Baseball, Dylan and the Queen of Hearts

 
  
Baseball is the "yes, but. . ." sport.

I had the pleasure of meeting the nicest young couple from Raleigh at a UNC baseball game last week. They had both attended the University of St. Andrews, the oldest university in Scotland. She came back to Raleigh after graduation and soon decided she couldn’t live without him so she just went to Ireland and got him.

He didn't put up a fight.

I love Southern women.

They were an adorable couple, I’ll call them Dylan and Allison.

Dylan grew up in Northern Ireland. Allison is a North Carolinian. He told me his favorite sports growing up were rugby and Formula One racing.

(Formula One is very big all over Europe and now Texas, two places with absolutely nothing else in common.)

Dylan knew almost nothing about baseball and he wanted me to explain the game in detail as it progressed.

“Three strikes and the batter is out?” Dylan asked.

“Right.”

“How do they decide when the other team gets to bat?”

“Each team bats until they get three outs,” I explained.

“And they play for 9 innings?” 

“Yes, but. . . if the home team is ahead after the top of the ninth inning, they only play 8 ½ innings. And if the game is tied, they keep playing complete innings until the winner is decided. In the Super Regionals last year, Kentucky and Kent State played 21 innings.”

A UNC player fouled off a pitch.

“So,” Dylan asked, “a foul ball counts as a strike?”

“Yes, but not if it’s the third strike. With two strikes you can foul off pitches for hours and not strike out.”

He nodded and smiled and you could see the information being filed away.

A Maryland player swung at strike three but the ball got past the catcher and rolled all the way to the wall. The hitter ran to first and made it before the catcher could throw him out.

“What just happened?” Dylan asked. “That was strike three. Why is the batter not out?”

“If the catcher doesn’t cleanly field the pitch after strike three with two outs, the batter can run to first unless the catcher throws him out.”

“So three strikes aren’t always a strikeout?”

“Yes, it’s a strikeout in the record book, but the batter can also reach base after striking out.”

“Seriously?” 

“Yes, but not if there is already a runner on first base, because previous base runners can’t advance on the play.”
 
“Why?”

“It’s complicated,” I tell him.

The answer is actually the same reasoning as the infield fly rule. Without the rule, the defense could intentionally drop a ball and force a double play. I imagined explaining the infield fly rule and quickly came to the conclusion that doing so might lose Dylan as a potential baseball fan forever.

Besides, he seemed happy with “it’s complicated”.

“You know, I feel like I can’t really be at a baseball game unless I get a hot dog and a beer.”

“Yes, but you can't buy beer here at the stadium.”

“You’re kidding, right? Europeans always think of Americans as sitting in the sun, watching a baseball game, eating a hot dog and drinking a beer. You can’t buy a beer?”

“Not here,” I tell him. “It’s an ACC rule. You can buy beer at Durham Bulls games, though. And my school is in the Southeastern Conference. In the SEC, if you show up at a football game and you aren’t already drunk, they won’t let you in.”

"Can the coaches substitute players?"

"Yes, but unlike other sports, once a player is substituted for, he can't come back into the game." 

Dylan returned about 10 minutes later with a hot dog, looking very proud of himself even without a brew.

In the middle of the seventh inning, we stood up to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Dylan was quite impressed.

“It doesn’t strike you as strange that the entire stadium would stand up and sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame at every game in the middle of the seventh inning?” I asked.

He looked into the distance with an expression of deep thought.
“I suppose,” he replied, “it’s because they really like baseball?”

“Yes, but. . . they’re already at a ballgame.”

Singing at the Ball Game

After the first half of the seventh inning of every baseball game (the “stretch”) from the college level up, fans stand up and sing Take Me Out to the Ball Game. Some find it peculiar that we only sing this song when we’re already at a ballgame, still nearly everyone in the park sings it.

Baseball is nothing if not traditional.

People who wouldn’t be caught dead singing anywhere else in public sing it. People who can’t sing sing it. People who sing well sing it loudly to show off, but we all sing it.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game was written by Jack Norworth in 1908. He also wrote Shine On, Harvest Moon. He wrote an updated version in 1927, but the plot is the same. A guy asks Katie out on a date but she'll only go if he takes her to a ball game. (My kinda gal.)

The part we actually sing at the stretch is the chorus:

Nelly Kelly love baseball games,
Knew the players, knew all their names,
You could see her there ev'ry day,
Shout "Hurray," when they'd play.
Her boy friend by the name of Joe
Said, "To Coney Isle, dear, let's go,"
Then Nelly started to fret and pout,
And to him I heard her shout.

"Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game."

Nelly Kelly was sure some fan,
She would root just like any man,
Told the umpire he was wrong,
All along, good and strong.
When the score was just two to two,
Nelly Kelly knew what to do,
Just to cheer up the boys she knew,
She made the gang sing this song.

"Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,

At the old ball game."

There are two common modifications of the lyrics at the ballpark. First, a small part of the crowd always wants to change “Let me root, root, root for the home team” to “root for the Tar Heels” or “root for the Wildcats”. And second, no one ever sings “cracker jack”. They always make it plural.

About half the crowd sings “ever get back” instead of “never get back”, but that’s a nit.

UNC’s Boshamer Stadium has a cool additional tradition. After every game, as the fans are leaving the stadium, they play James Taylor’s Carolina In My Mind on the PA system.

If you want to sing at a ball game at any time other than these two, that's cool. 

But please don't sit near me.

Last Night's Loss Sucked

I was pretty disappointed with the outcome of our game last night. My college classmates will assume I’m talking about UK’s loss to Vanderbilt in the SEC basketball tournament, but I was at a baseball game.

I did follow the UK game on Twitter from the stands, but it wasn’t televised here and I doubt if I would’ve stayed home to watch it if it had been. I kinda lost my appetite for college basketball this season when I saw the photos of Nerlens Noel’s knee dangling 90° in an unnatural direction. (And, no, I want give you a link to it.)

It’s a little like finding a dead bug in your chili, I suppose. Not that I ever have, mind you. But I imagine it would take some time to face a bowl of chili again and I think I’m gonna spend this spring watching baseball until I get my appetite for hardwood back.

It’s just not possible to have a perfect season in college baseball — to my knowledge it’s never been done in NCAA Division I baseball — but after starting the season with 16 straight wins as UNC has done, that first loss is still a shock to a fella’s system.

Carolina fell to Miami last night 4-1 at Boshamer Stadium in Chapel Hill and is now 16-1 on the season. Second game of the series is tomorrow evening.

I made it to the game early enough to see batting practice, but that was a mixed blessing. It was cold and getting there early also meant nearly four hours in the stands instead of three, with a half-hour walk home in the dark afterwards.

OK, cold-ish. It was 60° at game time and it fell to 50° by the time I left the stadium, but a mean breeze blew in from center field and made it feel colder. And we are, after all, Southerners with low tolerance for winter to begin with.

I found a concession stand selling coffee, a rare occurrence at the Bosh, and decided to buy a cup to stay warm. The young lady told me to be careful because the coffee was extremely hot.

It wasn’t.

I paid four bucks for a cup of joe. I’m not talking about a mocha frappacino double pump latte espresso dopio. I’m talking four bucks for a plain, tepid cup of coffee.

Capitalism loves nothing more than a captive audience.

It wasn’t a terribly exciting game. Carolina had 7 hits to Miami’s 9, but only a few were hit hard. A lot of bloopers, seeing-eye singles and two Carolina errors. Miami scored once on a blooper that fell a foot behind the first baseman’s glove and about an eighth inch inside the foul line.

One of those errors was charged to the second baseman. The pitcher got a glove on a line drive and knocked it down. It slowly dribbled out toward second. The second baseman made a huge effort to get to the ball but his throw dragged the first baseman off the bag. That’s a routine play and for his efforts he gets an E? That’s just wrong.

Still, Miami was able to play enough small ball to get ahead and then to stay ahead with some excellent pitching. It was a workman-like victory.

By 9:00, a crowd of 1,000 had dwindled down to a couple of hundred. Much of the crowd was following the Duke-Maryland basketball game and you could feel the excitement from the baseball crowd when the Terps won.  Sometimes around here it feels like a Duke loss is better than a Carolina win.

By 9:30 you knew who the real baseball fans were. Carolina played Florida State in the SEC basketball tournament at 9:30 and, this being Carolina, most of the remaining fans had drifted off home to their TV sets. It didn’t help that UNC squandered a couple of big hits and then a bottom of the ninth comeback from that 4-1 lead looked doubtful.

Still, there were a hundred or so fans that refused to leave until Brian Holbertson grounded out to Miami’s first baseman to end the game.

It’s amazing how much hope you can put into that final out.

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.

Battle of the Cheap Seats

The Arizona Wildcats may have won the title, but the fans in the cheap seats stole the show at the College World Series Finals the past two nights.

General Admission tickets are available for the outfield seats if you stand in line early enough on game day. The seats are the last in the stadium to enjoy shade on a hot afternoon and fans stare directly into the sun for the first several innings. The GA seats are mostly filled by college students who seem to need more than a good baseball game to occupy their time.

As I noted in my previous blog, the rest of TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha was startled early in Game One when, during a quiet time of the game, the fans in left field suddenly stood and shouted in unison, "Right field sucks!"

As you can tell from the video, it wasn’t a chant. It was more like someone suddenly standing up in a quiet restaurant and shouting, "I'm bored!"

About the time the laughter died down in the rest of the stadium, the fans in right field stood and returned the insult. It went downhill from there. Turns out it was only a warm-up for Game Two.

Game Two was much better than Game One, though Arizona ultimately won both. ‘Zona scored first and held a one-run lead much of the game until South Carolina tied it in the 7th. The ending was pretty dramatic until UA broke it open in the top of the ninth. Still, USC loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth, down 4-1, and got the winning run to the plate before losing it on a fly ball to center.

The weather for Game Two was better, too. Temperatures dropped early in the evening.  A beautiful breeze blowing in from left field kept us cool but probably also kept a potential Carolina dinger inside the park. 

Still, nothing topped the cheap-seaters.

After the initial insults were hurled at one another, the left field fans secretly inflated what seemed like a hundred beach balls.  They bounced them just above their heads looking for all the world like a giant human popcorn machine. 

Waves of beach balls washed out of the stands and onto the field and the game was delayed while a half dozen of the ground crew cleared them.

The kids in left explained: "We've got baa-alllls!" Clap. Clap. Clap-clap-clap. "We've got baa-alllls!" Clap. Clap. Clap-clap-clap. 

Yes, you do.

An inning later, a left field fan dropped a single beach ball onto the field. The umpires called time so a ground crew member could run onto the field and remove it.  He ran back off the field with the ball under his arm but when he got nearly back, the fans rolled another ball onto the field. Then another. And another.

You could see the kids queuing up the next ball to drop, like silver balls in a pinball machine, waiting for the ground crew member to almost get off the field before dropping the next. After running on and off the field four times, the poor guy was out of breath and signaled for another member of the ground crew to take over.

One devious fan dropped a beach ball onto the field and waited for the ground crew to almost reach it, then pulled it back into the stands just out of their grasp with a string no one could see.

The left field stands were a mixture of SC fans, UA fans and others. So were the right field stands. The stupidity, the hilarity and the genius of this comedy was the ad hoc banding together of kids for a friendly competition with another group of kids who had nothing in common other than the random assignment of their stadium seats.

God, I miss college.

The beach ball tricks having lost their novelty, several left field fans jumped down onto the field and ran around until Security caught them and escorted them out of the stadium. 

At one point, six kids were being chased across the field at the same time by a dozen security guards. One would climb down onto the field and as soon as Security started chasing him another would jump down and head in the opposite direction. 

There is something about a jailbreak that is timelessly hilarious.

They weren't all guys, either. One cute, tiny, blonde co-ed in a sundress eluded Security for quite a while. (I still haven't figured out how she jumped down from atop a 9-foot wall.) As she ran across the field, she reached over and patted every player she passed on the butt. 

That's entertainment.
 

Not everyone was amused.  A Gamecock couple sat in front of me. The young lady stood up at one point and said, "I'm outta here."

"Where are you going?" her boyfriend asked.

"I cannot watch a baseball game with these people," she informed him and strode off.

Her boyfriend gave an embarrassed smile to the fans around him and shrugged, but I like a woman who takes her baseball seriously.

Now, I have mixed feelings about interrupting a championship baseball game, but serious baseball fans all around me were enjoying the sideshow. Try that stuff at the NCAA basketball finals and other fans will end you.

I began to wonder why we felt differently when a baseball game is delayed than we would feel about basketball or football interruptions. I gave it a great deal of thought and here's my conclusion.

We're baseball fans. We wait.

We wait five minutes between half innings for the sides to change. We wait while the pitcher stares at the catcher for a sign for so long that the batter gets tired of waiting and steps out of the box so the pitcher has to wait for him.

We wait during conferences at the mound and during countless pitching changes. We wait while one of the coaches argues a call with the umpires. We wait while the umps talk it over amongst themselves. We wait while the umpire makes notes in his little notepad after ejecting the manager for the aforementioned arguing.

We wait while the pitcher throws to first, thirteen consecutive times despite the boos, to hold the runner. We wait for hours for the rain to stop so the game can continue.

We even wait for everyone in the stadium to stand up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the middle of the 7th inning when it’s obvious that we're already at the ballgame. (Logically, this is a song you should sing at home before the ballgame.)

While we wait we want to be entertained. We want to watch kids spin around a bat until they're dizzy and then stumble and fall while they try to run to first base.  After five consecutive innings without a hit, we'd watch Ron Paul debate Rick Perry on YouTube. Twice.

We watched kids dress up like sumo wrestlers and try to knock each other down between innings until it occurred to someone that we might be offending very large Japanese men who toss people around for a living.

One night at a very slow UNC baseball game we watched a fat man in shorts and suspenders get into a screaming match with the popcorn vendor and at the time we were damned thankful for the diversion.

We baseball fans don't object to a little creative entertainment from our fellow fans while we wait as long as they don't interrupt that 5-second streak of action that can decide the game.

So, I salute those of you who were ejected from the stadium in Omaha for running onto the field just to entertain the rest of us — and maybe got arrested for trespassing, for all I know.

And you USC Gamecocks guys who were brave enough to wear those "I ♥ Cockz" t-shirts to show your team loyalty. That's a step farther than I'm willing to go for my alma mater.  

(You know we’re not laughing with you, right?)

This Bud's for all of you in the cheap seats at the CWS, but I digress.

There was also a baseball game.

In fact, a good one that ended with fireworks and an Arizona dog pile. Congrats, UA. You went undefeated in the CWS and clearly deserved your title. The SC fans around me were dejected, but seemed happy and a bit surprised to have reached the finals.

A friend asked me if, all things considered — the early flights with barely-made connections, the oppressive heat and humidity, the ridiculously overpriced Comfort Suites hotel room — the trip to Omaha was worth it.

Honestly? I had a ball.

Several, actually. 

The College World Series: Unexpected Drama

The most dramatic moment of last night's Game One of the 2012 College World Series was Robert Refsnyder's two-run homer for Arizona in the bottom of the first inning.

But the second most dramatic moment was when the entire left field section of cheap seats shouted in unison, "Right field sucks!"

It wasn't a chant, but one loud, dramatic outburst that startled the stadium before everyone started to laugh.

Moments later, the right field cheap-seaters stood and shouted, "Left field sucks!" even louder and the entire stadium reveled in it.

It had only just begun, as Karen Carpenter would say.

OK, maybe it was the third-most dramatic moment, following a flyover by four F16 Vipers coordinated with the end of the National Anthem, so low you could feel the rumble in your gut. The shivers down my spine weren't entirely from the jet engines.

The game could have been more dramatic-- South Carolina never recovered from Refsnyder's yard ball-- but I still had a great time and the pageantry was something to behold.

It gets hot in Omaha in June. There wasn't a dry T-shirt in the house. I walked to the top of the stadium a few times to catch a nice breeze, but in the seats the air was still and the concrete kept it from cooling down.

When I left the stadium right after the game to walk the 12 miles to my parking garage, the temperature was immediately pleasant with a nice breeze.

Reasonably-priced parking is hard to find anywhere around downtown Omaha. Real estate is in short supply here on the prairie, you know.

Speaking of t-shirts, I shopped for one with the 2012 CWS logo, but couldn't pull the trigger. I found a baseball cap I liked (I desperately need another baseball cap), then noticed it had a UPS logo on the back.

I'm not buying anything with Christian Laettner's monogram on it.

The middle innings got a little boring as 'Zona kept widening the margin and USC couldn't score. Beach balls began bouncing around the left field stands and the fans began to chant "we've got beach balls!" derisively to their less fortunate right field-stands rivals.

But the most dramatic fan display was a super slow-mo wave from the left field cheapies. They rose slowly from their seats with perfect timing and just froze with their hands in the air. It was worth the price of admission.

I don't know where or how the rivalry began between the left and right field grandstand occupants that, based on the equal mixture of school colors in each was not fan-based, but it seemed deep-seated.

(I can not pass up a pun. Sorry.)

The NCAA played a lengthy promo on the jumbrotron as a tribute to championships in its many sports. How they managed to show several schools while omitting the University of Kentucky's basketball title was. . . well, not the least surprising.

They did manage to work in a shot of Duke and Coach K, though.

Your remember Duke in the NCAA basketball tournament, right? Lost early to basketball powerhouse Lehigh? Yeah, them.

So, Game Two tonight. Hoping for a little more drama of the baseball kind.

I'll get back to you on the cap.