9.4.01 BATAVIA MUCKDOGS vs BROOKLYN CYCLONES

This, then, would be my final game of the year. A cool, overcast Tuesday afternoon gave way to a cool, overcast Tuesday evening and I headed out to Batavia early, knowing at least that it would be my last Muckdogs game of the season. Their schedule came to a close on Wednesday night, and though I can’t for the life of me remember what it was now, Wednesday night I was doing something else.

It was good that I got there early, though, because it afforded me the pleasure of watching crowd-favorite G. G. Sato receive the Most Popular Player award during a disarmingly genuine pregame ceremony, which also saw the dubiously grammatical Player Most Likely to Go Furthest title bestowed upon first baseman Ryan Howard and Ryan Hutchison named Pitcher of the Year. I’m not sure what criteria were used to determine that Batavia Booster Tim Balonek was Fan of the Year, but given his Muckdogs t-shirt, jacket, and cap—one of those awful stuffed-animal-on-top deals, no less—I wasn’t about to argue with the selection. His fellow boosters felt no such compunction, however, protesting loudly and demanding that he buy them all beer, which he later did. Our questionably elected public officials should be so gracious.

The much-heralded Mets-affiliate Brooklyn Cyclones were in town, bringing with them a whiff of the big-city glamour that had accompanied their inaugural season of nightly sell-outs at Coney Island and a near-.700 winning percentage. And again the Muckdogs gave the assembled crowd of 900 or so—contrast with the 8,000 that regularly turned out to see the Cyclones at home—their four dollars’ worth.

Masterful seven-inning, one-run performances by both the Muckdogs’ Taft Cable and Brooklyn’s Ryan Olson, allowing but five and four hits, respectively, made for a tense affair as the sun made its familiar Batavia rounds, sinking toward a sliver of open sky on the horizon. The game tied at one apiece after six innings, both starters gone after seven and no one going anywhere soon, the brace of un-uniformed Cyclones charting pitches and trading insults behind the plate—identifiable as such both by their standard-issue team jackets and their distinctive swagger, an insouciance clearly learned over a summer of major-league-style adulation, for it was something I’d never seen in any of their Single-A peers, not even their local rivals, the lower-profile Staten Island Yankees—their night off becoming a long one, settled into the Lazy-Boy recliners placed there as a promotional gimmick, the chairs’ earlier, prize-winning occupants having long since departed.

Twelve innings it went. Twelve innings, bringing my innings-viewed-in-Batavia total to 46 for the year, over four games. I got a free game, and change! Such a deal! The sun had already traversed that distant sliver of sky, briefly bathing the ballpark in a golden-amber glow that again succeeded in making any attempt to describe it without invoking divine influences the existence of which I’m simply unwilling to endorse woefully insufficient, and had in fact slipped far enough beneath the horizon that the sky had turned pale with the evening’s gloaming and the clouds above dark and very nearly ominous, when with one down in the bottom of the twelfth my man Ryan Howard knocked in the winning run.

And that was it. Those few of us who remained contentedly filed out, full with the night’s dramatic and satisfying conclusion. I put the top up for the drive home; it was cold already. Had I known I was driving home from a ballgame for the final time in 2001, I might have left it down, cold be damned, and used the chilly drive to reflect upon a season of unlikely adventures: the new home team I never really succeeded in regarding with much more than contempt, despite a truly earnest effort to get behind it; the old home team which ended up having a respectable season despite being cursed with my presence at ten of their games; best of all, the unexpected wonders of rural upstate New York and the revelation that is NY-Penn League baseball. Forty games, eleven new ballparks, several thousand miles, innumerable hot dogs, and umpteen million times having to hear that piece-of-crap U2 “Beautiful Day” song…not bad for a short season.

Probably, though, I looked forward to the month ahead, the month I had deliberately set aside for my major league Baseball Diaries coda, a month’s worth of ballgames that, as it turned out, I couldn’t be bothered with. Ah, well. Maybe next year.

FINAL SCORE: MUCKDOGS 2, CYCLONES 1

FOOD CONSUMED: A red hot, a Labatt’s, and some peanuts. And I stood in line behind two Cyclones players.