A Baseball Bum's Weekend

While nearly everyone else wasted their weekend at cookouts and setting off fireworks, I did something far more productive. I watched baseball. I had a blast at Friday night's IronPigs game. But on Saturday afternoon, things were even better. You see, the Lehigh Valley Catz, our other baseball team, were dueling the Jersey Pilots in a nooner at Easton's beautiful Hackett Park. My shaded seat, almost directly behind the catcher, cost nothing. My fireworks were the resounding crack of a wooden bat and the snap of a catcher's mitt stopping a screaming fast ball.

The Catz are part of the Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League, a summer wooden bat league supported and sanctioned by both Major League Baseball and the NCAA. It's pretty good baseball, too. Former Catz shortstop Drew Sutton, for example, was just called up to the show this weekend by the Cincinnati Reds. He'll be with them when they face the Phillies, starting today.

The Catz game, as beautiful as it was, was eclipsed by Sunday's Little League show down between Bethlehem's Northwest and City Line Farm Division All Stars. In Little League, it's helpful to have several law degrees for the disputes that always arise, from loaded bats to pitch counts. There's even more intrigue than you'll ever find in Northampton County politics. Naturally, I love it.

My grandson is ineligible for Northwest's All Stars this year because he lives in Allentown. He needs a waiver and must jump through about forty hoops and go to District Commissioners and all kinds of other bullshit. To hell with it. But we came to Sunday's game to support our team.

They did not let us down. At the end of three innings, the score was a lopsided 24 to 4. The scoreboard stopped counting at 19. But this game, like most Little League games, was a game of interruptions. The first occurred when one of our fans, a young boy, fell off some nearby 90' high monkey bars and broke his wrist. Compound fracture. That was nothing. Parents packed the tot's wrist in ice, called an ambulance, and play resumed very quickly. A second injury time-out happened when one of our batters was hit right smack on the elbow by a 45 mph heater. He had been hit in his first at-bat, too.

Now this boy is one tough kid. I've watched him run right through other tough kids during football games. But he was doubled over in agony. It had to hurt.

The solution? Rub his frickin' elbow. No pinch runner.

"Shake it off, Mikey!"

"That's why you have two arms!"

The real interruption came after two outs in the top of the fourth, when the "ten run" mercy rule was about to be invoked. Our manager had sent Jacob to left field that inning. But he has two Jacobs, and the wrong one went out. After two outs, City Line realized we had somehow screwed up.

It was apparently some sort of illegal substitution. I'm unable to describe exactly what happened because I don't understand it myself. But it sounded pretty serious. Coaches and umps discussed things for nearly forty minutes, with rule books, Purdons statutes, judicial opinions and line up cards. During the delay, I was able to eat two hot dogs with fries and could even have set the fracture for monkey bars boy, if I knew what I was doing. The ambulance and cops had finally arrived, about forty minutes after being called. Half of the lawyers chasing EMTs instead flocked to the field, passing out business cards and interjecting legal advice. Fortunately, nobody recognized me from my perch in center field, where I telling lies to Lower Nazareth coaches who will face Northwest on Tuesday.

Managers often looked up at the scorebox behind home plate to make their case. Were judges up there? The baseball gods? The only remedy for this serious transgression, apparently, is to award a victory to the victimized team, even when it's down by twenty runs. Forfeit. Just when I thought there would be an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, City Line managers relented. I don't know why.

Once kids were allowed to resume play, it was over in about five minutes. The lawyers and ambulance left around the same time as the players.