INGLES FAMILY FUN DAY AT MCCORMICK FIELD
Today I went with my son-in=law Todd and our mutual friend Randall and his son Laird and Laird’s father-in-law to the baseball game at McCormick Field in Asheville. The temperature was 85 F and almost everyone had seats in the shade.
Baseball has long been as American as apple pie. A couple of the men in my old men’s group follow their favorite teams and like to talk about it. Long ago men listened to the major league games on the radio with actual attendance at a game being a summer high point.
Asheville’s team is called the Asheville Tourists. Today they played the Hickory Crawdads. Asheville being a fairly small town, our team is at the bottom of the hierarchy of baseball leagues. Ours is at the A level. Above us are larger cities with AA teams, above them at the top of the minor league teams ladder are the Triple A teams. And then, high above are the major league teams that everyone has heard of: the Boston Red Sox, the Atlanta Braves, the New York Yankees.
So the game we watched was of competent players trying to work their way up from A to AA to AAA and then finally for the chosen few to the major leagues where they could get fabulous salaries, often in the millions of dollars and valuable advertising spots. The players we were watching made just enough money to live on and most of them would never make it to the major leagues.
But the actual game was only a part of why families with children had come to the game. The main reason families were there was to get outside on a sunny afternoon, whoop and holler when the announcer led the cheers, and most of all to take part in the promise of the “post game kids run around the bases” when all of the children, some toddlers bounced along by their mothers would run once around the bases, just as the players did, in what seemed like an endless stream.
For us old folks the game was part of the fun. We half watched what was mostly an endless string of strikeouts or walking to first base after receiving four pitches out of the strike zone, four balls, and occasionally the crack of a bat sending the ball looping high in the sky.
But even for us the main fun was watching people parading back and forth to the concession stand for hot dogs and soft drinks and super sweet sugared fried curlicues and soft ice cream as well as eating this unhealthy food ourselves.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 