He's just a man and not a freak

[austin_dern]

Nearby is a minor league baseball team. It's an exceedingly minor league, almost invisible: the team has the players who hope to be called up to a team where they might be called up to a team where they might be called up to the Phillies. They moved in about five years ago and my father had never before gone. Free batting helmet night finally got him to take action. He left a message saying to be home at 5:15 if I wanted to go, allowing us a scanty hour and 20 minutes to cover the ten-minute drive. When he finally got home about 5:45, he wondered if we could possibly make it.

Despite a parking lot jam of almost two cars ahead of us we squeezed in, although we never figured out where they were giving away helmets. They were giving away paper fans, soda can cozies, programs, pens, notepads, and more that we rejected, making the $9 admission quite a bargain.

And there's entertainment: for one, the mascot, Buster. Buster looks sort of like a transporter accident merged the Phillie Phanatic with Elmo, but he or she's good-spirited about it. And most every half-inning saw another diversion, like somebody shaking around a box labelled with a cable company name, or trying to make a half-court-distance free throw basketball shot. After the game another contest had people tossing purchased tennis balls at hoops on the infield for prizes. It was the sixth-inning race of giant eyeballs from center field to home plate that baffled me most.

Oh, and there was a fine baseball game, very swiftly played, with the lead never more than about two runs and changing repeatedly. Despite this patrons kept wandering off. The official attendance was a touch under six thousand; I don't see how more than maybe 800 were present at the same time. By the seventh inning even Buster seemed to have drifted off. It was fine when the huge guy in front of me obstructing my photographs left, but he quit about four innings in. It hardly seems worth going for that short a time.

I was indirectly touched by one of the other giveaways, the T-shirts tossed from the field. One of the bundles hit me and rebounded to one of the people sitting next to me. As I didn't want the T-shirt that was fine by me; luckily, my father was off getting a pretzel so I didn't need to explain my refusal to fight for the chance to wear a realtor's logo on my chest.

Trivia: At the start of the 1941 baseball season -- through April 21-- Joe DiMaggio managed a .528 batting average. Source: 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports, Mike Vaccaro.

Currently Reading: Edison: A Biography, Matthew Josephson.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Buster is.. a curious mascot. I have the impression that it's an off-the-shelf mascot suit of some sort that's designed for generic appeal as minor league teams will switch their brand identity every few seasons. He certainly doesn't look like your team's current animal. Nor a Cape Fear Croc or a Fayetteville General.

I also can't understand early departure from a sporting event; but then again I stick around for all the credits in a movie as well.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

If I had a team, I'd call 'em "The Baseball Players". The whole team would be mascots.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Why, that's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant! To the secret laboratory, Kronk!

Wait, you'd need mascots that could throw overhand.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You're right that it looks like it's meant to be easily matched to whatever the team is, although my initial thought was that it was meant to vaguely resemble the Phanatic, so that it could be assigned to whoever was the very little league Phillies associate that year. Besides, I don't think you can really do this team's animal in costume without losing most of the ability to interact with people by, say, shining the heads of the bald patrons.

I could see leaving the game early if it had run on for, like, twenty innings and was in danger of reaching into its fourth day of play, or if like that school team in Japan one side scored 66 runs in the first two innings, but when the game is moving swiftly and the lead is reasonably small, leaving so early suggests the game wasn't actually interesting to you in the first place.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I really quite enjoy watching the local team, the Lansing Lugnuts. The stadium is not far from my house, in easy biking distance, and close enough that you can hear the fireworks after Friday and Saturday night games (and thus know how late the game ran). Speaking of fireworks, they put on a really amazing fireworks show, and you're much closer to the fireworks than most venues let you get on the Fourth of July.

I love sitting in the cheap seats, drinking a couple of frozen margaritas and perhaps eating an ice cream sandwich, enjoying a sunny summer evening.

The Lugnuts' mascot is Big Lug, a sort of cartoon dinosaur-looking thing with lugnuts for nostrils. He used to have a smaller "kid" version as a sidekick -- Little Lug -- but that one hasn't been seen in a few years. I heard they didn't have the budget for him anymore, or something. I was really disappointed a few years back to read that, up until the eleventh hour, the team was going to be named the Lansing River Dragons. The change to Lugnuts was sufficiently last minute that there had already been some River Dragons merchandise made. I would sure love to see what logo was going to go with that. That would have been much cooler than "lugnuts." On the other hand, there are already two teams with dragon logos in our league -- the Dayton Dragons and the Fort Wayne Wizards, whose logo is a dragon wearing wizard robes.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Neatly enough both my Singapore and my last Troy, New York, apartment were comfortably near school baseball fields, although I was situated where I couldn't actually see anything without leaving my living room. I would just hear the pinging of balls on metal bats.

Curious that dragons would be so overly represented, but I suppose if the premise is popular in one town it's likely popular in nearby areas too. Dragon wizards seems like it might be overloading the character, although I guess wizards got a nice burst of popularity the last decade or so.

Lug nut nostrils are an odd concept, though, I have to admit. They don't seem exactly practical. Now, neck bolts, those make sense.