The Stranger I Met Today

I went to a Wilmington Blue Rocks game last weekend with some friends.  The seven of us hadn’t been there in years, so we were overdue for a visit to Frawley Stadium.  The price was right ($10 a ticket), the parking fee was reasonable (free!), and the drive and traffic were manageable (about 10 minutes from the Delaware Memorial Bridge).  It was a perfect baseball night.  As I surveyed the stands before heading down to our seats behind the visiting team’s dugout, I stopped to look at the crowd.  The stadium was alive.  Children bounded down the steps to their seats while parents yelled after them, cautioning them to slow down.  Vendors called out to the Blue Rocks fans navigating their way to their seats.  The hum of the crowd at the Blue Rocks stadium, I thought to myself as I watched people high-five and hunker down in their seats with hot dogs, is timeless.  That same hum, that same buzz of excitement, has been the hum of baseball games for years past and will be for years to come. 

By the time the first pitch was thrown, my friends and I noticed our younger neighbors.  The kids in the section to our left, six boys, were probably around 9 or 10 years old.  There was a frenetic one with hipster glasses, a ever-cheering one who loved to yell, a jumpy one that showed off his karate skills by chopping the air a few times each inning, a quiet one who managed to sit in his seat for most of the game, a dancing one that especially liked the music between innings, and a bossy one that frequently attempted to direct the group’s attention.  In the second inning, we could tell when excitement and sugar really started to take hold of the boys.  By the fourth inning, five of the boys had mutated from hyper kids to flashes of noisy, blurry movement. 

During the bottom of the sixth inning and the kids were taking turns eating popcorn out of a helmet that had been on each of their goofy heads.   I chuckled.  The man sitting in front of the boys caught my eye and yelled over to me.

“You wanna switch seats?”  I laughed and shook my head.  The man and his wife were handling the situation, being seated directly in front of cluster of sweaty, wound up, rowdy youngsters, with understanding and tolerance.  The man shrugged his shoulders and I gave him a nod, to empathize and silently reassure him that I understood if he had a massive headache.  Everyone who had been close enough to hear the chanting of the boys (the wordage changed frequently throughout the game), had at some point wished for a different seat.  However, their enthusiasm for the game was mostly amusing and they were truly thrilled to be at a live game. 

Lesson Learned

The boys, even though they made all of us cringe at some point during the game, were part of the experience.  Overexcited kids, soft pretzels, foul balls, cold beers, collective sighs and shouts, exciting plays that brought everyone to their feet – it was all part of it.  When the fireworks show started after the game, for a moment, the boys, along with all the other children in the stadium, stopped and looked up at the same sparkling sky.  That moment and that calm didn’t last long, but it captured that feeling, that feeling you can only experience on a clear night at a baseball game.