Springfield Cards

The middle section of my month long (or longer) trip extravaganza took me to the far reaches of man's settlement. I dared the very edges of civilized society so that I may say that I have done so. And later blog about it. Was it the Great Alaskan North? No. Siberia? No again. Antarctica? Not even close. The frozen tundra of wasteland that I visited was none other than Springfield, Missouri (Hyperbole and exaggeration, I know, yadda yadda yadda [no soup for you] ).

Most of our time was spent playing video games, seeing movies, and eating at the restaurants that we had been dreaming about for the past year. I've had several conversations with the boys about how much we all were jonesing for sesame chicken from Hong Kong Inn. Basically, we were living the dream.

One of the final evenings there was spent in a little big stadium hidden in the middle of the city. This is where the Springfield Cardinals played. You may be familiar with the St. Louis Cardinals, and you'd probably assume that there is some sort of association between the two. You would be right. Or wrong. I don't really know. They do have similar emblems (do teams have emblems? Are they logos?) and it seems that half of the inhabitants of St. Louis seem to make their way down to Springfield at some point in their lives.

We were three rows from the dugout and it felt like if I really, really wanted to, I could throw my Pepsi at the first baseman and hit him. This would probably only work once, though. It was all fairly surreal as to how close to the action we were (being a minor league stadium, it is much, much smaller than, say, Kauffman stadium, but just as professional looking). Then I happened to think:

"You know, I've seen on TV where the batter tips the ball just right so that it zings straight to the right. Right, uh, right here where I'm sitting. Oh, crap. I'm going to die."

Sure enough I got hit and needed major reconstructive surgery. Well, not really, but I knew this would be a certainty. Right on cue, a foul ball shot straight at an old man maybe fifteen seats to my left. He jumped to the side as the ball took out his beer in a yellow shower of terror. The man got up, wiped off the beer, and raised up the demolished paper cup, demanding a new one.

I tried my best to pay attention to the game, but most of my energy was spent in preparation for a sudden move. Maybe to the left, maybe the right, but it would certainly have to be one of those things where you act out of instinct and not "Oh hey, I'm about to get laid out by a baseball. I should move, yes?"

Something changed though. The paradigm shifter was named Nick (I think maybe it's spelled Nic) and he's three or four years old. He's Matt's nephew and it wasn't that long ago that he would run screaming, utterly terrified out of the room whenever he saw me. He's warmed up to me and now he decided that he wanted to sit between me and Nick (big Nick, one of the guys that came to Springfield). Being that I enjoy my space, there's an empty seat to my left, and I gave him the go ahead to sit there.

Right where the ball would inevitably fly.

The first half of the game I was perpetually ready to duck out of the way, and the second half, I found myself always ready to throw myself in front of Nic(k) when the ball does come.

Kids. They always change things.

and the stars look very different today