Baseball
I rush home from work, agonize over which Twins shirt to wear (“We won the last three times I wore this, but lost twice before that…”), watch Jason adjust his ballcap, grab the tickets and scorebook and drive into downtown. We navigate leftover rush hour traffic and confused drivers and pull into a stuffed-to-the-gills parking lot. We hold hands and dodge ticket scalpers and people who stop in the middle of the too-narrow concourses in the Dome for no reason. We smell fresh Dome dogs and mini donuts and beer. We grab pizza and subs and balance our bottles of pop that are handed to us without caps (stadium rule). We are recognized by the ticket checker at our section and admitted with a smile and nod. We greet our usual usher, nod to the guy in our row who’s been to every home game for years, wait for our baseball friends from last year to walk their adorable 2-year-old daughter to their seats across the aisle. We are accosted immediately by the fan photographer and smile broadly as we stash our food behind our backs. For three hours, there is no stress. No work, no job hunt, no vehicles needing brake work, no pets throwing up on the comforter. Just baseball and marking down the plays in the scorebook with a freshly sharpened pencil. There’s White Sox fans sitting next to us, struck silent by their team’s lack of offense. There’s the loud chatty guy behind us, trying to impress his date with baseball facts that are full of inaccuracies. “Pierzynski sure is calling a good game tonight,” he says, even though Pierzynski isn’t playing. “Greinke threw a perfect game two weeks ago,” he claims, even though it was Buehrle in his last start a week ago. A 9-year-old boy stands in the aisle and coerces the crowd to start the wave. His motivational speaker act is successful and everyone cheers. The fame goes to his head and he turns annoying, pleading and cajoling for people to do the wave for another half hour, until the good-natured crowd turns on him and starts yelling for him to sit down. A little girl with glasses gets hit by a foul ball and everyone immediately starts waving for the first aid team, which stays with her for awhile offering ice packs and bandages. A perfectly planned attack of beach balls erupts in the early innings, 40 or 50 beach balls tossed around at once from the upper deck. Our usher mutters, “Oh my GAWD,” when she sees it, and sprints out of her chair to intercept any from reaching the field, grabbing a pen from her purse to puncture the balls she captures. Three beach balls make it onto the field, where the ball boy grabs them, rips them apart and throws them under the bullpen bench. The game is close, 3-2, and the 9th inning is a nailbiter, with guys on first and third and our closer having recently blown a save. But we win and spill out of the Dome into the cool clear night. “Good game,” we say to each other as we head back to real life. “Good game.”
