8.28.01 ROCHESTER RED WINGS vs OTTOWA LYNX
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Okay, again with the coming clean. I don’t remember a damn thing about this baseball game. I do have a box score to refer to, and some photographs that elicit a vague oh yeah… in my head, but I’m afraid I’m not going to be of much use when it comes to the particulars. Was this the night that crotchety old motherfucker patrolling the stands in right again shooed me away from a front row seat in the furthest section, a completely empty row in a completely empty section by that point, where I had temporarily alighted to enjoy my hot powdered funnel cake in peace? It may very well have been, now that I think about it. Indignant, I spitefully walked halfway back around the park and sat down right behind home plate. So there!
I was doubtless pleased with the performances of my new favorite players Keith Reed and Tim Raines, Jr., with five RBIs between them, and those of Jose Leon and the recently returned Ivanon Coffie (both 3-for-5) and even old Calvin Pickering, who managed his 99th RBI of the season on a solo (of course) home run in the fifth. It all added up to a 13–7 drubbing of the depleted Ottawa Lynx, which would have sounded a bit more impressive had a tired Rick Bauer not given up four runs in the eighth.
What I do remember about this evening was a disconcerting sense, with the weather having taken a sudden turn for the autumnal and minor league seasons everywhere coming to a rapid close, that summer was plainly over. And I felt cheated. Cheated, because perhaps my favorite part of baseball season is that final, interminable month, when the rituals of summer are played out against the growing awareness of autumn’s inexorable approach, and while the few teams that have something at stake battle for wildcard slots and prepare for the playoffs, the rest are left to play out meaningless matches in front of dwindling crowds in a perversely beautiful and bittersweet rite that becomes, for me, the very embodiment of the word melancholy.
And this year there would be none of that. No lingering over the remains of the season’s delights. No glass of vintage baseball port, no single-malt baseball scotch, no baseball cigar. Just push in your chair, please—we’re closing. And that bummed me out. I did have plans for September, semi-serious intentions of hitting Toronto, and Montreal before it disappeared from the major-league landscape, vague plans of maybe getting down to New York or Baltimore, plans that would implode upon impact a few weeks later. Even if the attacks hadn’t happened, though, even if I had made those trips, any of them, they would have seemed like afterthoughts, footnotes, the post-breakup indiscretion that only serves notice to both parties that it is, in fact, over.
There was a week left of baseball season, was the fact of the matter. Over so soon. Bummer.
FINAL SCORE: RED WINGS 13, LYNX 7
FOOD CONSUMED: The aforementioned funnel cake, which I didn’t try for the first time until very late in the season—tonight, maybe—but to which I took an instant, if sheepish, liking; I don’t remember what else.