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.