4.8.01 BUFFALO BISONS vs PAWTUCKET RED SOX
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It looked like a nice enough day and all when I went downstairs this morning and looked outside, but I was nevertheless unprepared for the remarkable sensation awaiting me when I slid open the door from the kitchen and walked out onto the back porch. I had to yell to my wife to come down here, like, now. It was warm, you see. And not “warm” in the highly elastic Rochesterian sense of the word, which describes a spectrum that can cover anything upwards of 33 degrees. This was warm, in the conventional, old-fashioned, Californian sense, in which the word is part of a binary system that also includes cool, and refers very specifically to the way air feels on one’s skin. One goes outside, and can immediately say “it is warm” or “it is cool”; none of this, “Hey, my ears aren’t numb after ten minutes of walking around—it’s kinda warm today!”
Anyway, it was something of a shock to feel this bona fide, literal, unqualified warmth in our current surroundings, because I honestly don’t think I’d ever felt it before. I looked at our thermometer. It indicated something in the mid-70s. The sun was shining. The sky was blue. It was the first weekend of baseball, and we were driving to Buffalo to meet our friends Chris and Amy from California and Liz and Steve from Toronto and take in a ballgame. We pulled out of the driveway in a top-down reverie.
It would be a short-lived one. Interstate 90, the New York “Thruway,” seems to have been built in a wind tunnel. About two-thirds of the way to Buffalo we pussed out and put the top up, which helped some, but not much. When we arrived at the ballpark and got out of the car, we discovered to our dismay that the glorious warmth of our morning in Rochester hadn’t quite survived the trip.
Evidently, however, the denizens of Buffalo have adapted to their surroundings by developing temperature receptors in their skin that create sensation based upon the sun’s mere appearance rather than its actual effectiveness, for roughly half of the sparse crowd that had turned out for what had become a double-header were dressed in shorts and tank tops. This despite a wind chill somewhere in the high 30s. Go figure.
Enough about the weather though. (Am I betraying my So-Cal roots? It’s a significant cultural difference: People talk about the weather here because there’s actually something to talk about. It’s not always the lamest attempt at small-talk one can muster.) Dunn Tire Park, with a capacity of 21,050, is one of the largest minor league ballparks in the country. And while it’s nice enough, it seemed to me an awful lot like Angel Stadium with the top deck lopped off, complete with not-so-picturesque views of a freeway and a hockey arena. It’s too bad, because believe it or not downtown Buffalo features some splendid architecture, and while there are a number of lovely buildings visible from inside the park, you’ll only notice them if you go up to the top row and turn your back to the field.
You can’t but be impressed, however, by the display of pennants beyond the left-field wall, which boasts of ten International League championships, the most recent in 1998, the first in 1891. Fair bit o’ baseball history in Buffalo, then, it would appear. We arrived during the fourth inning of the first game, which the Cleveland Indian–affiliate Bisons were then leading by the decisive margin of 9–3. As is the custom with minor league double-headers, the games were shortened to seven innings, which meant that the seventh-inning stretch became the fifth-inning stretch. I was getting food at the time, so I missed it, but when I returned to my seat the other members of my party expressed no little consternation regarding not only the unconventional timing of the stretch, but also the way that the organist began playing the opening refrain of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” immediately upon the third out being made on the field, allowing no time at all for spectators to actually get up and stretch before launching into song.
It would be exactly the same in the second game, which I was around for, and sure enough, it was annoying as hell. By the time the crowd was on their feet and singing, the song was half over! What’s up with that? The second game was tighter than the first, with the PawSox tying the game up at 2–2 in the sixth. With the game going into “extra” innings—meaning, in this case, more than seven—and having endured about three and a half hours of bone-chilling Buffalo wind, the saner (read: non-male) heads in our group prevailed, and we headed off for a traditional Buffalo dinner of beef on weck. Good thing we left when we did, too: the game ended up going thirteen innings.
FINAL SCORE: BISONS 11, PAWSOX 3; BISONS 3, PAWSOX 2
FOOD CONSUMED: One foot-long hot dog, more good fries, some peanuts, a Diet Coke. The hot dog was the subject of some controversy. My wife didn’t like hers, characterizing its consistency as “mushy” and complaining of a too-high bread-to-dog ratio. I liked mine quite a bit, though, especially the slightly blistered skin of the dog, and found nothing wrong with the size of the bun.