If you live in a city with a wide selection of professional sports, you may think of minor league games as little more than events that make parking difficult at unpredictable times for no good reason, but in pro-sports deprived cities, it can be a lot of fun. Businesses get behind it to do promotions and giveaways and attendance is strong. The people are there for the fun of it, not because they’re obsessive about baseball, but they do cheer for well-turned plays.
We went for the convenience, stayed for the festivities, and lingered a bit longer for the late inning cheering.
Unlike full-tilt baseball games, you get to go right down to the bullpen and see the pitchers griping about calls, even ones made in favor of that particular team. If you’ve ever had a chance to get up close and personal with a player, this may not mean much, but as someone who has always tried without success, it was awfully exciting to get close to players with a modest likelihood of making it just as big someday. When you find them young you get all the attention you could want (in fact they love it!) and without all the ego involved.
We stayed because this particular stadium had the good sense to add what all young baseball fans really want… a bouncy house. I think sometimes they call them moon bounces or jumpy rooms, but however you slice that invention it’s the best thing since some kind of bread… I think sliced, not sure.
Another selling point was that, even though we had really good seats down the first-base line, we were free to head to the sloped lawn along the third base line where energy-abundant juniors like us could run for hours without bothering anybody.
But the real clincher to the deal was the giant chicken. I’ll grant you that it didn’t look quite like a chicken, but more like some other kind of bird. My brother said it looked to him like an eagle, but that wasn’t quite right either. The Missoula Osprey have a mascot, and he wears an animal themed costume, but I can’t figure out what sort of bird the osprey was meant to represent.
Call me new-fashioned if you like, but if it isn’t in my food chain, I can’t be expected to know what it is.
If you’re traveling through Missoula and your dates fall along the minor league schedule, try to take in a ballgame. The parking is great, the fans are better than you might even believe, and the concessions are priced on a scale in keeping with “people who want to eat food” rather than “rich people who hate their money and think they should buy something,”
And if I can add one more thing, they’ve got an awful lot of second-duty police on-hand for security, as all places do in the almost indiscernible wake of 9/11, but these police folk are actually kind, reasonable and accommodating. I guess when they saw my stuffed dog they didn’t think I was smuggling in explosives, and with history as my witness, their common sense approach was correct!
