Future Redbirds

With a month and then some of the baseball season now in the books and temperatures holding steady in the eighties, it’s clear that spring is now firmly entrenched. Yesterday at Hammons Field there was another clear reminder of spring as school buses filled the nearby parking lots and legions of small children marched through the gates on a spring field trip to the ballpark. School children posses an irrepressible energy this time of year as the beautiful weather sets in and they begin to sense their impending furlough.

Normally, I might have turned around and headed for the nearest radio, but the company paid for my ticket and how do you turn down the opportunity to spend the afternoon at the ballgame instead of the office? (It’s probably worth noting that I work for a nonprofit – something I gave up a career as a work-from-home freelancer for – and even though nobody wears cork sandals to work, it’s probably more enlightened than the typical corporation, hence the day at the game.) There was also something redeeming, even somewhat pleasantly subversive, about seeing hundreds if not thousands of kids enjoying a day at the ballpark in the midst of No Child Left Behind’s attempt to turn schools into soulless testing factories.

The pregame hoopla was especially tedious for this game, as the day before I was on the docket to toss out the first pitch only to have those 15 minutes ripped away in one heartbreaking phone call. It’s too disappointing to recount. Bitter and determined to ignore the waste of time that fills the minutes before the game gets underway, we instead turned our attention to whether or not Cory Rauschenberger is a starter or a reliever. When he drilled Arkansas’ Cody Fuller just above the knee with a sinking fastball, neither became the consensus answer in our section. He has a 54.00 ERA as a reliever, and in his last start he gave up 4 earned runs in 5 innings while striking out just one batter and walking none. But then, after picking Fuller off at first on a dubious call, he issued two beautiful strike outs to the two and three hitters. As the game went on and he continued to pitch well, that conversation turned to how the 23-year-old would fair in Memphis next season and whether or not he had a big league future.

Despite Colby Rasmus’ status as uber-prospect within the organization, Joe Mather has unquestionably become the fan favorite in Springfield. He may be the only player on the team to have his own chant – “Let’s Go Joe” – that quickly builds to a stadium-wide chorus. When he came to plate in the bottom of the first, hysteria took hold. The fourth graders in front of us paused from decimating their paper cones of popcorn to join the chant and even found enough attention to watch his entire at-bat. The section beyond first base filled with color coordinated school children felt positively North Korean, and they gave a wild but rhythmic cheer familiar to a rally for Kim Jong Il when Mather hit his RBI single in the first.

I have no idea how Juan Encarnacion, who looks like he’s in the midst of a terrible vacation (maybe he hasn’t been to Bass Pro), beat out that infield hit for a single, but by the end of the third inning their myriad collection of singles and walks had resulted in 2 more runs than the much sexier long balls that gave Arkansas their two runs.

Aside: the Travelers away jerseys say Little Rock on the front, even though they’re the Arkansas Travelers. Why is this? I think we could probably just assume that they play in Little Rock. They only other viable options would be West Memphis, and as you may know, Memphis already has a minor league team, or Fayetteville, where everyone could give two hoots about minor league baseball with the Hogs in town. Moving on…

By the fourth inning it became a pitcher’s duel, and not a very exciting one at that. The masses of school children, lured by the promise of wrestling and chasing each other around in the lush grass of general admission and the inflatable dirt collecting castles that they jump around in, lost interest in the game. We headed for a friend’s suite and I went for a much needed beer as the rain started to fall in earnest, making the fifth inning a soggy one. The game moved along at a snail’s pace by this point, and I tolerated the tired antics of the activities host or MC or whatever those guys are called, in this case it was a recently fired local TV news reader. Oh, that between innings stuff is horrible, and when people use term “bush league” to refer to things of low quality they must surely be speaking of the insufferable trivia games and musical chairs and other mind-numbingly dull regalement hawking the wares of local businesses that define minor league games. This stuff makes the minor league games last a minimum of three and half hours, regardless of how fast teams make outs.

In the box scores, you don’t get to see anything but the results. Which is a shame, because Colby Rasmus continued to make solid contact as did Mather, but sometimes a pretty line drive goes directly to the outfielder’s glove and all you see in the paper the next day is 1 for 3 with a walk. With Anderson out of the lineup and Jay nursing an injury and who the heck is Jason Motte in for the save, the throngs of school kids only saw part of the Cardinals’ future. Still, it wasn’t a bad glimpse, and even a dull AA game beats another day of having their childhood repressed inside the windowless salt mines of their youth, and a baseball game is always a pleasant harbinger of that sorely missed three month furlough.