The Beauty of Minor League Baseball

I have two super powers:

1. Finding parking anytime, day or night, in Downtown Greenville.

2. Waking Jaimie up seconds before her alarm goes off.

The first one Jaimie finds helpful. The second makes her want to murder me.

This past Saturday, Jaimie was taking her post-rehearsal nap. At 6:58pm I hopped onto our bed:

“Let’s go to the baseball game!”

“My alarm is going off in two minutes.”

“Oh. So I should leave you alone -“

“-yes you should leave me alone.”

Thirty minutes later, a groggy Jaimie emerged from the back. She had decided to humor me and go to the baseball game on the condition that I bought her ice cream and a hot dog. It seemed like a reasonable request. It was Star Wars night at the stadium, so Jaimie was sporting her A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance t-shirt.

We got there in the middle of the second inning. Our local team is the Greenville Drive. The Single A Affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. We bought our ten dollar tickets and made our to our seats. A family was already sitting in the ones assigned to us, but this is minor league baseball- nothing really matters. Which is perhaps the reason I love it so much. For ten dollars you can sit outside and be mildly entertained by professional athletes. You can root for a team, yet truly not care who wins. You can watch the stupid between inning antics. Or not. You only paid ten dollars to be there. Who freaking cares!

In the two weeks since I’ve known things are back, I’ve been to three of these utterly meaningless games. One with my family, one with Jaimie, and one by myself. I loved each and every one. I can’t remember who one any of the games. But I do remember the cups of boiled peanuts. I remember making fun of the player’s walk up music. And I remember that for two hours at a time, at these completely pointless sporting events, not thinking about the past, or the future to come.