Mike Green is back with part two of his travelogue through the North Eastern US.  Today it's Cleveland.

Progressive Field stands a block away from Interstate 90 in Cleveland .  We rolled in to our chain hotel across the street from the stadium at about 10 p.m. on Sunday night, with plans to sight-see during the day and then catch the Jays facing the Indians at night.

Downtown Cleveland has pretty clearly benefited from recent urban renewal efforts.  Storefronts are modern and the streets are clean.  We ate lunch at a fine spot on a walking street a block and a half from the park.  The “Edmund Fitzgerald” dark beer went down particularly well. 

We then headed to the subway at the city center to take a trip to the waterfront. There were no ticket collectors at the subway entrance, but instead a friendly black female police officer.  She advised us that the waterfront line now only ran on weekends due to budget cutbacks, and suggested that we might want to visit Shaker Square or Ohio City instead.  We decided to take the train to Shaker Square about 6 stops away.  There were probably 40 black people on the well-maintained train, from businessmen/women and professionals to teenagers, and no whites save for ourselves.  Shaker Square might be roughly equivalent to Toronto ’s Annex area with a fair trade coffee spot, art galleries, and a great used bookstore nearby.  After a fair bit of learning about Lou Boudreau who came from the area and the origin of Shaker Square and the Shaker Heights neighbourhood (no, it has nothing to do with Lloyd Moseby), some gift buying and a cool beverage, we returned back to downtown on the subway.  This time there was one other white woman on the subway with us.  To an outsider, it was hard to understand why black and white people apparently mixed very well on the streets but did not mix on the subways. 

We walked into the ballpark at about 6:15 pm, and immediately picked up hot dogs and a beer (there is a stand for Great Lakes Brewing, which brews the Edmund Fitzgerald; if you ask for a Dortmunder aka “a dort”, you won’t be disappointed).  The hot dogs were well above ballpark average.  We had great seats, about 25 rows back and almost directly behind home plate.  I cannot imagine a better scene on a warm summer night.  We were stoked, as were the couple from Whitby next to us, and the young man in the Jays’ Halladay T a row back.

The game itself was a disappointment.  Ricky Romero did not have his best stuff early on but wiggled out of trouble with the help of the DP.  My companion astutely noted that the Jays looked lackluster, and this game did turn out to be the first loss of five in a row. The hitters were facing Jake Westbrook but you would think that it was a young Bob Feller out there.  Only Lyle Overbay seemed to be in sync and focused; I felt that the club missed Travis Snider’s left-handed power badly on this night. 

By the time that the hot dog cannon had come around in the middle innings, a Jayson Nix suicide squeeze had brought in the go-ahead run and Kerry Wood had come in for the save with only Overbay putting up a fight, I realized that I probably should have gone back for a second dort. 

The following morning, we hit the road again on a long drive through Pennsylvania to a suburb of New York City to visit family and then on to Auburn, New York for more prospecting. 

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Thanks Mike.  We are looking forward to part 3.