We arrived in Pittsburgh last night after our rained out game in Mahoning Valley and met up with our friend Suresh from Philadelphia, who will be joining us for the weekend. Friday morning Mike and I headed to the Andy Warhol Museum, an artist who is at the top of my list. The museum is located right next to PNC Park, so next time you go to see a ballgame there stop by the museum first. It definitely has one of the better gift shops as far as museums go. After running a few errands and exchanging our temporary rental car and getting our beloved Chrysler 300M back (upgraded model!), we headed to PNC Park to catch batting practice (see picture above) and ate at the Outback Steakhouse located inside the park, which had nice views of the field. Today’s tickets were given to us by StubHub, and they were some of the best seats I’ve had at a MLB game yet this year. We sat right behind home plate, which offers some great views of downtown Pittsburgh.

Some interesting notes about PNC Park—the right field wall is 21 feet high, which is in honor of Roberto Clemente, who wore number 21 while playing for the Pirates. The stadium is very compact, seating just 38,500 fans at full capacity—almost 10,000 less than the old Three Rivers Stadium. During the game, the Pirates pitcher only made one mistake—allowing a 2-run homer to the Astros Carlos Lee in the 2nd inning that just cleared the fence. Those two runs proved to be the difference, as the Pirates weak offense just couldn’t get it together tonight. After the game, the park treated the fans to a fireworks show over the river.

Later that night, Mike and I decided to head to a local bookstore a few miles away to get the new copy of Harry Potter. By the time we showed up at 11:55 PM, the store was packed and there was a line of 300+ people standing in line down the block. Surprisingly, the majority of people in line were around 18 to 25, and not little kids. Even more surprisingly were the number of people dressed up in Harry Potter attire, including a bunch of kids who were acting as Dementors, which are soul-sucking fiends. We shot a great video of these so-called Dementors, but it needs some editing before it will ever make its way on to the site. 90 minutes later we had our copies of Harry Potter and returned back to the hotel for a few hours of sleep before our long doubleheader on Saturday.