Thursday, May 27, 2010

The night the lights went out.

So anyone that watched the game last night saw that during the 4th inning last night, the lights went out at Wrigley.

I didn't hear an exact cause, but the rumor going around the stands was that a fire over on Grace and Racine cause the power to flicker, resetting the lights which then took about 20 minutes to cool down to restart.

I didn't bring a camera (since no one told me the lights were going out), but I did try to capture a few pictures on my phone.

 This was almost immediately after the lights went out.  Probably the coolest site was all the flashes from cameras that were going off at that point.  About a dozen of the lights obviously were on backup generators or had some sort of battery back up to help them survive the power flicker.  This gave enough light to illuminate the field to the point where people weren't bumping into each other.  If you look at the picture carefully, you can see the bright spots on the field behind third base and in the left field corner from those lights.

The view of the bleachers...as you can see, at this point, there was still a little day light.  Everything in and around Wrigley suffered from the power flicker.  Electronic scoreboards all went off as well...in fact the little board the hangs from the roof on the 3rd base side of the main grand stands (where they show the pitch velocity), that board never actually functioned again...it was all messed up.

Due to the time of the outage, the sky's quickly darkened and it appeared that things were getting gloomier after 15 minutes or so as you can tell in the picture below.


During yesterday's game, Jim Belushi, chronic embarrassment for the city of Chicago, was sitting just behind the Cubs on deck circle with what appear to be some of the Ricketts boys (and maybe Crane Kenney?  I couldn't tell.)  Well when the lights went out, Belushi and a couple of the Ricketts clan disappeared...while one of them went on the field and was trying to talk to the umpires about what was going on.

The pressbox was actually dark for about 2 or 3 minutes too...but the lights did come back on there...about the same time the lights that illuminate the grandstands came back on.

Finally, after about 20 to 25 minutes, the lights had cooled down enough to come back on...and slowly, one by one they started to come back on.


Considering it was a slow game to start with, you can understand how this game ended up going until past 11pm last night...I didn't get home until well after 2 am (which is why this blog post is so late)

Oh...and Gorzelanny sucked to the point he'll probably be demoted...more on that some other time.

Cubs lost.