 |
| leaving Tampa Bay like |
Home runs from Kazuma Okamoto (again!), Daz Cameron (his went like four-hundred-forty feet and landed on a catwalk), and Nathan Lukes (who also made a fantastic catch at the wall with runners on late in the game), a weird George Springer roller through the right side that probably had a base-hit probability of like 2% tops (all probabilities estimations, and poor ones at that), and seven four-hit, no-walk innings from Shane Bieber? Yes please. Even allowing for the Jésus Sanchez's fielding misadventure(s) Wednesday night, this series went just about as well as could have been hoped, didn't it? We are now finished with the Trop for the year, which is always a welcome occurrence. It's bad enough that we go down there and so often lose, but it makes for a genuinely depressing presentation even beyond that: the total attendance over the three-game series is listed at 38 259, and, not to be an attendance truther, but that's got to be tickets sold, rather than a turnstile count, because the wide-shots of the lower level (the Rays neither seat nor staff the upper deck of the Trop except for the rarest of circumstances) offered late-stage Olympic Stadium crowds at best (having attended Expos games towards the end myself, I can report that it was all pretty grim). That three-game total (to see an excellent team! a team that is excellent in particularly interesting and exciting ways!) has been surpassed by single-game attendances in Toronto fifty-nine times already this year, with plenty still to come (there have only been seven games slightly under that three-game Rays total this year, all early in the season [one of them in the Dodgers series, if you can believe it! but school nights are school nights]). Major League Baseball in Florida is such a weird thing, and not super duper defensible really?
Also not super duper defensible: in the second game of this series, the Wednesday night Jésus Sanchez game, I attempted the gastronomic feat of nine hot dogs in nine innings that you may have seen mention of here and there in recent years (some ballparks now offer it as a boxed option, I have learned), and I can report that, while good fun, it is sort of no big deal? As no less (formerly) august a publication as The Sporting News notes that "some prefer to eat one hot dog per inning but that is not a requirement," I felt like the best approach for me and the shape of my evening would be to get out to an early lead and essentially try to mercy-rule the whole thing as though this were the WBC (or indeed ソフトボール天国 Softobōru Tengoku). The end result was nine Maple Leaf Natural Top Dogs (Maple Leaf, of course, being the wiener most intimately associated with Canadian sporting excellence) topped with Krispi Kraut Sauerkraut (unambiguously the preferred krauting option in our post-Tancook era [R.I.P. {the "p" stands for pickling}]) all addressed, a little to my surprise, before the top of the third had ended. The first seven were genuinely enjoyable; midway through the eighth dog, I had attained that level of satiety in which one's awareness of texture begins to heighten; and the ninth felt as though it would be the last one, certainly. I had prepared ten, since that constitutes a whole package, but decided not to press my luck. I can report, too, that my beverage choice of a simple lemonade (I thought it best to avoid carbonation in this context) proved a pleasure throughout. It was all much more chill than I had anticipated. Just a neat little thing to do once, and then, quite obviously, literally never again.
KS
No comments:
Post a Comment