An evening at the ballpark.

For the first time in a few years I spent an evening at Knight's Castle in Fort Mill, SC to see the Charlotte Knights play ball. Maybe someday we will have a ball park near the center of Charlotte so we won't have to drive a half hour to get to a game in another state. I went with Super W and the One Big Loud Guy. We snuck down to the front seats behind the third base dugout late in the game. No one was checking tickets since attendance was below three thousand and it seemed like one of those deals where you could sit pretty much where you wanted. That's the way it should be at a minor league game anyway. All tickest should be seven bucks and you can sit wherever the hell you want. Now that would be fun. They still don't open the grass area up unless there is a big crowd. I don't like that either. What's the point of having a grassy area and not allowing people to use it. Silly.

We got to see a pitcher for the opposing team, the Toldedo Mud Hens, named Fernando Rodney pitch an inning. He was throwing over 95 mph according to the radar gun readout in the left field wall. We were right at field level and I think the radar gun was pretty accurate because he was throwing smoke. I was intimidated and I was in the stands. One of the Knights' players was completely over matched by the pitcher but fouled a few pitches off and managed to fly out. It was a gutsy performance by the batter.

I have to say that nothing embodies the pastoral and timeless traditions of baseball more than the One Big Loud Guy doing call and response with a bunch of kids hyped up on sugar on the other side of the diamond. He's holler "whoo!" and they'd holler "whoo!" It went on for a while....