike zone and an "overdive" by Castro on a weak line drive that he dropped to allow the tying and winning run to score.

All in all a fun and interesting day.....