IN ATTENDING A Lefties’ game last week, I decided to go incognito.
For no real reason other than kicks. No press pass, no notebook. No declaring the time on my timecard. Wearing sunglasses. Red Sox hat pulled down low. I literally went just as a fan. It’s a small enough town that I still got recognized by a couple of people.
My first impression was that I seriously doubt you can possibly find a more gorgeous setting in the WCL or anywhere else in which to watch a baseball game, with a glimpse of the Strait of Juan de Fuca over the left field fence and the towering Olympic Mountains over the right field fence and the hills of Port Angeles beyond center field.
The town I worked in before — Missoula, Mont. — came close, but I give the Civic Field view the edge (one reason being Missoula could often be pretty smoky after July). The minor league team in Missoula, the Ospreys, played in a beautiful little stadium right on the banks of the Clark Fork River. I regret that I only ever got a chance to see one or two games there. In one game I got to see Paul Goldschmidt play long before he became a star for the Diamondbacks.
And that’s part of the joy of going to a WCL game. Wondering if four or five years from now, you’re going to see some guy on TV in The Show that you watched play in one of the small towns of the WCL.
Smells and sounds
I love the smell of the ice and the sounds of hockey … the crack of the puck hitting the blade of the stick, the boards rattling from a hard check and my favorite, the ping! of the puck bouncing off the post. Nothing can totally replace that. My heart always get pounding when I’ve been able to get to a hockey match.
Baseball is more serene for me. It’s definitely a game from another era … before TV and radio, before cars even. One of my favorite baseball jokes … “the last time the Cubs won the World Series, the Ottoman Empire was still a thing.” That used to be true. Look it up. That speaks to just how old baseball is.
To me, baseball, like hockey, is about the smells and sounds. Especially the sounds of wooden bats in the WCL. There’s a lot of time to watch the play of the sunset on the clouds and the mountains. There’s plenty of hot dogs and beer to be smelled and tasted.
And yes, the beer is great at the games, cold and microbrewed, and the hot dogs are huge.
Baseball is a game I worked really hard at but never really got particularily good. Man, it’s hard sport. If you threw the ball right down the middle of the plate, I could hit it just fine, but if you threw any kind of breaking ball or changeup, I couldn’t hit it to save my life. Fielding was always a challenge for me, even though one of my personal greatest prides in playing sports was going an entire season without making a single error in left field and making a game-saving catch over the fence in the bottom of the seventh to end the game.
One thing I was really struck by at the Lefties game. How the crowd was made up of both a lot of kids and senior citizens. Both equally having a good time. How many places are you going to find that? Maybe a Paul McCartney concert (Seriously, I saw people from 8 to 80 at a McCartney concert a couple of years ago.).
The kids in particular seemed to enjoy running back and forth along the stands, sometimes it seemed for no apparent reason other than just having too much energy to burn, and the seniors watching, perhaps like me being jealous of having that much energy.
At the game, the kids do their darnedest to get their hands on a game ball. One boy ended up with a couple of baseballs, so he handed one to a little girl who had a broken arm. Karma paid him back when he later was able to snag a wooden bat from one of the players. That was my favorite part of the game I attended … well the 11-run inning was pretty cool.
I have tickets to a Mariners’ game next month, the first MLB game I will have attended since 2007. I’m very much looking forward to it, but I already doubt it will be more fun that Civic Field on a beautiful night.
Even if you’re not a big baseball fan, I would recommend taking in a Lefties game when they finally return next month from a long road trip. Go for the beer, the view, if you want to take the kids somewhere fun. Whatever reason you need, even if the only reason you need are for the sounds of the wooden bats and the smell of the hot dogs.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at 360-417-3525 or plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
