Baseball. It is Good.

Baseball.  It is Good.



Went with the family to a Chattanooga Lookouts game last night.  A hot, muggy summer night that's perfect (in my mind) for watching a baseball game.  Bellsouth Park, the Lookouts' home, one of the better minor league stadiums I've visited, was filled to about 80% capacity, as the Lookouts (the AA affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds) played the Carolina Mudcats (affiliated for the first year with the Florida Marlins).

My sister had free general admission seats.  There's not a bad seat in Bellsouth Park, and we found an excellent vantage point behind home plate.  On such a muggy night, I actually appreciated the bleacher style seating and the slightly less-than-capacity crowd.  We were able to spread out on the bench a little bit.   Had we decided to move down into the box seats, the chairs would have had us stuck together in a proximity not entirely comfortable on the muggy July night.  The bleachers gave us breathing room.

The game itself was fairly fast paced.  The Lookout pitchers worked quickly to combine on a three hit shutout of the Mudcats, whose team philosophy seems to be based muchly on the teachings of Cubs' manager Dusty "Walking's for Sissies" Baker:  swing at any pitch between the nose and the toes.  I was rooting, more or less, for the Lookouts, so I was pleased by the Mudcats' tendency to put the ball in play usually by the third pitch of the at bat, even if it meant popping weakly to the infield.  Had any Mudcats' fans (or Marlins' fans looking at prospects) made the trek, I know the urge to scream "Take a Pitch" would have been near unbearable.

The crowd was pleasant and polite, but a little quiet for my tastes.  I think little yelling and screaming is good, so long as it's honestly enthusiastic and imaginative.  Though, to my discredit, I didn't help out any.  I think I yelled at the umpire once for a close call at first base, which led to one of the Mudcats three hits.

A few interesting things I wanted to note:

Part of the discussion up in our area of the bench was over the home plate umpire.  I hadn't been paying much attention during player or umpire introductions, so I missed the name of the home plate umpire.  We had a good vantage point for watching the strike zone, and I was impressed with the consistency of calls (the home ump was giving the inside corner but was a bit stingy on outside pitches, but she was consistent about it). While noting this, there was something I noticed.  I said to myself, that umpire's awful dainty.

And I got to looking, and I tried hard to listen for the ball and strike calls, but we were too far up for me to hear much.

I finally asked my sister what she thought of the umpire.  "Is it a girl?"

We both looked for a while.  Got Mom and Dad in on the discussion. We couldn't decide for sure. Mom was fairly sure, but the rest of us were on the fence. It could be a girl, or just a really skinny guy.

Finally got to looking this morning, and sure enough, for the second year, the Southern League employs Ria Cortesio. She's been umpiring a few years now. I did not know that. And we move one tiny bit of info from the gigantor pile of Things Tommy Didn't Know to the teeny pile of Things Tommy Knows.

She did good work.  Hope she gets to move up.

A couple of other things of note about the night:

My sister works at the Creative Discovery Museum, which is located pretty much right next to Bellsouth Park.  She lent us a work parking pass to park right behind the museum.  We thought we'd be pretty punk to have such nice parking spots, but nobody was policing the parking passes, and the lot was pretty much full by the time we got to the stadium.

One of the things I was sorry to think I was leaving behind in Middle Tennessee was Fat Mo's, a really great small chain of hamburger places.  Imagine my surprise in the last couple of weeks to find that Chattanooga has its own Fat Mo's!  If you're in the area, and you want to eat a fine, fine hamburger, it's on Lee Highway, not far from the Shallowford Road intersection.  I ended up eating their twice yesterday...once when the Filthy Hippy and I wandered down there to pick up a bed, and again before the game.  I've had my Fat Mo's fix for a while....

Like I said, the game was right around 75% to 80% of stadium capacity with the crowd.  Nice crowd.  Lots of kids.  Lots of well behaved kids.

Even after the trip to Fat Mo's, I procured a baseball hot dog.  The best place for hot dogs is the baseball stadium.  There is nothing like a stadium dog.  You know, if I put a couple of franks in a pot and boil them up at my house, they're a simple but fairly pedestrian lunch.  Grinded meat and rodent hair in a skin.  But at the stadium, they're the food of the Gods.  They taste better.  They look better (maybe it's the wrapper).  They smell So Much better.  My friend Steven, who is a resolute vegetarian, has admitted to enjoying the wondrous scent of a stadium hot dog.  I think he was even tempted once out of his vegetarianism on the special Wednesday Quarter Dog special up at relatively lovely Greer Stadium one afternoon.

I'm going to briefly mention stadium etiquette.  There was a feller who'd moved down from general admission with his brood of kids to a set of box seats just a few rows down from where they'd been sitting.  It was early in the game, the second inning or so.  And the people whose seats they were sitting in came to claim them.  The guy and his family didn't want to move.  The usher came to resolve the problem, and the squatter decided to use the argument that since the game had started the original ticket holder had lost his claim to the seats.  It was a short exchange, but the usher told him that he could move out of the guy's seat (he didn't even tell him to go back to general admission), or he could leave....  Such a thing would normally be an ugly conversation, but I enjoyed how polite all parties were.  Even the guy squatting in the seats.

Polite is good, when it comes to stadium etiquette.  That's the first thing I want to say. We're all there to chill and have a good time.  There's no need to be a jerk to somebody.

Like I said previously, there's not a bad seat in Bellsouth Park.  In fact, I like the general admission seats better than the box seats.  But if you're wanting to move down from general admission , I'll say that I'm not morally opposed to it.   Lord knows I saw an armload of games for free up in Nashville one summer thanks to my friend Jophes, so I'm not caught up the moral ambiguity of the subject.  And hey, if you can find seven together to move down to for you and the rest of the Brady Bunch, more power to ya, feller.

But if somebody comes to claim the seat, you gotta move.  That's all there is to it.  You don't have an argument.  No legs to stand on.  In such a laid back environment, you're not going to get a lot of crap from anybody, unless you go starting it by arguing that it's yours just because you're sitting in it.  If that was the case, I'd get to play because I'd be moving down to the dugout any chance I got.  If somebody tells you to move because it's their seat, then move, and don't start nothing.

That's the etiquette talk.

The Lookouts won the game 6-0 on the strength of their pitching.  Three-hit shutout.  Good crowd, most of them stayed till the end.

All in all, a good night of baseball.  Here's hoping to go back soon....