4.16.01 ROCHESTER
RED WINGS vs
SCRANTON/WILKES-BARRES RED BARONS
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Baseball America ranks the Baltimore Orioles’ farm system 17th out of the 30 major league organizations. Watching tonight’s game, one would be forgiven for wondering if number 16 is the Bad News Bears.
Second inning: Second baseman Steve Sisco throws the ball away, and a potential double-play along with it, setting up the first Scranton/Wilkes-Barre run.
Third inning: A harmless grounder gets past shortstop Eddy Garabito, allowing the second Scranton/Wilkes-Barre run to score.
Fourth inning: Third baseman Ivanon Coffie throws the ball away, setting up another run.
Fifth inning: Coffie drops a routine pop fly as if his glove has a hole in it.
Seventh inning: Garabito boots another easy grounder, looks at the sky, looks at the ground.
By the time it was over it was 8–0. Ugly baseball. Godawful baseball.
Just plain bad baseball. Still a great night, though. A cool weeknight, a
thin crowd of regulars, so little at stake that you’d’ve had a hard
time measuring the game’s significance with an electron microscope. An
unseen voice called down from up above us to a seventyish gentleman two rows
down. “Who was the pitcher who killed the guy in 1920? Was it Walter
Johnson?” The man scratched his chin, said no, no…it wasn’t
Walter Johnson…. “Ask your cronies!” shouted the voice. Slowly
turning back around, the man got the attention of a similarly silver-haired
spectator down near the field. “Hey! Hey Tommy! Who was the pitcher who
killed the guy in 1920?”
This went on for about ten minutes, a network of old men yelling to each other
from across the ballpark. Eventually the answer came back: “It was Carl
Mays. And the guy he killed was Ray Chapman.” So there you go.
Then there was the woman who came and sat near us some time around the fourth inning. Twenty-something, black, exceptionally passionate about the result of the game being played, and accompanied by a boyfriend who just kept looking over at me and rolling his eyes and laughing, she at one point made the somewhat unreasonable demand that Red Wings pitcher Calvin Maduro “strike ’em all out, now!” and later came up with what is without question the best Ivanon Coffie pun of this young season: “I like my coffee black and strong!” Wonderful.
Incidentally, I feel compelled to retract my previous criticism of the geographical appellation “Scranton/Wilkes-Barre,” which I last year deemed hopelessly clumsy and unmusical. Of course, I was saying it “Scranton-Wilkes-Bar,” like John Wilkes-Booth combined with Pamela Des Barres, when in fact it’s pronounced “Scranton-Wilkes-Barry,” like have some blueberries. This makes all the difference in the world, it turns out.
FINAL SCORE: RED BARONS 8, RED WINGS 0
FOOD CONSUMED: I’d taken Chris and Amy to Don’s Original for a lunch of red hots and ground rounds (that’s Rochesterian for “hamburger”), so Chris and I tried the Frontier Field barbequed pork sandwiches. Not so good. Still more excellent fries, though, and also a Genny (that’s the local bad beer, Genesee, which tastes like bad beer, but you can’t help but like drinking it at the ballpark when the brewery is just across the river half a mile away).