Oh My God, we are in the playoffs!

Keeping up with my belief in superstitions during the baseball season I might as well be tardy in updating my blog. I didn't update in September which really isn't a bad thing since the Cardinals didn't really play that well, 12 wins, 16 losses including a 7 game losing streak. They almost didn't even make the playoffs losing the last game of the season to the Brewers. If it wasn't for the Braves beating the Astros there might have been a make-up game against the Giants on the day after the season officially ended. But enough about that, they won the division and the second season began with the chance to redeem themselves and play the way they were expected to. They were labeled the underdogs and supposed to lose to the Padres, they won 3 games to one. They were basically told that the Mets would sweep them, but Suppan pitched an amazing game, Molina hit an amazing home run and Wainwright threw an amazing curveball past a frozen Carlos Beltran with the bases loaded to send a few veterans and a bunch of rookies to the World Series!

It's Team Poster Time!

Every year for the past 6 years the Cardinals and Ice Mountain Water give away a large team poster in September. The first two years they used mostly my pictures and had a designer create the poster, but in 2003 I was able to talk them into letting me design the whole thing! The best part about that was that now all of the pictures would be mine and luckily they liked my design better than the past two. We agreed on what I thought was a fair price for photo usage and design and everyone loved the poster. The only problem was for 2004 I had to make it look different than 2003, so enter my wife Valerie. As I was trying to come up with a new concept she suggested that I make the whole background photo red to go along with the Cardinals' 2004 slogan "Red Means Go", which worked out great.
The only problem with designing a team poster is roster changes. It seems that every year we get close to the final approval and the team makes a trade or calls someone up from the minors. This gets real frustrating because I put the players in numerical order and if I have to make a change it could take a couple of hours to move all of the players around. Which brings me to yesterday. I emailed a lo-res version to the Marketing department for approval and other than making a minor change everyone was pleased. I went to the ballpark to get ready for the game and I see minor league outfielder Timo Perez taking batting practice! Why?! Who did we send down?
Well, they sent down Brad Thompson which probably means nothing if anyone is actually here reading this but for me it means that I have to remove player number 48 and put in player number 19. Why couldn't Perez be number 49 so I could just swap them out. I now need to move 16 players around to make room for the new one. Well, The file has 60 layers and is about 1 gigabyte in size, so it will take me a while. So I am going to see if I can leave it as is with Thompson in place and Perez off of the poster because Thompson was on the Opening Day roster and will be back in two weeks any way with the September call-ups. I just have to hope that nobody in Marketing is a big Timo Perez fan!

Back to Blogging

I feel bad, I have asked my friends and family to check out my blog and then I haven't updated in over two months. The good news is that I have been very busy. In the time since I have not updated I have had a family vacation in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico and covered the 2006 All Star Game in Pittsburgh. The vacation was wonderful, no cell phone, voice mail or email! The All Star game was fun also, lots of late nights. Today was the hottest game of the year at Busch Stadium, 120˚, it was real tough with the black camera bodies. The bad news is tomorrow is supposed to be hotter! After a pretty bad June the Cardinals have started winning again, that always makes it easier to be around the ballpark. i'm sure as I end this post I will think of something else to add, so hopefully I will update again soon.

The First 10 Gamer

The season's first 10 game homestand has come and gone. Whew, I must be getting older. I remember when I thought the more the games the better. Now I'm getting a little tired towards the end of the homestand. Part of it has to be carrying my 75+ pounds of gear to and from the ballpark, I used to be able to leave gear in a locker at the beginning of a homestand and take it home at the end. But with a new ballpark I don't have a locker yet and I walk about 3 blocks among the fans instead of just walking across the street from the parking garage. I know, I know, waa waa waa whoa is me. I just need to get to the gym, lose some weight and get back into better shape and it won't be a big deal!
Well at least the Cardinals went 8-2 during this stretch. I shot alright although I felt that my timing was a little off. One nice thing that happened was Albert Pujols' 14h home run of the month, which set a MLB record of 14 home runs in the month of April. It's fun having Albert around, he seems to always be breaking some sort of record. So now it's edit, edit and some more editing and soon enough the team will be back for another 9 game homestand. At least we have a couple of days off during that one!

Superstitions

Let's see, the Cardinals have taken the series from the Cubs, swept the Pirates and now get ready for the Nationals. During Monday night's game I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, on Tuesday night I was wearing pants, a long sleeve shirt, a pullover and a jacket. One night 80 degrees, the next night it was 48 degrees, boy that sucked.
So back to the title of this post " Superstitions". On Sunday morning after we had taken 2 games from the Cubs, one of the field ushers came up to me and sarcastically said " Boy it's a little dirty around here, we need to sweep". For those of you not getting the meaning, he was referring to the Cardinals chance to sweep the Cubs and win all 3 games. Well of course we all no what happened the Cardinals lost, no sweep.
Now the next example was yesterday, the game is in the ninth inning and the Cardinals are one out away from Mark Mulder's 100th career victory, a Jason Isringhausen save and a 2 hour and 10 minute game. So the fan next to me tells his buddy out loud how fast the game has gone and they can still make it to wherever they want to go after the game with plenty of time. What happens? Izzy serves up a game-tying home run to strike-out King Jose Hernandez, but luckily Albert won the game in the bottom of the ninth 20 minutes later.
These 2 examples just help to prove that you can't talk about a victory before the game, or how fast the game is going or how the pitcher has a no-hitter going because baseball is full of superstitions that always seem to come true whether you believe in them or not.
I am actually adding to this post a day after I originally published it because last night during the game against the Nationals I noticed that their pitcher was throwing a one-hitter in the sixth inning. Well I looked over to the Post Dispatch photographer Chris Lee and said out loud "hey look Armas is throwing a ONE-HITTER". Chris laughed knowing about this post and sure enough the next Cardinals hitter got a base hit! No more one-hitter for Armas.
If only I could harness this power.

A Busy Weekend

The weather cooperated, the first homestand of the season is over, the Cards won some games, and now the depressing Blues season is history. It was definitely a busy weekend. I feel bad for the Blues, it was some of the saddest hockey I have ever seen and I love shooting hockey so I thought that I could look past the way they played, but it was tough. You could really tell that they tried to play well, they just couldn't play well as a team. Oh well, no playoffs for the first time in Blues history, and I feel sorry for my friend Mark, the Blues team photographer. But now I am ready for a summer of baseball in a new home. Starting this Friday with the Cubs, we begin a 10 game homestand, I should be pretty used to the new Busch Stadium after that. One of the nice things about the new ballpark is that there are a lot of good places for remote cameras, so hopefully I will use remotes more often, we have 5 day games during this next homestand. So I'm going to start getting my archive software ready for a new baseball season and as they say......PLAY BALL!!

A Hot One

Wow, it's the middle of April and instead of wearing a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, a jacket and batting gloves to shoot a ballgame, I wore a t-shirt and shorts and found myself looking for shade whenever I could. Of course I am talking about today's day game between the Brewers and the Cardinals at Busch. It was 90˚ out and probably reached 100˚ on the field. In 23 years of shooting baseball I don't remember a game this hot so early in the season. I am still trying to get used to the new park, I know I will enjoy shooting there. It will be interesting to see how the light changes with the season. I got a nice shot of Albert Pujols in the dugout, the light was really nice. Hopefully this weekend the weather will be good, we have two day games and I would like to walk around the park a bit during the game.

Welcome

Wow! Now I am really keeping up with the times, I have my own blog! If you are here and reading this then you already know who I am and what I do, so I won't bore you with details. I thought I would create this blog so that I can let friends and family know what I have been up to and what's going on in my life. So, enough of the small chat, on with the blogging.
Yesterday we finally had Opening Day at the new Busch Stadium. It was a pretty neat experience, seeing how the light will move across the field, seeing the actual game from the photo pits, trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B and so on. Thank God the Cards won, makes it a more fun day than it could have been. Hanging out with all of the photographers is also a good time and hearing what new angles or ideas they may have is also important in a new ballpark. Well, the Nashville Predators are here playing the Blues tonight so it might be a little interesting, they don't seem to play nice with one another. Thursday we have our first 12:10 Cards game at Busch so that will be fun and then day games on Saturday and Sunday with night Blues games following, I don't know if I will do both Blues games after baseball or not. That's all for now, so thanks for checking out my blog, I hope to update regularly, your comments are appreciated.