Beisboru
I’ve been trying to find fun stuff to do with Charles before The Baby comes and takes us out of the power play and into man-to-man coverage. Earlier in the month we went to the zoo (always a favorite for me; I love a good capybara). Yesterday, I discovered that as a result of Monday evening’s rainout, the Wilmington Blue Rocks were going to play a twi-night doubleheader, with the first game starting at 5:05. I figured we’d get there late, stay to the end of the first game, and then sneak out before the rains started.
I picked up Charles at the usual time and asked him if he wanted to go to a baseball game, and he was SUPER-excited. (One great thing about children is that they cannot hide enthusiasm: they actually say things like “Yay!” and “Wow!” completely unironically.) So we got in the car and headed down to Frawley Stadium. Charles, being under the age of 4, required no ticket, so I bought a general admission ticket for $6. We went inside and were each given a free Rocky Bluewinkle hat, after which Charles got to meet the moose himself and shake hands. Then we went and found a little bench just outside the reserved seating area to watch a few at-bats.
Next to us, a stadium usher was chatting with an EMT (of which there were several around; I wasn’t sure if the Blue Rocks’ fans had a particular problem with coronary thromboses, or what; I can report that most of the fans, myself included, are well into the “obese” area of BMI measurement), discussing what idiots the fans were for thinking that they could move out of the General Admission seating into the almost utterly empty “Reserved” area. Anyone that tried was summarily dismissed to the bleacher seats. By the end of the game, there were hundreds of people crowded into “GA,” and literally tens of fans in reserved seating. Supposedly they would be permitted to upgrade their seating for the second game, but c’mon, Blue Rocks management. That’s kind of a silly policy on a Tuesday evening with threatening skies.
We watched a few at-bats, and I tried to explain to Charles what the fielding positions were; he grasped “pitcher” and “catcher” because, well, they pitch and catch, respectively. We got to see one Salem player knock one out of the yard, and I thought of Harry Kalas. Charles’s attention span being what it is, we had to find something to do after a bit, and got some chicken fingers and fries. Again, his attention span failed us as I got him to eat approximately 6 fries and no chicken before he spotted what he called a “trampoline,” but was in fact a small moon bounce. I insisted we eat some dinner, but he was too amp’d up. I finished off the chicken and threw most of the fries away (in our defense, the fries appeared to have been cooked during the last Democratic presidential administration) and wandered over to the moon bounce, where I was charged $2 for the privilege of watching my son bound around with wild abandon.
Once I finally convinced him to take a break, we headed up into the General Admission area, to the top row, where he watched baseball for about 30 seconds and then spent 10 minutes watching trucks go by on I-95. After a time, he decided he needed some popcorn, so we went off to retrieve that, and then returned to the bleachers to watch some more. By then it was close to 7pm, and Charles was entering a loopy state wherein he would say deliberately unintelligible things and then giggle uncontrollably, so I realized it was getting to be time to go. We shuffled out of there back to the car and were home and watching Thomas do his Tank Engine Thang by 7:30.
The Blue Rocks won, 8-3.
