Day 161 - Go to a Minor League Baseball Game

Date: June 16th, 2010

For most of my life, I wondered why baseball was considered "America's Pastime".  I mean, its kind of neat.  Its better than soccer, though most things are.  Realistically, I would've always considered football to be America's pastime.  I mean, think about it.  Violence is not only allowed - its part of the game.  It comes in short, quick bursts so our adorably nonexistent American attention spans can still keep up.  The ball itself is non-conformist - there's nothing more American than individualism even at the cost of quality. And finally, the points are crazy and disorganized (in a move that I've long believed was to pay homage to our refusal to cop to the metric system).

More importantly, I've generally found baseball quite boring.  The one exception being a Tigers game I went to with my friend Tim back in August.  Even then, it was Tim's delightful company that made it a nice afternoon.  The baseball was just window dressing.

I think the thing I had trouble wrapping my head around was the pomp and circumstance at the game.  There was this altered sense of pace at the professional ball game I went to back in August.  The ambiance insisted that I feel that edge-of-my-seat, action-packed, every-play-matters kind of emotion the entire time.  The fact of the matter is, in most games, every pitch doesn't matter.  Every swing doesn't win or lose the game.  Every play is not mind-blowingly interesting.  When I went to the Tigers game, the atmosphere seemed to insist that I treat things that way. 

I decided that before I gave up on baseball entirely, I would hit up a minor league game and see if there was a different feel to it.  Ok, not understanding the allure of baseball was only part of it.  The other part is that I just had to see for myself what the deal with the newly christened Cooley Law School Stadium was.

This, apparently, is the deal.

Seeing a minor league game taught me to appreciate baseball in a way I never understood before.  The majors has this insistence on a superfast pace.  But that's not what baseball is about.  Baseball isn't a short story, its a saga.  Going to a game is an experience, meant to be savored and enjoyed.  As we rounded into the third inning and I'd settled into my seat with a soda and some popcorn, I didn't feel a care in the world.  Work?  A distant memory from an hour before.  School?  Not a concern until the fall.  Parking ticket?  Whatever shall be shall be.

Going to a minor league game made me appreciate the joy of baseball for what it is.  Baseball is a story.  It builds on itself so that while each individual pitch doesn't necessarily change the course of the game, you never know which one will be the one.  I saw amazing strike outs, ground-rule doubles, two utterly unbelievable catches in the outfield and several down-to-the-wire slide plays.  And which pitch would yield these delights, well, you just couldn't know until it was thrown.

I started thinking about what, if anything, could make the game more complete.  There were amazing plays, great popcorn, on-the-field radio contests, the kiss cam (a stadium favorite for sports of all kinds), ballpark franks and at least one obnoxiously overzealous fan.  Dude, we're up by five runs.  Let it go.  Then it hit me - about the only baseball related experience I was thusfar missing --- catching a foul ball.  I thought about this for a few moments and realized how unlikely that was.  People have season tickets for decades in prime territory and never catch one.  I, on the other hand, was in balcony seating, about halfway down the third base line.  Not in any kind of position to have a ball come anywhere near me.  So I gave up and went back to watching the game.

Then I caught a foul ball.

Icing.  Meet cake.

Going to the Lugnuts game was definitely the full experience.  In addition to the fact that they are an incredibly talented bunch of guys.  They solidly defeated Toledo, but made it darn interesting in the process.  

Now, some of the more avid baseball fans in the audience may have noticed that I said nothing about singing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".  I decided that I wanted to conclude the entry with the words to the song.  The thing is, I really understood what the heck that song was about for the first time when I went to the Lugnuts game.  It captures that feeling of escape and calm that just completely surrounded the game.  It wasn't about constant, minute-by-minute blitz plays.  It was about taking some time to smell the grass, feel the breeze and take in a show.  The song captures that perfectly:

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.