Last night, for my birthday, I went to my first baseball game in a year. The Carolina Mudcats, the local AA franchise, were hosting the Mississippi Braves.<\/p>\n
The Braves won, 4-0.<\/p>\n
The morning’s newspaper summed the game up thusly:<\/p>\n
Jeff Francoeur had three hits and three RBIs as Mississippi ended Carolina’s unbeaten start to the second half Friday at Five County Stadium.<\/p>\n
Braves starter Chuck James struck out 11 in six innings, raising his season total to 116 in 94 1\/3 innings. Four Braves pitchers combined to fan 17 Mudcats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Seventeen strikeouts. The Mudcats didn’t even threaten<\/i>, not until the bottom of the ninth, with two outs. The Braves closer got a strike-out, then a force out at first on a grounder to short, and with two outs he loaded the bases on a walk and two bloop hits into the outfield.<\/p>\n
Now things got interesting. I was seated right behind the Mudcats bullpen, and they sent a pitcher to warm up. With two outs. Maybe the Mudcats manager heard the kid in front of me, the one who kept yelling, over and over, “They’re going for a grand slam! They’re going for a grand slam!” Ah, the optimism of youth.<\/p>\n
And so the game came down to James Shanks.<\/p>\n
The count ran full, and Shanks fouled off one ball after another. But no, the “Mighty” Shanks struck out, and there was no joy in Zebulon.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a great game, but it was a perfect night for baseball. The weather was perfect. No mugginess, no overwhelming heat. A nice cool breeze blew in. The joy of minor league baseball comes from seeing all the inane little things they do between innings. Kids having a frozen tee-shirt contest. The mascot firing tee-shirts into the stands. The father\/son wiffle ball contest. Goofy stuff.<\/p>\n
The evening ended with fireworks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, for my birthday, I went to my first baseball game in a year. The Carolina Mudcats, the local AA franchise, were hosting the Mississippi Braves. The Braves won, 4-0. The morning’s newspaper summed the game up thusly: Jeff Francoeur had three hits and three RBIs as Mississippi ended Carolina’s unbeaten start to theContinue reading “On the Carolina Mudcats game”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[4081,3963],"class_list":["post-459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-baseball","tag-baseball","tag-carolina-mudcats","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}