Baseball
Last night we went to a Round Rock Express game. It was so much more fun than I expected it to be. Before this I’d only ever been to one college game many years ago in the middle of the daytime scorching heat with terrible seats way up high despite the fact that the stands were only about ¼ full. Still, that was my only baseball experience prior to last night so I expected to be a bit bored. I was quite pleasantly surprised.
When we arrived, the air in the stadium seemed to be buzzing (even more so than at the one pro hockey game I’ve attended). It was a gorgeous August evening, pleasantly warm with a nice breeze, perfect weather for a baseball game. First we found the beer and big pretzels, and then we found our seats. I’m not sure if it was the beer or our close seats (only 14 rows up from the field) but something really made this game exciting. Oh wait, it could have been that we were sitting in the foul ball section and almost every single batter popped one right into our seats. The likelihood of getting pegged in the head by a fast moving leather sphere will certainly force a person to pay attention to the game.
It was early in the game when we almost got our hands on a ball. It looked like it was heading right for us, but landed a few seats over across the aisle. It bounced once and the guy on the end of that row caught it with one hand without even spilling the chili fries he was holding in his other hand. We were all quite impressed. Not long after that another one headed for us but landed 2 rows back. A little girl about 7 or so tried to catch it right out of the sky, but it smacked her hand pretty hard and she lost it. She did her best to hold back her tears, but a few seconds later she was whimpering and clutching her hand. I hope she didn’t break anything; she did spend the rest of the game with an ice pack on her hand though. The guy a few seats over who got the ball when the little girl lost it was nice enough to give it to her, so I was happy when he caught a squishy souvenir ball during the 7th inning stretch. I thought the little girl was quite a trooper and handled herself well, not wailing and making a big scene. Especially since a few minutes later a left handed batter sent a foul into the stands on the opposite side of the field and that ball caused a whole gaggle of teenage girls to scatter and scream so loud we could easily hear their high-pitched shrieking all the way over on our side.
Baseball, as it turns out, is a pretty low scoring game. At the bottom of the 7th we were still tied with the Salt Lake City Bees 0-0 when we finally made something happen with 2 runs. We scored again in the 8th and ended up winning the game 3-0.
So what did I learn from this wonderful summer evening? I learned that cotton candy has flavors. I never knew this until the cotton candy lady came to our section shouting, “COTTON CANDY!!!! GET YOUR BLUE RASPBERRY AND STRAWBERRY COTTON CANDY!!!!” Seriously, I always thought cotton candy just had colors, blue pink and the occasional yellow and that it was just cotton candy-flavored, or more accurately sugar-flavored. I had to check this out for myself so I got some of the blue stuff and it tasted like…cotton candy. Maybe my palette is not sophisticated enough to detect these new flavors.
Anyway, we had a great time. I think we are now baseball fans, and I guess since Tim grew up in Houston and the Express are a farm team for the Houston Astros, then that makes us Astros fans too. We’re planning on attending a couple more games this season if we can make it happen with our schedules.
