“D-weezy on the track! D-weezy on the track!”

Post by: Raja

These are the words I just heard as I watched Beth implore me to blog about our recent foray into downtown St. Louis to catch a Cardinals game. Luckily, I am listening to my ipod using my new sound-isolating earphones so I can’t hear a word she’s saying. All I hear is Baby Boy Da Prince rhyming poetically. Unfortunately, Etymotic hasn’t come up with a way to eliminate incessant tapping on my shoulder, so here I am blogging. I guess its really not that bad. I like to write and like to keep up with friends and family, so here it is. My take on the baseball game:

When we found out that we were going to be in St. Louis for this rotation and we finalized our living arrangements, we were really excited about being downtown and within walking distance to Busch Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals. We had visions of taking a nice summer stroll down to the park, catching a game under the sun, and enjoying one of the pleasures St. Louis offers its citizens. We went shopping multiple times and multiple times Beth would pick up a shirt, dress, top or some other article of clothing and exclaim “This would be great for the ballpark!” Fully endorsing anything that allow me to watch more sports, I’d nod in agreement and encourage the purchase.

So there we were, in early August, about two weeks from completing our stay in St. Louis and we hadn’t even thought about going to a Cardinals game yet. I guess on the plus side, Beth got a lot of new clothes… In any case, we didn’t want to leave the STL without going to one game, so we looked at the schedule, picked out a Tuesday night game and made plans to spend the evening taking part in Red Bird Fever. The game definitely had some great potential… and in the end turned out to be really exciting. I bought the tickets about 4 hours before Manny Ramierez’s trade to the Dodgers was announced, and what do you know, the tickets I had bought had us going to see the Dodgers vs. the Cardinals. St. Louis was all a buzz about Carpenter, their up and coming young pitcher coming off of the DL and facing Manny and the Dodgers in his first game back. It was shaping up to be a great game.

Tuesday morning rolls around and I check the forecast. Rain. We’ll, that’s no good. I was hoping that the weather man, true to form, would be wrong, but we weren’t so lucky. We got to the game okay – on time and dry. The game was moving along nicely, but there wasn’t much action. Mostly three up, three down through the first 4 innings. I was enjoying the game, but Beth was caught in a quandary. She hated the fact that there was not really much action, but at the same time was grinning and bearing it due to the speedy nature of the game. This seemed to work out well for both of us.

Then the inevitable happened. It started to rain. The first rain delay wasn’t too bad – yes, I said the first one. As soon as they got the tarp out to cover the infield, it stopped raining so the entire length of the delay was basically the time it took them to un-roll and roll the tarp. However, after about 15 minutes of play, it started to pour again and they had to bring the tarp out for a second time. This one lasted considerably longer and Beth quickly realized that a fast-moving, no action game was much better than a non-moving, no action game. Luckily, we had seats in a covered part of the stadium so we were able to wait out the storm in relative comfort.

After about 40 minutes, the game was back on again and the second half was really exciting. There were tons of hits, a few home runs, and even some 9th inning drama. The Cards were up and looked like they had the game won, but in the ninth, the Dodgers made an improbable run and closed a 3 run gap. We had left our seats just before the run started because we thought the game was over, but, on a whim, stopped on our way out to watch Manny bat one last time. Wouldn’t you know it, he got on base. So we stayed to watch the next guy. He got on base. So we stayed to watch the next guy. And he hit a home run. The game was tied and we had a feeling it was going to go into extra innings. I wanted to stay since the game was just getting good, but it was a Tuesday night, already around 11PM, and Beth was exhausted so we decided to head home and catch all the drama on TV.

I stayed up to watch another couple innings on TV, but by midnight, the game was still running. However, the Cards are not the Heels and my loyalty to sleep outweighed my loyalty to St. Louis Baseball. I was happy to find out the next morning that the Cards managed to win the game though. Beth couldn’t have cared less.