The Minor Leagues
On a beautifully temperate Saturday night, a friend and I took in a minor league baseball game in Atlantic City. The home team is called the Surf, and they took on the Pride of Nashua (I'm down on team names that are collective plurals--team nicknames should end in s's. However, I'm intrigued by the idea of a league that is made up of the other of the seven deadly sins. I want to play for the Lust).
The Surf are a class-A level team, and not affiliated with any major league club. As near as I can tell, they have never had someone go on to the bigs from their team, although they did have Ruben Sierra for a while when he was clinging to a professional baseball career. They play in a 5,500 seat ballpark, which has a gorgeous view of the Atlantic City skyline over the outfield wall, so you can see the name "Trump" as much as you dare.
The minor leagues are all about marketing. There were perhaps a thousand people at the game (and I may be being very generous) but the team worked that crowd as if it were 50,000. They have a mascot, a sea monster in a foam-suit that desperately needs dry cleaning. His name is Splash, and it was his birthday the night I went, and the crowd was reminded of that every half-inning. They even gave out birthday cake, which was a first for me. There were all sorts of competitions between innings, like musical chairs and the bat-spinning race, where two kids spin around a bat, the knob pressed to their foreheads, and then have to run, completely disoriented.
I'm sure this is true all over the minors, and applies to minor league hockey, if I can judge by the game I went to in Las Vegas in April. There is no moment during a stoppage in play that isn't occupied by some sort of distraction. The play of the players themselves wasn't bad--there were no errors afield, but the Surf pitcher got tired midway through and the Pride won, 7-2, but somehow the score of the game at one these affairs is an afterthought, and instead the experience itself is what matters.
Yeah, it's annoying how the minor-league teams belittle the play that's going on through the constant distractions. It's much easier to follow and get into a major league game in person, because it seems to command the crowd's attention. One of my best experiences at a minor league game was a weekday day game of the Durham Bulls that wasn't timed for school field trips, and I happened to sit just behind a group of the players' wives. Overhearing all the gossip was great, and it was interesting how to them the game was totally not about the score but about their husbands not making errors or strikeouts.
ReplyDeleteI also had a good time at a Coastal Plain League game (one of those partial-season sub-A leagues for college players--I forget the correct terminology) played at the old Durham Athletic Park. It was the Durham Braves, and they were so low down that they couldn't afford the distractions, and the crowd was really into the game.