Last week I crossed yet another item off my Oregon Bucket List: Go to a Corvallis Knights’ game. The Knights are a collegiate summer baseball team who play at the OSU baseball field.
Non-major league baseball games are incredibly fun. You get the entertainment of the sport, the thrill of the event, the dedication of the fans, and none of the overwhelming crowds or over-priced food & drinks. It’s just great. An additional fun aspect of this particular game was the extreme number of foul balls. You might think so many foul balls makes for a boring game, but on the contrary it makes for a whole lot of fun in the stands. My roommate Alison & I almost got drilled once, a few people we knew in front of us nearly got hit twice, a man in the section to our left had an epic over-the-railing catch of a stray hit, and then there was the cluster of kids.
Outside the stadium, back behind home plate and the first base line, was a gathering of young boys out to catch as many foul balls as possible. They made it into a game of sorts, racing one another to each ball that made it over the stands. At first we thought they were all part of the same family, like the parents only bought two tickets for themselves and told their kids to just stand outside the field. But once we heard them calling each other by shirt colors-- “Hey! Green shirt kid! Have you caught one yet?”-- we realized they were mere strangers brought together by the common cause of rowdy ball wrangling. They were really quite fair to one another, sharing balls with anyone who hadn’t caught one yet and playing catch between innings. Their camaraderie made the quaint event all the more enjoyable. Seriously, low-profile sports are the way to go.
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