5.17.01 ROCHESTER RED WINGS vs NORFOLK TIDES
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Despite threatening skies, I rode my wife’s bike to the park this afternoon. For the Red Wings it was the eleventh defeat in their last twelve appearances at Frontier Field. For me it was a soggy ride home.
Josh Towers, recently returned from a brief tour of duty with the Orioles during which he worked exclusively from the bullpen, faltered in his first start in three weeks, allowing eight hits and five runs, all of them earned, in six innings. He was still great fun to watch, though, the skinny kid with slouched shoulders and droopy eyelids looking exactly like a fifteen-year-old who can’t be bothered to look you in the eye when you’re talking to him. Utterly unflappable, he seems, too.
The Norfolk Tides are the New York Mets’ top-level affiliate and win the award for worst uniforms sighted at Frontier Field so far this season, a not-so-bad blue-and-blue color scheme marred by a ridiculously large and cheesy-looking “Tides” logotype across the front of the jersey, a particularly graceless “wave” comprising the horizontal bar of the T. Totally amateur-hour. I’m guessing the uniforms didn’t matter much to starter Richie Lewis, a stocky 5'10" 35-year-old with bleached hair who I could’ve sworn was throwing knuckleballs out there. Other notables in the Tides’ line-up included Mets’ pinch-hitter extraordinaire Matt Franco, and first baseman Mark Johnson, the second of the three International League Mark Johnsons to visit Rochester in the space of a couple weeks (the first having been Mark Johnson, Charlotte Knights catcher, who would be familiar to readers of last year’s Baseball Diaries as the guy who hit that ninth-inning, two-out two-run double off Angels closer Troy Percival in a game the White Sox went on to win in ten).
A meager-looking crowd sullenly viewed the proceedings as the Tides carried a 5–0 lead into the sixth, and couldn’t even manage to get worked up when, after an RBI single by Julio Viñas, big man Calvin Pickering came to the plate with two men on and a chance to narrow the Tides’ margin to a run. No, it would take something far more stirring to get this group to make some noise.
Pickering fouled a pitch back over the netting behind home plate, landing in the seats just below the press box where, oddly, nobody ever sits. Nobody, that is, except one guy in particular, who’s there all the time. Chubby—okay, fat—fortyish, dumpily attired, pretty much all this guy is missing is one of those hats with a propeller on top of it and a lunchbox packed by mom. He spends the games meticulously keeping score, moving only when a foul ball lands anywhere in his general vicinity, whereupon he scurries comically over rows and across aisles to secure it for himself, no doubt logging the date, batter, pitcher, inning and count for each ball so acquired.
I’d seen him get one already today, earlier in the game, in fact. Nevertheless, when Pickering’s big swing ended up in his neighborhood he scrambled again, over one section, up five or six rows, reaching the ball at precisely the same moment as a seven-year-old kid whose dad was watching from near the top row. A struggle ensued. The father, incredulous, arrived on the scene just in time to see the Newman (from Seinfeld) look-alike wrest the ball from his child’s hands and hurry back to his seat. Meanwhile, the crowd, which moments before was all but comatose, had risen from its slumber and turned on this guy with a savagery that I have never witnessed in this town outside of a Flutie–Johnson debate. Dad was screaming, the kid was crying, all of Rochester was taking up torches and gathering in the square. Newman feigned obliviousness, staring resolutely ahead, and went back to keeping score as Pickering knocked in the second run for the Wings.
After several minutes of unabating jeers, one of the ballpark’s teenage interns ran up and presented the kid with his own ball, courtesy of Red Wings management, held his hands up triumphantly, and received a thunderous ovation from the damp multitudes.
FINAL SCORE: TIDES 7, RED WINGS 5
FOOD CONSUMED: I guess the Hebrew National cart just isn’t open for day games. Two crappy Zweigle’s hots, some peanuts, a Genny.