Bring me a ball...

The reason doesn't matter, but when I went with a friend on a Sunday afternoon this month to a minor league baseball game in Maryland at a lovely baseball park in Waldorf, the Regency Furniture Stadium, I was presented with a request by my friend for us to get her an actual baseball that had been used in play.  This request was repeated several times, practically every inning as the game progressed, so I paid attention to it, for sure.

I have never in my life captured a ball in the stands that came off the field of play, and I have been attending baseball games for over sixty years at almost every major league and many minor league parks.  This was going to be challenging.

I studied the stadium with an eye towards how the ball might come off a hitter's bat and make it out of the field of play.  We were in assigned seats that weren't going to work because we were on the third base side behind the safety netting that keeps foul balls out of the stands.

We had to get beyond the netting for sure; and also most foul balls that go into the stands past the netting slice off the bat of late swinging hitters to his front side, and most hitters are right-handed so they typically send a curving foul ball into the stands on the first base side which is the side they face when they assume their batting stance.

The park looked like it could seat about 3,000 spectators, with plenty of room on a grassy stretch with park benches past the outfield walls for standing-room-only people.  There were less than 300 people present, including ball players and stadium staff, so there were tons of empty seats and no one was in the outfield area.

First we tried sitting out past the outfield walls all by ourselves in the broiling sun, hoping a home run ball would come our way.  After a few innings it seemed to me that no hitter present had the power to put a ball over the outfield wall so we drifted over to the first base side of the stands, checking out the scarcely used fenced kiddie park out there past the seats.  The children's playground had one adult attendant and only a couple of children present but was full of cool looking structures like a climbing wall, a playhouse, a row of seesaws and a carousel.

There were several young children in the stands over on the first base side, and the few times a ball landed in the stands it looked like a horde of locusts on the move as they swarmed up the aisles to the area where the ball landed and jumped over the seats in a mad dash to get to the ball first.  I took note of the narrowness of the lines of stepped concrete walkways between the rows of empty seats, watched the nimble agility of the children jumping over seats, considered my age, closer to seventy than sixty, and decided that I could not outrace that horde.

I would have to get to any foul ball in the stands first without being amongst the children, which dictated sitting in a mostly vacant spot in the largely empty stadium.  We returned to the more desolate third base side and sat further out towards the foul pole, past the netting, down near the field by the home team bullpen who all had seats along the wall in foul territory in the field of play.

The game itself was entertaining, high scoring with a sparkling defensive play or two.  At my age and with my diminished vision, it was hard to track balls, they just disappeared into the haze that was the sky.  My friend noticed, as did I, that three or four balls had gone over the grandstand behind home plate to land either on its roof or soar over it into the parking lot.

My friend came up with a strategy.  "If a ball comes over here," she said, "you block any kid running for it and I'll go get the ball."

"Oh," I said, "and then I can fight the father when he shows up in support of his child."

"Okay," my friend replied, "I'll block any kid and you go get the ball."

I could foresee an adult fight in either instance but fortunately, no ball came our way.

It was so hot that we retired from our seats without shade and sat at a table in the causeway with a view of the game.  We bought a bottle of water for $4 to cool off and slake our thirst and once we had guzzled it, I filled it up again at a water fountain, which was not refrigerated so the water was tepid.  We asked the counter person where everybody was if they weren't at this wonderful park on such a beautiful day.  "Church," was the laconic reply.  At 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon.

The last inning arrived as we sat at our table.  My head was down and I didn't see it but an opponent hit a home run out of the park.  I heard the crack of the bat and looked up but couldn't pick up the ball but I recognized the batter's slow home run trot and knew that the ball had traveled over the outfield wall somewhere.  There was no one out there.

I got up and walked down the causeway into the grassy area beyond the outfield fences.  My friend remained behind.  There was an attendant in the closed lounge out there, and another one at the pool beyond left field.  Perhaps one of them retrieved the ball before I got out there, or perhaps the ball was hidden somewhere in the grass, but I circumvented the outer area past the fences and without seeing any ball.

Now it was the bottom of the ninth and, barring a huge comeback given the 11-5 score, I had only three more outs to work with to try to secure a ball used in the field of play.  I paused on the causeway by the right field foul pole beside the kiddie park with its blue split rail fence, beyond the arc of seats by first base and beyond.  The playground was now closed.  There were several children along the first row of seats down there, perhaps two hundred feet away.  A right-hander was up.  I closely watched his at bat.

Crack!  A foul ball twisted off his bat and sliced towards the right field foul pole.  It stuck the cement walkway 40 feet behind me and bounded into the kiddie park.  I intently watched it crazily spin around in there, sluicing wildly until it finally came to rest under a kiddie structure with short legs.

I looked back towards the seats.  The horde of locusts appearing as children was boiling upwards towards me, now 150 feet away.  I didn't have time to run towards them to reach the kiddie park entranceway and then backtrack to the ball.  

I ran over to the 4-foot tall split rail fence surrounding the kiddie park and tried to slither through the split rails.  The rails were too close together for me to squeeze through, after all the purpose of the fence was to keep small children in.  I had to go over it, and quickly as the kids were nearby by now.  I threw a leg over the top rail, hefted my torso onto the rail, heard and felt an ominous crack beneath me, threw myself over it intending to land on my leading foot and gain the ground, but instead I just fell off the fence and landed flat on my back in the kiddie park.  Fortunately the ground was soft with straw and wood chips, appropriate for a children's playground, covering the surface.

Still, I lay there stunned and helpless for a second, feeling like an overturned turtle.  But I was on a mission, and its conclusion lay nearby in the form of a baseball that mere dozens of feet away.

I scrambled up and went to the structure I thought the ball was under.  Several predatory children, all seeming to be aged six to eleven years old, were in the park already, running towards me.  They all seemed to have navigated the fence much better than me.

I looked, and there was no ball!  I was at the wrong structure.  The kids swept by me fanning out throughout the kiddie park.  I went to the nearest adjacent structure and scanned under it but no ball.  I looked at the further structure, on the other side of the first structure I'd looked under, and there it was, pretty much in plain sight.  Trying to look dignified, I went over to the plaything, reached under it and snatched my treasure.

An eleven year old boy immediately appeared beside me. "Are you going to keep that ball?" he asked.

Burning with shame I said apologetically, "I'm sorry, but I have a friend who wants it so I'm going to keep it."

The boy shrugged and said, "That's cool."

Next appearing magically beside me was a six year old girl.  "Are you going to keep that ball?" she asked.

My faced flushed a deeper crimson as I said, "I'm sorry, but I have a friend who wants it so I'm going to keep it."

The little girl took it harder than the boy and gave me a look that combined incredulity and impetuosity before she skipped away without a further word.  I palmed the ball as I emerged from the kiddie park, hoping the whole stadium wasn't watching me, an adult, denying a ball souvenir to cute small kids.  I determined at that moment that the only way I could feel worse was if I had been so close to getting a ball-used-in-play, without impeding any child trying to get there first, and I hadn't gotten it.  I slunk through the back concourse behind home plate without looking anyone in the face.

My friend was on the third base concourse where I'd left her.  Since the game was over, she said forlornly that it looked like her wish for a ball wasn't going to happen after all.  She had spent the last twenty minutes out in the parking lot, watching the stadium's superstructure hoping for a ball to come over.  No luck.

I pressed the ball into her hand and said, "Here's your game ball."

She looked down, turned the ball over in her hand and exclaimed, "You bought this!"

"No, no," I said, "the stadium baseball store doesn't even sell used baseballs," and launched into a long description/explanation of how I'd acquired the ball, showing her the muddy stain on the back of my tee shirt and the small scrapes on my elbow from where I'd fallen off the fence.

I pointed out the abrasions on the ball where it had hit the concrete causeway, the brown stain where it had struck the muddy kiddie park surface after the first bounce, and another stain that might have been from the bat striking the ball.

I told her of my struggle to get into the kiddie park to get the ball, telling how I came within a hairsbreadth of crashing through the top rail of the fence, which would have provided the spectacle of an adult not only denying children a baseball but tearing down the kiddie park fence to get it.

It was incredible, to me, that I had been presented in a tongue in cheek way with this impossible task and incredibly, I had fulfilled it.  On the very last foul ball of the game.  I felt really good about it.

My friend loves the ball.  She offered to let me keep it, given how hard I'd worked for it but I said, "No, no, it's yours, believe me, if you hadn't wanted a ball so badly I would never have gotten it in the first place."  Ask, and I'll do my best.