Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Ballpark moments

Marie and I had dinner with her Dad yesterday, so I was talking to him about baseball, and I remembered a couple of cool things that happened at ballgames that Marie and I have attended.

We lived in Phoenix Arizona from February 2001 to July 2003. While we were there we went to a handful of Arizona Diamondbacks games.

During the seventh inning stretch of the first game we went to together we were singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and Marie said “root root root for the Cubbies”, the Cubbies! Apparently she’d heard the song plenty of times from Cubs fans, or Cubs games, and it didn’t occur to her that rooting for the Cubbies is inappropriate at a game between the D-backs, and the… I forget who, but it wasn’t the Cubs.

We took Ben to a game when he was very young. He was starting to learn to clap, but it was hard to get him to do it. During the game I noticed that when the crowd was cheering Ben was clapping along. It was way cute.

I discovered the beauty that is Brat’s and Sauerkraut at a D-backs game. I loved it so much that I wanted to go to games just to get it.

Finally, my proudest sports moment. The D-backs had only recently acquired a guy named Shea Hillenbrand, and he was doing tremendously well at the plate. The other team was intentionally walking the guy that batted before Shea, and Marie said “They’re walking him to get to Hillenbrand?” She knew it was a bad idea, and then guess what Shea did. Yup, he hit a Home-run. I was very impressed that Marie had actually learned something about strategy in a sport. Not that Marie’s dense or anything, it’s just impressive, because she’s so not into sports.