A Day at the Game

Karen and I drove into Oakland today, for a special event at McAfee Coliseum. It was Barry Zito figurine day. We lined up early to make sure that we would get a free figurine, and we were not disappointed. You can see Karen above, proudly holding the unopened box, figurine inside.

It's amazing to think that in our few years here in America, both Karen and I have become such big baseball fans. After all, we are Canadians in a country where the Canadian national anthem is not even worth a decent performance, a performance like the Star Spangled Banner gets every game. When the Toronto Blue Jays are in town, Oh Canada is only worth a pre-recorded organ version that sounds like it was taped at the municipal hockey rink in Red Deer Alberta, haltingly played by the part-time organist from the local United Church.

Yet despite our questionable national origin, we are such big fans that we can now carry on conversations with other baseball nuts about things like pitch-counts and slugging percentages.

But my love for baseball did not begin with a love for the major drama that happens on the field. Like any other baseball fan, I love ninth inning heroics and a well executed double-play. But it's the rest of the game that I first loved, and still do.

Like today. We sat in the left-field bleachers, where the hard-core fans sit. We don't go often enough to be considered hard-core, like the guy who is always wearing that green hockey mask, or the elderly, stick thin man in the tight black pants and Buddy Holly glasses, dancing with his pom-poms to a song only he can hear. We're not that serious. But we are regular enough to catch small pieces of the other action, all the minor drama that happens off the field. This is the drama I love to watch.

This drama comes in the polite rejection of the balding man, sitting in the row front of us, by the woman who is more interested in someone else. She's more interested in the guy who doesn't get high fives from his friends, but high twos, because he only has a pinky and a thumb on his left hand. So all his friends hold thier three middle fingers down, leaving only their pinkys and thumbs up, when their right hand meets his left.

I love to watch how the gulls begin to fly when the bottom of the ninth inning comes around, knowing that they will soon be able to attack all those half-eaten hotdogs and peanut shells, because the game is almost over and the fans are about to leave. Even today, when the game went into extra innings, the gulls picked up on this, too. They only dappled the field with their shadows when they heard loud cheering, the kind of cheering you hear when a game was just won by the home team.

I love calling Joe, Julie and Grace, good friends who are A's fans but far away from Oakland, and telling them I'm at the game. (I love calling Jane, too, but not today. She's the biggest Barry Zito fan I know, and I was afraid she would be jealous of my figurine.)

I love that a seven-year old boy gave me his last peanut.

I love the fact that the elderly lady who was hit in the leg with a foul ball, got a souvenir baseball to take home. It wasn't the foul ball that hit her, despite the the chant from the crowd, "give-her-the-ball, give-her-the-ball." The man who got that foul ball, on the rebound off her shin, wouldn't do it. But she got another ball from an emissary from the left-field bleachers. He had collected a ball caught during batting practice, and presented her with that one. She turned to us all and gave a happy thumbs-up.

This is why I like baseball. For the the game, yes. But more-so for the friendship, and above all, for the drama that takes place in the bleachers.