I'll Follow the Sun

One of the great things about college baseball is that it gets you outdoors in the winter and early spring, when you might otherwise be tempted to stare outside through a window.

In Carolina, we get wonderful days in February and March and miserable ones. I’ll write about the latter sometime, but today was magnificent: a high near 60 and beautiful sunny skies.

Sunday’s game might have been even nicer. I showed up a few innings late (because my son was visiting from Asheville) and found my baseball buddies’ seats empty. I looked around and noticed them under the roof on the concourse.

“What are you guys doing up there?” I asked.

“Had to get out of the sun!” came the reply.

In February. Nice.

Of course, the Friday and Saturday games had been cancelled or postponed due to freezing rain, but that’s how the start of college baseball season goes around here.

How do you beat t-shirt baseball on a February weekday afternoon? With a 9-run second inning to start, on the way to an 18-5 win over St. Johns. (I’d feel a little bad for St. Johns if they hadn’t knocked us out of the CWS last year.)

So, make it t-shirts, baseball, big innings and revenge. Tough combination to beat.

Speaking of tough to beat, this new freshman, Skye Bolt, is amazing. He came into the game batting .583. He’s made a number of clutch hits, mostly doubles, and he has jets. A St. Johns player crushed a ball into the right field gap, looking like a single from the moment it came off the bat. Bolt somehow ran it down and made a beautiful over-the-shoulder catch.

Glad he decided to forego the pros for three years of entertaining me.

Warm weather or cold, baseball promotions are hilarious. Today at the UNC game, they chose an older Carolina fan from the stands and told him to answer three questions correctly and he would win something. Don't recall what it was. Probably something like $2 off an oil change at Jiffy Lube.

Anyway, they asked him how tall the Bell Tower is (who knows) and he guessed 25 feet. (Turns out it's something like 176.) Then they asked him what the UNC motto Lux Libertas means. (Light and Liberty, if you know three words of Latin.)

He didn't seem like someone you would've met in Latin class.

So then they asked him the name of the campus site where students used to draw water. I didn't go to UNC, but I was pretty sure they were referring to the Old Well.

He said he had no idea.

Best part: they gave him the prize, anyway.

Even the warmest February afternoons are a fleeting thing. You can sit in the stadium in the sun and out of the wind and be perfectly comfortable. . . until the sun drops behind the dormitory building behind the right field fence. Then it’s winter again.

And the walk home after the game? That can be a mile-and-a-half walk into a cold wind in the dark. I pack accordingly.

This time of year I always carry a backpack with an additional jacket or pullover, earmuffs (the kind that wrap around the back of your head instead of going over the top), gloves (with little patches on the index fingers that work on my iPhone screen), and Faces Only sunscreen.

I pack a small LED flashlight with a red flashing light on the back because I'll be walking home  through dark neighborhoods with no sidewalks until Daylight Savings Time next month.

I also take an inflatable seat cushion, mostly because those seats can get awfully cold and the insulation helps. For the worst days, I always keep a half-dozen chemical handwarmer packets in the bottom of my pack. Oh, and bifocal sunglasses so I can watch the game and keep score (OK, and Tweet on occasion).

The first sign of winter usually comes in about the 5^th or 6^th inning on weekday games that begin at 3. It’s the shadow of the right field light post and, skinny as it is, the shadow always finds me. That’s my cue to switch to the heavier jacket.

Not long thereafter comes the inevitable encroachment of the dormitory shadow. And on colder days, that means migrating.

You can stay in the sun by migrating a few rows down toward the field between innings (I start in the top row along first baseline for best visibility of the field). Some of my friends move with me; some think it’s too much trouble.

(One day you'll look to see I've gone
For tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
Some day you'll know I was the one
But tomorrow may rain, so I'll follow the sun.
And now the time has come
And so my love I must go.
And though I lose a friend,
In the end you will know, oooh.)

The loss of friends is usually temporary; more on that in a sec.

At some point one runs out of verticality, as basketball announcers love to say, and must begin a counter-clockwise rotation around the field to follow the sun, one section at a time, ending up behind the home team dugout along the third baseline.

The dugout isn’t a problem but the sun is. At that point, in order to stay warm in the last vestiges of sunlight, you stare across the field and directly into the sun. I adjust the bill of my cap low to match the outfield fence and stare slightly downward. If the ball is hit into the air, though, there is no chance that you will see it.

Another thing college baseball makes you do is get out and meet people. You already have something in common with them, baseball. You make a lot of friends and, inevitably, you make a few mistakes. Sitting with people for 9 innings many times a year may expose the fact that a few of your new friends might be as happy as you to sit in different places.

That’s awkward at a baseball game. It’s like unfriending them on FaceBook. They see you sitting there in the stadium, not with them, and know it’s because you don’t want to sit with them.

Baseball parks need a feature like “unsubscribing” where you could just make a selection from a drop-down menu and never see that person again, nor let them see you, without letting them know that you’re still in the park.

Fortunately, today’s weather was delightful and I only moved once into sunnier seats and was comfortable for the remainder of the game.

I didn’t feel a need to unsubscribe anyone and I don’t think I said anything to make them want to unsubscribe me.

All around, a darned good day at the ballpark.

Sunscreen and Frostbite

Wow, what an Opening Day at the Bosh!

Temps in the mid-60’s under a clear, blue Carolina sky. My adopted team is ranked first in several preseason polls and my “birth team”, UK, is ranked number eight. I could have two reasons to go back to Omaha this year!

I'm often asked who I'd pull for if UK played UNC in the World Series. Man, would I like to find out!

Carolina defeated Seton Hall 1-0 and the game went down to the wire.

I’m excited. Can you tell I’m excited? Because I am. Excited!

I'm glad to be writing about baseball for a change instead of Social Security and Life-Cycle Economics. And I'm glad to have my mind off basketball because, frankly, after seeing Nerlens Noel's knee injury, I don't have the heart or stomach for hoops right now. I may be done for the year.

But at the Bosh, we had an excellent turnout for a mid-February game, no doubt due to the fabulous Friday afternoon weather. I had to put sunscreen on my face and actually perspired a bit sitting in the sunny stadium in shirtsleeves.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a large group of older friends that I sit with frequently at games. They’re all quite a bit older than me, and seem to have a lot more fun, now that I think about it.

Anyway, the entire gang was at Opening Day and abuzz with the news that two of them, Art and Gail, got engaged over the winter. It wasn’t news to me. 

I had met Gail on my Sunday morning walk through Chapel Hill a few weeks back. She approached me with her ring hand in my face and a big smile on hers. So happy for those two. They’re great people.

I got to show off my new College World Series cap. Kentucky and Carolina just missed the CWS last year. I had bought tickets, feeling certain that at least one of them would be in Omaha, but I ended up there alone. Had a wonderful time, but I’d like to do it again this year with one or both of my teams.

Carolina started a freshman in right field. His name is. . . I kid you, not . . . Skye Bolt. He played a great game, but I have to wonder what the hell his parents were thinking.  No one should name a kid Skye Bolt.

OK, maybe Usain Bolt could get away with it.

We got a new scoreboard this year. It has a larger TV screen, brighter numeral displays and an integrated speed gun display. Other than that, the Bosh looked pretty much as I had left it last June.

Season tickets came with $25 worth of vouchers to the Bosh concession stands this year. Let me put this into perspective. The Bosh concession stands have Major League aspirations. One of my baseball buddies claims the stadium is the most expensive restaurant in Chapel Hill.

Twenty-five bucks at the Bosh will buy the LARGE Coke in a light blue plastic UNC souvenir cup. . . but only one. I’m saving my voucher for warmer weather.

The Cats won their game today, too. They beat UNC Asheville 9-2. The good times just keep rolling.  Hey, I told you it was a great day.

Oh yeah, the game. So, Carolina led 1-0 going into the top of the ninth. Kent Emanuel pitched a complete game for the Heels, unusual for so early in the season. Seton Hall used a single, an error, a groundout back to the mound and a sac bunt to advance runners to second and third with two outs.

With the tying run on third, Seton Hall’s Sal Annunziata hit a Baltimore Chop back to the mound. It was the kind of chop that often goes just over the fielder's outstretched glove to score the run and break the home team fans’ hearts. But Emanuel is 6’ 4” and was able to time his leap perfectly to snag the ball and throw out the runner at first to end the game.

I’m telling you, it was this close. If Emanuel is 6’ 3½” we’re in extra innings, best case.

I’m so happy to be back at the ballpark. Especially with beautiful weather in mid-February. The forecast for tomorrow’s game is rain, turning to snow late in the day, with highs around 40 degrees.

Such is the nature of college baseball. Sunscreen today, frostbite tomorrow.