Sugar

A lot has been going on. Consequently, my sports viewing has tapered off a bit. (I have still been a frequent reader of Matt Mosley and Peter King, and have checked the standings to see the typical peaks and valleys of another infuriating Mets season) But down here in Asheville, NC I have had two brushes with a wonderful part of the American professional sports landscape: Minor League Baseball.

My fiancee Marianne and I went to an Asheville Tourists game on Thursday (the Tourists are the single A affiliate of the Colorado Rockies). We bought the cheap seats, because I wanted to be "high up and behind home plate." Of course, in this minor league stadium, there is no "high up." There is one deck where the "box" seats are separated from the bleacher seats by 5 feet.

The stadium was built into the side of a hill, and was thus quite a-symmetrical (360 to the power ally in left, 320 to right, with a slightly elevated wall in right field) The stadium did have an electronic scoreboard that flashed player pictures, info and stats, but I was annoyed that the batting order wasn't posted anywhere on the scoreboard.

The game promotions were a good time. One involved asking a little girl to guess the game's attendance from 3 choices. She guessed 1,410, which was said to be the correct answer. They were clearly lying. Some people had shuffled out by this late point in the game, but I thought there were about 300 people in the stadium at that point of the game. I'm not entirely sure the stadium could fit 1,400.

A second promotion required Ms. Asheville to successfully throw a baseball into the back of a hatchback from about 20 feet. That's right, the back of a hatchback. She couldn't do it. Perhaps next time they should use the broad side of a barn. Now, Ms. Asheville can be exonerated since she was wearing wedge shoes, but she must be chided for not thinking to take the shoes off. Let's hope she doesn't talk about "U.S. Americans" and their dearth of maps during the Q&A portion of the Ms. North Carolina pageant.

Another favorite was the "frisbee toss." No high-powered mechanical guns needed to propel them into the stands. Just a girl throwing frisbees at people.

The game stunk -there were 9 errors, but the concessions were good. Good local beer at a reasonable price is a big plus.

In all of this, what strikes me the most is the juxtaposition of serious and silly, professional and wildly unproffessional. There are men here - serious athletes - who are pinning serious hopes on their performances in these game. But in between innings, beauty contestants are trying to throw baseballs into hatchbacks. The professional seriousness of the stadium workers, juxtaposed with the silliness of a lot of their work captured this. (Like the worker who was very seriously carrying the life raft that was used in their version of the pierogie race)

Today I watched the independent film Sugar. It's quite a good film about a Dominican pitcher trying to make it in the big-leagues. It is completely non-formulaic. You should see it. It does a good job of capturing the strange juxtapositions I spoke about - it combines funny, serious, silly and absurd scenes very well. For such is baseball. For such is life.