The hot weather has finally arrived and some nights it's just miserable being inside with no air conditioning. The perfect solution to this…spend the evening at the local ballpark.
This is Kiger Stadium. One of only two all wood ballparks left in the United States. It has been the place of thousands of baseball games. I'm not exaggerating that number!
Last summer we welcomed a new team to this field. Our very own West Coast League wood bat team. The Gems!
I come from a family of baseball fans. For the past 15 years my parents have had season tickets to the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes. After moving here, baseball in the summer was something that I truly missed. When we heard we would be getting team, we ran out and bought season tickets. This year was a little different in that you could actually pick your specific seats for your season tickets. So this is where we would spend over 30 nights this summer.
Good ol' Section B. (Just as a bit of trivia here, Scott and I were actually the first people to purchase our tickets this year and we had full pick of any two seats in the stadium!) We came to love our "summer family". It took a few games to get to know each other, but in the end, we were so happy with our section.
We quickly realized that, among our group, there was the "cheering" ringleader:
The crazy guy who you never wanted to high-five because once you did, you were stuck doing it for the rest of the game. This was also the guy who got the whole crowd involved in things like the wave. On a slow night, he would do just about anything to get everyone's attention:
There's of course our mascot, Tater:
I love watching new people come to the game and try to figure out why the mascot for the Gems is a bucket of french fries. For those of you who don't know, a Gem is a type of potato grown around these parts. Now Tater doesn't usually dress up, he was promoting "Dinner on the Diamond", a fundraiser to help Kiger.
There were plenty of theme nights:
Foam Finger night was my personal favorite. Everything just seems better with a foam finger.
Diamond Dig night, where for $5 you could purchase this little plastic shovel in hopes of finding the small box with a diamond in it buried somewhere in the infield.
In case your wondering, no, neither Tonja or I found it.
There was the night that I won $162 dollars on the Babe Ruth 50/50:
In case your wondering, no, I did not give my half of the money back to the Babe Ruth team. Do you have any idea how many pairs of shoes I could buy with $162????
There was the night that we held the 1st annual Gun's and Ax's Charity softball game before the Gems game.
Lot's of good fun between the police and fire departments. I can say that because, of course, the fire department won!
The first half of the season didn't start out to well, but once we got all our players, and got in our groove, things started to come together. We ended up being one win away from going to the playoffs. I can honestly say that it's not about how well the team is doing, it's about being out at the ballpark on a warm night:
It's about watching your favorite player make another good play:
It's about getting up the courage to ask your favorite player for a photograph:
(And then completely forgetting your name when he asks.)
It's about sitting through not one but two 13 inning games. It's about missing the first ever grand slam home run in team history the night you didn't go to the game. It's about standing in line hoping to get your team poster signed by all the players:
But most of all, it'a about having something that you can be proud to say is your hometown team. The Gems made us proud this season and we are already looking forward to next season!
No comments:
Post a Comment